An outrageous, hilarious, and touching memoir by the youngest of nine children in a hardscrabble, beyond-eccentric Maine family. With everything happening on Helen Peppe's backwoods Maine farm, life was wild -- and not just for the animals. Sibling rivalry, rock-bottom poverty, feral male chauvinism, sex in the hayloft: everything seemed--and was -- out of control. In telling her wayward family tale, Peppe manages deadpan humor, an unerring eye for the absurd, and poignant compassion for her utterly overwhelmed parents. While her feisty resilience and candor will inevitably remind readers of Jeannette Walls or Mary Karr, Peppe's wry insight and moments of tenderness with family and animals are entirely her own. As Richard Hoffman, the author of Half the House: A Memoir puts it: "Pigs Can't Swim -- is an unruly, joyous troublemaker of a book."

Long recognized as a master teacher at writing programs like VONA, the Loft, and the Stonecoast MFA, with A Stranger's Journey, David Mura has written a book on creative writing that addresses our increasingly diverse American literature. Mura argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft, particularly in relationship to race, even as he elucidates timeless rules of narrative construction in fiction and memoir. His essays offer technique-focused readings of writers such as James Baldwin, ZZ Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Karr, and Garrett Hongo, while making compelling connections to Mura's own life and work as a Japanese American writer. In A Stranger's Journey, Mura poses two central questions. The first involves identity: How is writing an exploration of who one is and one's place in the world? Mura examines how the myriad identities in our changing contemporary canon have led to new challenges regarding both craft and pedagogy. Here, like Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark or Jeff Chang's Who We Be, A Stranger's Journey breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationship between the issues of race, literature, and culture. The book's second central question involves structure: How does one tell a story? Mura provides clear, insightful narrative tools that any writer may use, taking in techniques from fiction, screenplays, playwriting, and myth. Through this process, Mura candidly explores the newly evolved aesthetic principles of memoir and how questions of identity occupy a central place in contemporary memoir.

Oliver Sacks has always been fascinated by islands--their remoteness, their mystery, above all the unique forms of life they harbor. For him, islands conjure up equally the romance of Melville and Stevenson, the adventure of Magellan and Cook, and the scientific wonder of Darwin and Wallace. Drawn to the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap by intriguing reports of an isolated community of islanders born totally color-blind, Sacks finds himself setting up a clinic in a one-room island dispensary, where he listens to these achromatopic islanders describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. And on Guam, where he goes to investigate the puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis endemic there for a century, he becomes, for a brief time, an island neurologist, making house calls with his colleague John Steele, amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture. The islands reawaken Sacks's lifelong passion for botany--in particular, for the primitive cycad trees, whose existence dates back to the Paleozoic--and the cycads are the starting point for an intensely personal reflection on the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the genesis of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time. Out of an unexpected journey, Sacks has woven an unforgettable narrative which immerses us in the romance of island life, and shares his own compelling vision of the complexities of being human.

"Is this the whole world?" This question begins the first of three memoirs by Austrian Romani writer, visual artist, musician, and activist Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), told from her perspective as a child interned in three Nazi concentration camps from age nine to fifteen. Written by a child survivor much later in life, the memoirs offer insights into the nexus of narrative and extreme trauma, expressing the full spectrum of human emotions: fear and sorrow at losing loved ones; joy and relief when reconnecting with family and friends; desire to preserve some memories while attempting to erase others; horror at acts of genocide, and hope arising from dreams of survival.In addition to annotated translations of the three memoirs, the book includes two of Stojka's poems and an interview by Karin Berger, editor of the original editions of Stojka's memoirs, as well as color reproductions of several of her artworks and historical photographs. An introduction contextualizes her works within Romani history and culture, and a glossary informs the reader about the "concentrationary universe." Because the memoirs show how Stojka navigated male-dominated postwar Austrian culture, generally discriminatory to Roma, and the patriarchal aspects of Romani culture itself, the book is a contribution not only to Holocaust Studies but also to Austrian Studies, Romani Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.and a glossary informs the reader about the "concentrationary universe." Because the memoirs show how Stojka navigated male-dominated postwar Austrian culture, generally discriminatory to Roma, and the patriarchal aspects of Romani culture itself, the book is a contribution not only to Holocaust Studies but also to Austrian Studies, Romani Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.and a glossary informs the reader about the "concentrationary universe." Because the memoirs show how Stojka navigated male-dominated postwar Austrian culture, generally discriminatory to Roma, and the patriarchal aspects of Romani culture itself, the book is a contribution not only to Holocaust Studies but also to Austrian Studies, Romani Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.and a glossary informs the reader about the "concentrationary universe." Because the memoirs show how Stojka navigated male-dominated postwar Austrian culture, generally discriminatory to Roma, and the patriarchal aspects of Romani culture itself, the book is a contribution not only to Holocaust Studies but also to Austrian Studies, Romani Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

I couldnt put this book down. I stayed up all night reading it. I laughed, cried, got excited, got mad, was surprised, had a good emotional ride, and learned some things along the way. Wonderful book! a great example of how strong and caring a woman can be. What a lady! ~Sandra Woodard, LMT I love this book absolutely an inspiration. I couldnt read fast enough! taught me to hold my head high no matter what happens in my life. face every situation with pride and dignity. ~Anita Warren, Personal Coach In several places it takes the reader to the heart In other places to the pinnacle of accomplishment. Heartwarming Instructional Goal oriented Hard to put down Altogether enlightening! ~Charlotte Radieu, M. A.

‘This is a book of memories. Some of them are my own. Some of them belong to others. They are as true and as fallible as any memories—distorted by time and distance and a writer’s choice of words...’ In the debut memoir that kickstarted a writing career that has spawned more than 20 books, including many award-winners, Ben Brown writes of a quintessentially New Zealand way of living that may not change the world or even ripple its waters, but is replete with meaning. Gathered from the tobacco-green valleys of the Motueka River where he grew up during the 1960s and 1970s, Brown’s memoir is rich with a sense of place, of family. The strands of his parents’ lives reach from Outback Australia and the hardship years of the Great Depression and World War II, to the Waikato heart of the Kingitanga and a re-emergent people, to a time and place where ‘tobacco was king’ and a small farm by a river was the sum of all ambition. Each story, each portrait, resonates with the dignity, warmth and understated humour of one of our finest poetic voices.

A Spectator Best Book of the Year ‘There are three rules for writing a novel,’ Somerset Maugham once said. ‘Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.’ So how to bring characters to life, find a voice, kill your darlings, avoid plagiarism (or choose not to), or run that most challenging of literary gauntlets—writing a good sex scene? Veteran editor and author Richard Cohen takes us on a fascinating excursion into the lives and minds of our greatest writers—from Balzac and Eliot to Woolf and Nabokov, through to Zadie Smith and Stephen King, with a few mischievous detours to Tolstoy along the way. In a glittering tour d’horizon, he lays bare their tricks, motivations, techniques, obsessions and flaws.

Lord writes an honest and revealing memoir of what it was like to grow up in the shadow of her famous father, the pioneering realist Hamlin Garland, whose first collection of stories, "Main-Travelled Roads" (1891), shocked the nation in its unabashed portrait of harsh Midwestern farms.

In her sharply observed and ultimately redemptive memoir, Catherine McCall paints a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking portrait of growing up in a complicated Southern family, whose perfect façade hides crippling imperfections. There are two parents, three children, and five ghosts in the McCall family. With their preppie clothes and country-club smiles, the McCalls look like all the other East End Louisville families. No one knows there are problems, that an internal gash the size of the Ohio river is flooding the family. All Cathy and her siblings can do is promise to stick together no matter what—and swim. But even though they are fast, the McCall kids can’t outdistance their father’s destructive habits and their mother’s worry. As her family reaches a breaking point and an unexpected love blooms, thirteen-year-old Cathy finds she must keep secrets of her own. Though the love in this family is strong, Cathy must discover if it’s tenacious enough to withstand the truth. Candid, captivating, and infused with compassion, Lifeguarding affirms the flexible strength of love itself; how family bonds must often bend to the point of breaking . . . and beyond.

"THE MALIBU COOKBOOK is not only a cookbook but a colorful memoir filled with angels and many magical moments. From the streets of the Bronx, New York to the beaches of Malibu, California, the Godmother takes you a delightful rollercoaster ride with warm and wonderful stories about people and food... ...stories that say over and over again...."LIFE IS A BANQUET AND MOST POOR SOB'S ARE STARVING TO DEATH" ..** For the first time in 27 years, The Godmother reveals her famous recipes, some of which originated in dreams and family cupboards and have made The Godmother of Malibu a legend." Quote **From Mame, The Musical......book by Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee based upon the novel "Auntie Mame" by Patrick Dennis