Books in the American Lives series

An edgy memoir by a daughter of a murder victim, narrating her emotional journey after the death of her father.

Dinty W. Moore asks: What would the world be like if eternal damnation was not hanging constantly over our sheepish heads? Why do we persist in believing something that only makes us miserable?

A piecing together, from moments and objects and words of a father's life.

Farmers and pragmatists, hard-working people who made their way west from Kentucky through Ohio and Indiana to settle at last in southern Illinois, Lee Martin's ancestors left no diaries or journals or letters; apart from birth certificates and gravestones. This is one man's story of love and compromise as he separates from his family's history.

In this candid and moving memoir, John W. Evans articulates the complicated joys of falling in love again as a young widower. Should I Still Wish chronicles Evans' efforts to leave an intense year of grief behind, to make peace with the natural world again, and to reconnect with a woman who promises a life of abundance and charm.

Describes the joys and anxieties of preparing for fatherhood in a setting as challenging as it is promising. This work features a story of two people exploring the unmapped territories of loss and grief and finding solace and grace in the mountains.

Everything changes when Julie Riddle's parents stumble across the wilderness survival guide How to Live in the Woods on Pennies a Day. More than simply a memoir about family and place, The Solace of Stones explores Riddle's coming of age and the complexities of memory, loss, and identity born by a family homesteading in the modern West.

Modern manhood is confusing and complicated, but Joey Franklin, a thirtysomething father of three, is determined to make the best of it. In My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married, he offers frank, self-deprecating meditations on everything from male-pattern baldness and the balm of blues harmonica to Grand Theft Auto and the staying power of first kisses.

Whether pulled from the folds of memory, channeled through the icons of Greek mythology and Roman Catholicism, or filtered through the lens of pop culture, Sonja Livingston''s Queen of the Fall considers the lives of women. Exploring the legacies of those she has crossed paths with in life and in the larger culture, Livingston weaves together strands of memory with richly imagined vignettes to explore becoming a woman in late 1980s and early 1990s America.Along the way, the award-winning memoirist brings us face-to-face with herself as an inner-city girl-trying to imagine a horizon beyond poverty, fearful of her fertility and the limiting arc of teenage pregnancy. Livingston looks at the lives of those she''s known: friends who''ve gotten themselves into "trouble" and disappeared never to be heard from again, girls who tell their school counselor small lies out of necessity and pain, and a mother whose fruitfulness seems, at times, biblical. Livingston interacts with figures such as Susan B. Anthony, the Virgin Mary, and Ally McBeal to mine the terrain of her own femininity, fertility, and longing.Queen of the Fall is a dazzling meditation on loss, possibility, and, ultimately, what it means to be human.Sonja Livingston is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis. Her first book, Ghostbread, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for nonfiction.

Follow Sue William Silverman, a one-woman cultural mash-up, on her exploration of identity among the mishmash of American idols and ideals that confuse most of us - or should. This searching, bracing, hilarious and moving book tries to make sense of that most troubling American condition: belonging, but to what?

What is "identity"when you're a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovah's Witnesses? The answer isn't easy. You won't find it in books. And you certainly won't find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy Castro's unmoored life of searching and striving that she's turned to account with literary alchemy in Island of Bones.

Offers a rare look into the heart of the average socialist trying to survive the Nazis and rebuild a broken world

Liz Stephens has come from Los Angeles to Utah for graduate school, and her brief stint working on a Taco Bell commercial is not much in the way of preparation for taking on the real West. In The Days Are Gods Stephens chronicles a move that is far more than a shift in geographical coordinates.

Doing things by the book"" acquires a whole new meaning in Brandon R. Schrand's memoir of coming of age in spite of himself. The ""works cited"" are those books that serve as Schrand's signposts as he goes from life as a hormone-crazed, heavy-metal wannabe in the remotest parts of working-class Idaho to a reasonable facsimile of manhood.

Cartography of high literary order, plotting routes, real and imagined, and putting an alternate landscape on the map

The Virgin of Prince Street chronicles Sonja Livingston's quest to explore devotion and spirituality in her life. Meditations on quirky rituals and fading traditions thoughtfully and dynamically interrogate traditional elements of sacramental devotion, especially as they relate to shifting concepts of religion, relationships, and the sacred.

Mary Clearman Blew's education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband. This Is Not the Ivy League is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman.

Settled in what seems like a charmed life in San Francisco, a diagnosis of cancer and the betrayal of a lover shake Tracy Seeley to her roots - roots she is suddenly determined to search out. My Ruby Slippers tells the story of that search, the tale of a woman with an impassioned if vague sense of mission: to find the meaning of home.

Memoirs are as varied as human emotion and experience, and those published in the distinguished American Lives Series run the gamut. Excerpted from this series and collected here for the first time, these dispatches from American lives take us from China during the Cultural Revolution to the streets of New York in the sixties to a cabin in the backwoods of Idaho.

""Insouciant"and "irreverent"are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore's books and, invariably, "hilarious".Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form.

This is an unconventional memoir. A series of lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex family during the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it adds up to one woman's story while simultaneously reflecting the story of her times.

Tamsen Donner. For most the name conjures the ill-fated Donner party trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. For Gabrielle Burton, Tamsen's story had long seemed the story of a woman's life writ large. This book tells of Burton's search to solve the mystery of Tamsen Donner for herself.

Although Yellowstone is America's oldest, most iconic, and most popular national park, it is perhaps, in W.D. Wetherell's words, "America's least-known best-known place." Detailed in the humorous, and lyrical language that has distinguished Wetherell's award-winning fiction, this introspective journey merges the fascinating story of Yellowstone's history and geography with the author's own story.

A memoir of childhood and family which testifies to the power of collective empathy in the transformations that make and remake us throughout our lives. It enacts our human desire to understand the fragmented self.

A tale of how one young man matures through the sometimes violent blessing of social change and finds himself - and a sense of purpose - through the loss of innocence and naivete, the Seattle of his youth, and his father.

Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain.

Sky Songs is a collection of essays that takes inspiration from the ancient seabed in which Jennifer Sinor lives, an elemental landscape that reminds her that our lives are shaped by all that has passed through.

This memoir recounts Bethany Maile's efforts, informed by a steady diet of "western" activities, to understand the ways in which the western myth is outdated yet persistent.

In 1966, twelve-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China's Cultural Revolution. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, this work is a memoir of a young man's harrowing experience during a time of terror. It recounts how Shen escaped, again and again, from his appointed fate.