Books in the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Series series

In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.

Profiles invasive or unwanted species in the natural world and examines how our treatment of these creatures sometimes parallels in surprising ways how we treat each other. Part essay, part nature writing, part narrative nonfiction, as the chapters in Pandora's Garden unfold, they blend together like ecotones.

Offers an intimate intellectual walk with America's most edgy and original environmentalist. The thrust of the book consists not in learning "about" Thoreau from an intermediary but, as the title suggests, in learning "from" Thoreau along with the author.

This memoir distinguishes itself from others in its ""graphic"" elements - the appropriated diagrams, instructions, and ""exploded view"" inventory images - that Parsons has used. They help guide the reader's understanding of the piece, giving them a visual anchor for the story,and add a technical aspect to the lyric essays that they hold.

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career. Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be.

At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight. In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory.

This collection of more than twenty-five essays, both meditative and formally inventive, considers all kinds of subjects: everyday objects such as keys and hats, plus concepts of time and place; the memoir; writing; the essay itself; and Michael Martone's friendship with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut.

In February 2010, with the help of a friend, Justin Gardiner boarded a ship bound for Antarctica. A stowaway of sorts, Gardiner used his experiences as the narrative backdrop for this compelling firsthand account that breathes new life into the nineteenth-century journals of Antarctic explorers such as Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton.

In haunting prose that will follow you for days to come, Made Holy tells the story of the American family. Love, loss, and addiction entwine in this moving debut collection.

Oysters are a narrative food: in each shuck and slurp, an eater tastes the place where the animal was raised. But that's just the beginning. Andre Joseph Gallant uses the bivalve as a jumping of point to tell the story of a changing southeastern coast, the bounty within its waters, and what the future may hold for the area and its fishers.