Sharply observed, vivid, and dispassionate, it offers not only an unforgettable portrait of Wilde himself, his circle of friends, and his band of persecutors, but also a touching chronicle of Holland's own childhood, of the loneliness he experienced as the son of a remarkable, notorious father and of his emergence from the shadows of cruel injustice and dark scandal. "Fascinating for the light it sheds on Wilde's Oxford days and on his domestic life." - Atlantic Monthly "A strange chronicle . . . of considerable literary value." - New Yorker "Mr. Holland's vivid glimpses of the aftermath of that cause célèbre of the Nineties [do] a valuable service of his father's memory." - Saturday Review "An essential addition to Wildeana by a witness uniquely qualified to testify" - Library Journal "A biographical tour de force" - Observer

    At 15 she tried in vain to escape by marrying a white man, only to find herself trapped in the slums of Vancouver—addicted to drugs, tempted by suicide, close to death. But the inspiration of her Cree great-grandmother, Cheechum, gives her confidence in herself and in her people, confidence she needs to survive and to thrive.Half-Breed offers an unparalleled understanding of the Métis people and of the racism and hatred they face. Maria Campbell's story cannot be denied and it cannot be forgotten: it stands as a challenge to all Canadians who believe in human rights and human dignity.

     Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family-

     He would go on to travel to some of the most unexplored regions, meeting men and women who had never seen westerners before. Along the journey the crew meet Patagonians, Fijians, Tahitians, Aborigines, and many other peoples. Although the Wilkes expedition was largely scientific mission, the ships were not always peaceful, indeed there were a number of armed conflicts with Pacific Islanders as the United States began to assert its authority across the globe. The ships and their crews had to withstand some of the most appalling conditions as they continued their expedition, from the heat-driven mirages of the South Atlantic to the brutal cold of the Antarctic seas. What makes Erskine’s narrative so remarkable is that he is not writing from the perspective of an admiral or a scientific explorer, but instead from the viewpoint of a common sailor. Interspersed throughout the narrative are short ditties and sailor’s songs that provide a vivid picture of the mentality of nineteenth century seamen. After the Wilkes expedition landed back in the United States Erskine spent only brief moments on dry land as he frequently registered under new ships and continued his journeys. Erskine’s book is a fascinating first-hand account of exploration and maritime life aboard a tall ship. Twenty Years Before the Mast was published in 1896 towards the end of Erskine’s life.

    Comprised of letters written over the course of thirty years, and translated and introduced by acclaimed Peruvian-American writer Daniel Alarcon, it describes in vivid, painterly detail the remarkable courage and limitless imagination of a young girl growing up with nothing. Emma was an illegitimate child, raised in a windowless room in Bogota with no water or toilet and only ingenuity to keep her and her sister alive. Abandoned by their mother, she and her sister moved to a convent housing 150 orphan girls, where they washed pots, ironed and mended laundry, scrubbed floors, cleaned bathrooms, and sewed garments and decorative cloths for church. Illiterate and knowing nothing of the outside world, Emma escaped at age nineteen, eventually coming to have a career as an artist and to befriend the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as well as European artists and intellectuals. Far from self-pitying, the portrait that emerges from this clear-eyed account inspires awe at the stunning early life of a gifted writer whose talent remained hidden for far too long.

    In France, a young woman succumbs to illness, leaving her husband and small children bereft. Present at both events, Emmanuel Carrère sets out to tell the story of two families—shattered and ultimately restored. What he accomplishes is nothing short of a literary miracle: a heartrending narrative of endless love, a meditation on courage and decency in the face of adversity, an intimate and reverent look at the extraordinary beauty and nobility of ordinary lives.Precise, sober, and suspenseful, as full of twists and turns as any novel, Lives Other Than My Own confronts terrifying catastrophes to illuminate the astonishing richness of human connection: a grandfather who thought he had found paradise—too soon—and now devotes himself to helping his neighbors rebuild their village; a husband so in love with his ailing wife that he carries her in his arms like a knight does his princess; and finally, Carrère himself, longtime chronicler of the tormented self, who unexpectedly finds consolation and even joy as he immerses himself in the lives of others.

    With subjects ranging from the writer’s own “migrant childhood” to the need to protect what remains of the great western wilderness (which Stegner dubs “the geography of hope”) to poignant profiles of western writers such as John Steinbeck and Norman Maclean, this collection is a riveting testament to the power of place. At the same time it communicates vividly the sensibility and range of this most gifted of American writers, historians, and environmentalists.

    Beginning with a wonderful portrait of tha author's remarkable father, the book follows Dos Passos through Harvard; through World War I as an ambulance driver in France & Italy; through the chaotic postwar Middle East; through the vast reaches of Soviet Russia; the 'Russian Experiment' & through the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic.

    Vollmann, one of our most versatile talents, traveled to see the war in Afghanistan. In An Afghanistan Picture Show, his first book-length work of non-fiction, Vollmann paints a brutally honest and dryly comic portrait of a young American coming to terms with his political naivete. It is the story of a would-be giver who finds himself a perpetual Stranger, unable to comprehend the simplest things he hears and sees, and continually compelled to rely on others for help. In two narrative perspectives, Vollmann wryly confronts his own inadequacy in the face of limitless suffering and comes to the realization that one who went to aid and to understand could only hope, trust, and receive. In An Afghanistan Picture Show Vollmann describes a Cold War world of spies and lurking strangeness, a world in which his younger self asks unanswerable questions of orphans, refugees, guerrilla leaders, bureaucrats, corrupt officials, and prescient has-been politicians. He tells of Pakistan, a country as gracious in spirit as she is materially poor. And in his unnerving innocence Vollmann explores a land in which others continually invest him with almost supernatural powers simply because he is American. An ingenious narrative which inverts the very concept of the "white man's burden" and questions the idea of "truth" in non-fiction, An Afghanistan Picture Show stands as William T. Vollmann most entertaining--and autobiographical--work to date.

    E. Hotchner traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, and ran with the bulls in Pamplona. And everywhere they talked. For 14 years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared a conversation. Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene in the twenties, remembered his early years as a writer, and recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction. And Hotchner took it all down. His notes on the many occasions he spent with his friend Papa - in Venice and Rome, in Key West, on the Riviera, in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961 - provide the material for this utterly truthful, profoundly compassionate bestselling memoir of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a great writer who had, and determined, the time of his life.

    Long before his father achieved literary recognition for Ask the Dust or The Road to Los Angeles, and before Dan had conceived his novels 86’d, Chump Change, and Mooch, their difficult relationship as father and son evolved in a household where love and literary artistry were often overshadowed by emotional violence. Fante is the story of Dan’s struggle to find his own voice amidst the madness of his family’s dark inheritance, a memoir of his escape from his own vices and his eventual return to Los Angeles to embrace the man—and the calling—that once had driven him away.

    His works have been translated into every major language, and the Nobel Prize awarded to him in 1954 recognized his impact on contemporary writing. While many people are familiar with the public image of Hemingway and the legendary accounts of his life, few knew him as an intimate. With this collection of letters, presented for the first time as a Scribner Classic, a new Hemingway emerges. Ranging from 1917 to 1961, this generous selection of nearly six hundred letters is, in effect, both a self-portrait and an autobiography. In his own words, Hemingway candidly reveals himself to a wide variety of people: family, friends, enemies, editors, translators, and almost all the prominent writers of his day. In so doing he proves to be one of the most entertaining letter writers of all time. Carlos Baker has chosen letters that not only represent major turning points in Hemingway's career but also exhibit character, wit, and the writer's typical enthusiasm for hunting, fishing, drinking, and eating. A few are ingratiating, some downright truculent. Others present his views on writing and reading, criticize books by friend or foe, and discuss women, soldiers, politicians, and prizefighters. Perhaps more than anything, these letters show Hemingway's irrepressible humor, given far freer rein in his correspondence than in his books. An informal biography in letters, the product of forty-five years' living and writing, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters leaves an indelible impression of an extraordinary man. Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. At seventeen he left home to join the Kansas City Star as a reporter, then volunteered to serve in the Red Cross during the First World War. He was severely wounded at the Italian front and was awarded the Croce di Guerra. He moved to Paris in 1921, where he devoted himself to writing fiction, and where he fell in with the expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.

    Stewart's captivating missives from her homestead in Wyoming bring to full life the beauty, isolation, and joys of working the prairie.

    He had decided that after our parents died he just didn't want any more fighting between what was left of us. He was twenty-four, Beth was twenty-three, I was twenty-one, Toph was eight, and all of us were so tried already, from that winter. So when something would come up, any little thing, some bill to pay or decision to make, he would just sigh, his eyes tired, his mouth in a sorry kind of smile. But Beth and I...Jesus, we were fighting with everyone, anyone, each other, with strangers at bars, anywhere -- we were angry people wanting to exact revenge. We came to California and we wanted everything, would take what was ours, anything within reach. And I decided that little Toph and I, he with his backward hat and long hair, living together in our little house in Berkeley, would be world-destroyers. We inherited each other and, we felt, a responsibility to reinvent everything, to scoff and re-create and drive fast while singing loudly and pounding the windows. It was a hopeless sort of exhilaration, a kind of arrogance born of fatalism, I guess, of the feeling that if you could lose a couple of parents in a month, then basically anything could happen, at any time -- all bullets bear your name, all cars are there to crush you, any balcony could give way; more disaster seemed only logical. And then, as in Dorothy's dream, all these people I grew up with were there, too, some of them orphans also, most but not all of us believing that what we had been given was extraordinary, that it was time to tear or break down, ruin, remake, take and devour. This was San Francisco, you know, and everyone had some dumb idea -- I mean, wicca? -- and no one there would tell you yours was doomed. Thus the public nudity, and this ridiculous magazine, and the Real World tryout, all this need, most of it disguised by sneering, but all driven by a hyper-awareness of this window, I guess, a few years when your muscles are taut, coiled up and vibrating. But what to do with the energy? I mean, when we drive, Toph and I, and we drive past people, standing on top of all these hills, part of me wants to stop the car and turn up the radio and have us all dance in formation, and part of me wants to run them all over."

    Born with achondroplasia, a condition that causes disproportionate dwarfism, Dylan Postl had endured multiple surgeries by the age of 12. And yet, he held on to the dream that he would one day become a professional wrestler. Ignoring the naysayers and against doctors' recommendations, Dylan began training in his teens, and he soon began appearing on local independent shows. Before he turned 20, he was signed by the world leader in sports-entertainment, WWE, to play the role of Irish grappler Finlay's feisty sidekick, Hornswoggle, and remained a firm fixture in the company for a full decade.While most of Dylan's adult life has been spent in the wild world of the wrestling industry, Life Is Short is more than a story of a little person's journey through a world of giants; it's a memoir of elation and anguish, triumph and disappointment, and of how an endlessly positive outlook combined with the unwavering support of family and friends helped him become a success in his industry and a loving, responsible father. It's a story about a man who still loves wrestling -- but loves his family above all else.