Oh, and did we mention her sense of humour? Jann's natural comedic talents translate seamlessly into her writing, and her dedicated fans will delight in the details of this memoir--where there is no such thing as too much information. Readers will learn about how her brother used to steal her maxi pads to repurpose as GI Joe bunk beds and how she once got gum stuck in her hair so badly that when she woke up her head was glued to the pillow. But with the good times come the bad, and Jann opens up about the darker side of her so-called prairie-perfect nuclear family and the first signs that her brother was a uniquely troubled young man. Jann's readable prose keeps the reader tuned in as she reminds us of the inestimable value of having a teacher who believes in you, wide-open spaces to play and be a child, and a good mother.

    A revelatory look into the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, considered in his time to be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer, winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Mary Dearborn's new biography gives the richest and most nuanced portrait to date of this complex, enigmatically unique American artist, whose same uncontrollable demons that inspired and drove him throughout his life undid him at the end, and whose seven novels and six-short story collections informed--and are still informing--fiction writing generations after his death.

    Now Linwood was hauling fish guts to the woods for burial, answering distress calls from women in the ladies’ room who found themselves without toilet paper, and standing in leaky chest-waders pounding dock posts into the lake bottom.The chores weren’t so bad, especially when he could help his father, who had been a commercial artist before he bought his way into the tourist business. And in other ways, it was a good life for a boy. He had wheels (a John Deere riding mower), a small aluminum boat with a 9.5-horsepower outboard and only one speed (fast), and Chipper, a dog that chased boats the way other dogs chase cars, sometimes with catastrophically comic results. Linwood also had access to The Chart, a cottage reservations list that was, for him, a guide to the arrivals and departures of the guests’ teenaged daughters. Summer romances could be as intense as they were heartbreaking.When he was sixteen, an unexpected tragedy changed Linwood’s life again. His older brother, Rett, helped out as best he could, but he was wrestling with demons of his own – often withdrawing into his own complicated inner world. Linwood found an extended family in the resort’s guests, who lent him a hand, and shaped him into the man he would become. His mother’s eccentricities (she quit driving to shame the police for having given her a ticket) made Linwood’s new responsibilities heavier than they might otherwise have been. When he finally decided to move away from Green Acres to make a separate life, she made it as difficult as possible for him.In the midst of all this, Linwood found his vocation, and mentors, too, in Margaret Laurence, and in Kenneth Millar, who (under the pen name Ross MacDonald) wrote a highly successful series of detective novels.In this memoir, Linwood Barclay looks back with humour, sadness, and affection on the singular circumstances of his coming of age.

    Raymond Carver, Edna St. Vincent Millay, william Shakespeare, Jill Ker Conway, Judith Guest, Dominick Dunne, Anne Morrow Linbergh, and Albert Camus are among the writers whose works explore the shock, the grief, and the search for meaning that come with the death of a child. Seasoned with wisdom and experience, their words offer rare comfort and insight to thoses who need it most.

    John Vogel, fifty-two, had been arrested for single-handedly counterfeiting nearly $20 million in U.S. currency -- the fourth-largest sum ever seized by federal agents -- and then released pending trial. Though Jennifer hadn't spoken to her father in more than four years, the police suspected he might turn up at her Minneapolis apartment. She examined the shadows outside her building, thought she spotted him at the grocery store and the bus stop. He had simply vanished. Framed around the six months her father eluded authorities, Jennifer's memoir documents the police chase -- stakeouts, lie detector tests, even a segment on Unsolved Mysteries -- and vividly chronicles her tumultuous childhood while examining her father's legacy. A lifelong criminal who robbed banks, burned down buildings, scammed investors, and even plotted murder, John Vogel was also a hapless dreamer who wrote a novel, baked lemon meringue pies, and took his ten-year-old daughter to see Rocky in an empty theater on Christmas Eve. When it came time to pass his counterfeit bills, he spent them at Wal-Mart for political reasons.Culling from memories, photo albums, public documents, and interviews with the handful of people who knew the real John Vogel, Jennifer has created an intensely moving psychological portrait of a charismatic, larger-than-life figure -- a father who loved her and whom, in spite of everything, she loved back.

    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."

    As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

    One of the most gifted players in the NFL, Dunn talks about his remarkable career and accomplishments while sharing the pain of his lifelong battle with depression, a result of losing his  mother—a police officer killed while off-duty—when Dunn was 18 Thought-provoking and uplifting, Running for My Life is the story of an exceptional athlete’s secret torment and inspiring courage.

    It soon becomes a journey of exploration. For Grady, whose forebears were slaves who came to Canada in the 1880s, this is a journey through fear, racism, and violence into his own family roots. For Simonds, who grew up a lonely Canadian in the American School of Campinas, Brazil, it is a journey into the heart of the ex-pat promised land, the nation of the American Dream. As Grady and Simonds travel back through American history, they encounter the splendours of the Mojave Desert, the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, and the bayous of Louisiana and the Outer Banks, and they experience the impact of geography on culture and of culture on the landscape. Although they are observing America from the outside, they also strangely feel at home. The Americans they meet illuminate a country dissolving in the grip of the Bush administration's final years and inspire them to reassess their-and our-assumptions about that powerful and complex country. Also available in paperback.

    It is 1984, the height of Nicaragua's post-revolutionary war, and the peace-activist Friesens have come to protest American involvement. In the midst of this tumult, Juliet's family lives outside of the boundaries of ordinary life. They've escaped, and the ordinary rules don't apply. Threat is pervasive, danger is real, but the extremity of the situation also produces a kind of euphoria, protecting Juliet's family from its own cracks and conflicts.When Juliet's younger brother becomes sick with cancer, their adventure ends abruptly. The Friesens return to Canada only to find that their lives beyond Nicaragua have become the war zone. One by one, they drift from each other, and Juliet grows to adulthood, pulled between her desire to live a free life like the one she remembers in Nicaragua, and her desire to build for her own children a life more settled than her parents could provide.With laser-sharp prose and breathtaking insight, these stories herald Carrie Snyder as one of Canada's most prodigiously talented writers.

    Ivy is disliked by tribal leaders in spite of her obvious love for their children, yet she eventually overcomes their resistance and serves as their spokesman in negotiations with the U S government. Already scarred by her mother's tragic death in childbirth, Ivy overcomes her husband's suicide and other devastating disappointments to share her faith with her adopted people and eventually earn their love.In 1900, Ivy Cromartie Stranahan gives up a promising teaching career to join her husband at the remote New River trading post in south Florida - but she doesn't give up her love for learning or her passion for righting wrongs. In this remarkable story of God's faithfulness and one woman's commitment, Ivy becomes a friend to the Seminole people, their teacher of forbidden English and the Christian faith, and finally, their spokesperson in a time of turmoil. Like all of us who search for meaning, Ivy yearns to experience the power of faith, understand the limitation of human protection, and learn the importance of perseverance in caring for those we love. She finds them in Mystic Sweet Communion.

    "Lost Geography" takes the complexity of migration as its central subject: Why do landscape, work, and family lock some people in place and release others? In settings both rural and urban, these stalwart, tragically dispersed yet resilient people respond not only to new environments and experiences but to the eruption of sudden loss and change.As the settings and characters shift in this wise, resonant book, readers are invited to see how habits of survival translate from one generation to another. How are we like our forebears? How does circumstance make us alter what our heritage has told us is important? With unfailing subtlety and elegance, "Lost Geography" teaches us, in a luminous sequence of intense personal dramas, that what keeps us alive isn't so much our ability to understand the details of our past as having the luck and courage to survive the assaults of both the present and history.

    Whether impersonating Sigmund Freud in a department store window during the holidays, climbing an icy mountain in cheap loafers, or learning primitive survival skills in the wilds of New Jersey, Rakoff clearly demonstrates how he doesn't belong-nor does he try to.In his debut collection of essays, Rakoff uses his razor-sharp wit and snarky humor to deliver a barrage of damaging blows that, more often than not, land squarely on his own jaw-hilariously satirizing the writer, not the subject. Joining the wry and the heartfelt, Fraud offers an object lesson in not taking life, or ourselves, too seriously.

    She was rejected by both families, hidden away in a mental hospital and adopted by missionaries and then moved to North America. She began what she recalls with ironic humour as a “charmed life.” Targeted by girl gangs and facing other abusive situations, she escaped this early life by joining a punk rock band and leaving on tour, where she married the drummer and hit a downward spiral that found her on the floor of a Vancouver drug den.Through it all, her creative personality and unstoppable humour were her weapons of self-defence. Bif showcased her life’s journey in tattoo ink across her body and, with her unique ability to transform her true life stories into song lyrics, she found her voice as a solo artist, started her own record company and at twenty-three years of age became an international recording artist. Throughout her remarkable career, armed with her singular talent and instantly identifiable look, Bif would captivate the imagination of audiences and media alike, releasing nine albums and twenty-one videos. She embarked on seemingly endless international tours, several feature films and multiple television roles, only to be struck down with breast cancer at the age of 37. Bif would discover her passion for advocacy, as a triumphant survivor and someone who helps others first. This is Bif Naked’s story so far . . .

    He was also a key architect of Layton’s overnight success that was ten years in the making. In Building the Orange Wave, Lavigne recounts the dramatic story of how Layton and his inner circle developed and executed a plan that turned a struggling political party into a major contender for government, defying the odds and the critics every step of the way. The ultimate insider’s account of one of the greatest political accomplishments in modern Canadian history, Building the Orange Wave takes readers behind the scenes, letting them eavesdrop on strategy sessions, crisis-management meetings, private chats with political opponents, and internal battles, revealing new details of some of the most important political events of the last decade.