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Each One Teach One
Up and Out of Poverty, Memoirs of a Street Activist
Ron Casanova and Stephen Blackburn
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Each One Teach One chronicles Ron Casanova's struggle out of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction to find dignity and purpose in life. Through his own awakening, this Black, Puerto Rican activist ultimately finds his answer in helping other people. Born into a dysfunctional family and placed in an orphanage on Staten Island at an early age, Casanova faced overwhelming odds. His story illuminates some of the major events of our time, including the "police riot" at Tompkins Square, the "Housing Now" march of the homeless on Washington, and community takeovers of housing in Kansas City, New York, and Philadelphia.

Underlying Each One Teach One, with its vivid cast of characters and intimate descriptions of Harlem and other urban areas, is the profound sense that no matter what your circumstance, you can use your past experience to help others. Ultimately, Casanova's story is a message of hope for the future and for the possibility of self-sufficiency and self-empowerment for each individual.
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Each One Teach One
Up and Out of Poverty; Memoirs of a Street Activist
Ron Casanova as told to Stephen Blackburn
Northwestern University Press, 1996
The gritty and inspiring story of Ron Casanova, who went from homelessness to national homeless advocate

Each One Teach One recounts Ron Casanova’s struggle out of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction to find dignity and purpose in life. Through his own awakening, this Black Puerto Rican activist ultimately finds his salvation in helping other people. Placed in an orphanage on Staten Island at the age of three, Casanova faced overwhelming odds. His story illuminates significant twentieth-century protests, including the 1988 riot at Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, the “Housing Now” march of the homeless on Washington, DC, in 1989, and community takeovers of housing in Kansas City, New York, and Philadelphia.
 
Underlying Each One Teach One, with its vivid cast of characters and intimate descriptions of Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Tent City, is the profound sense that, no matter what your circumstance, you can use your experience to help others. Ultimately, Casanova’s story demonstrates the possibility of self-sufficiency and self-empowerment. Amid today’s economic crisis and rising homelessness, Casanova’s story brings a message of hope.
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The Earliest Diary of John Adams
June 1753 – April 1754, September 1758 – January 1759
John Adams
Harvard University Press

The existence of this diary was totally unsuspected until its recent and somewhat accidental discovery among papers at the Vermont Historical Society during a search by Wendell D. Garrett, Associate Editor of the Adams Papers, for Adams family letters of a later period.

In part, the diary antedates by more than two years all other diaries of John Adams, and as a whole it is an invaluable addition to the Adams Papers, significantly supplementing the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams issued by the Belknap Press in four volumes in 1961. The editors’ introduction describes the romantic and dramatic circumstances under which the diary is believed to have left the hands of the Adams family and found its way into the possession of young Royall Tyler, later a successful writer and distinguished Vermont judge, but in the 1780s a suitor for the hand of John Adams’s daughter Abigail. Among other matters, the newly found diary contains material on John Adams’s life as an undergraduate at Harvard, his choice of a career, his law studies and his first case as a practicing lawyer, his ambitions, and his observations on girls.

As L. H. Butterfield, editor in chief of the Adams Papers, says of John Adams, “He almost never fails to give even his casual reflections a characteristic turn. He is a great stylist… His wry, amusing, engaging comments, whether on daily life in New England, on literature, science, or government, show an original mind at work.”

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Eating Lightbulbs and Other Essays
Steve Fellner
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
In Eating Lightbulbs and Other Essays, Steve Fellner traces the seriocomic absurdities of his own mind and its obsessions with family, mental illness, film, poetry, and gay sex. His search for love finds its outlets and objects wherever it can: in an imaginary 1970s Cineplex movie theatre, at a baby shower, or in a co-ed sexual abuse support group; via a letter penned to the ghost of an environmental activist who killed himself; or in the form of the AIDS quilt, lava lamps, amoebas, and a famous queer poet who didn’t know he existed. As he charts the inherently flawed ways he—and we—live and love, Fellner is always ready to subvert victim narratives even if he has to commit a few (or more than a few) acts of betrayal along the way. Unflinching and sidelong, laugh-out-loud funny, and as sharp and unpredictable as shards of fine glass, these essays look straight at the moments in life most of us would rather forget. 

 
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Echoes From The Holocaust
A Memoir
Mira Ryczke Kimmelman
University of Tennessee Press, 1996
Echoes from the Holocaust
A Memoir
Mira Ryczke Kimmelman

"During the most difficult times of World War II," Mira Kimmelman writes, "I wondered whether the world really knew what was happening to us. I lived in total isolation, not knowing what was taking place outside the ghetto gates, outside the barbed wires of concentration camps. After the war, would anyone ever believe my experiences?"
Kimmelman had no way of preserving her experiences on paper while they happened, but she trained herself to remember. And now, as a survivor of the Holocaust, she has preserved her recollections for posterity in this powerful and moving book—one woman's personal perspective on a terrible moment in human history.
The daughter of a Jewish seed exporter, the author was born Mira Ryczke in 1923 in a suburb of the Baltic seaport of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Her childhood was happy, and she learned to cherish her faith and heritage. Through the 1930s, Mira's family remained in the Danzig area despite a changing political climate that was compelling many friends and neighbors to leave. With the Polish capitulation to Germany in the autumn of 1939, however, Mira and her family were forced from their home. In calm, straightforward prose—which makes her story all the more harrowing—Kimmelman recalls the horrors that befell her and those she loved. Sent to Auschwitz in 1944, she escaped the gas chambers by being selected for  slave labor. Finally, as the tide of war turned against Germany, Mira was among those transported to Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands were dying from starvation, disease, and exposure. In April 1945, British troops liberated the camp, and Mira was eventually reunited with her father. Most of the other members of her family had perished.
In the closing chapters, Kimmelman describes her marriage, her subsequent life in the United States, and her visits to Israel and to the places in Europe where the  events of her youth transpired. Even when confronted with the worst in humankind, she observes, she never lost hope or succumbed to despair. She concludes with an eloquent reminder: "If future generations fail to protect the truth, it vanishes. . . . Only by remembering the bitter lesson of Hitler’s legacy can we hope it will never be repeated. Teach it, tell it, read it."
The Author: Mira Ryczke Kimmelman is a resident of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and lectures widely in schools about her experiences during the Holocaust.
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The Eclipse I Call Father
Essays on Absence
David Axelrod
Oregon State University Press, 2019
In The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence, David Axelrod recalls a balmy night in May 1970 when he vowed to allow no one and nothing he loves to pass from this life without praise, even if it meant praising the most bewildering losses. In each of these fourteen essays Axelrod delivers on that vow as he ranges across topics as diverse as marriage, Japanese poetry, Craftsman design, Old English riddles, racism, extinction, fatherhood, mountaineering, predatory mega-fauna, street fighting, trains, the Great Depression, and the effects of climate change—accretions of absence that haunt the writer and will likewise haunt readers.

The essays in this collection grew from a ten-year period when the author found himself periodically living and working abroad, wondering why foreign landscapes haunted him more than the familiar landscapes of the inland Pacific Northwest he called home. Each place had a long history of habitation, but at home he was blind, unable to see past the surfaces of things. Axelrod examines many aspects of that phenomenon in these pages, framing surface realities and imagining the scale and scope of that surface, but also trying to sense what is absent or changed, and how, despite its absence, the unseen accretes to ever-greater densities and persists as something uncanny.

Curious, alert, and keenly observant, these essays probe the boundaries between what is here and what is gone, what is present and what is past, in elegant prose. Readers familiar with Axelrod’s poetry will find a new facet of his lyrical gifts, while those encountering his work for the first time will be richly rewarded by the discovery of this Northwest literary talent.
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Eight Prison Camps
A Dutch Family in Japanese Java
Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga
Ohio University Press, 1996

Eldest daughter of eight children, the author grew up in Surakarta, Java, in what is now Indonesia. In the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, however, Dutch nationals were rounded up by Japanese soldiers and put in internment camps. Her father and brother were sent to separate men’s camps, leaving the author, her mother, and the five younger children in the women’s camp. In this and later seven other prison camps in central Java, their lives gradually deteriorated from early days of fear and crowding to near starvation, forced labor, beatings, and seeing others disappear or die. On the family’s return to Holland after the war, they found a nation recovering from German occupation and largely ignorant of the horror of the Far East experience.

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The Eleventh House
Memoirs
Hudson Strode, Introduction by Don Noble
University of Alabama Press, 1975
"Every place I visited," says Hudson Strode, "was like a surprise package to be opened, and I untied the strings with high expectations." Reading The Eleventh House: Memoirs is like going to a party of smartly dressed guests.
 
Strode starts his foreign travels in Sorrento with Dante's descendant Count Dante Serego-Alighieri as his guide. He takes a Russian cattle boat to Tunisia and lunches with the lovely Countess de Brazza. Then he embarks on a whirlwind tour of South America and writes South by Thunderbird. Later, in England, he visits Rebecca West at her country home and strikes up a warm friendship with Lady Astor. In Denmark his hostess is Isak Dinesen. In Finland he meets Jan Sibelius.
 
Such are the times of Hudson Strode. With his keen eye for settings, with candor, energy, and curiosity, Strode sees his famous friends closely and wholly. His is a unique account.

The Eleventh House is the story of a rewarding and fascinating life told by a man who remembers it all with affection. He tells it for the record and as great entertainment.
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Ella Elgar Bird Dumont
An Autobiography of a West Texas Pioneer
Edited by Tommy J. Boley
University of Texas Press, 1988

A crack shot, expert skinner and tanner, seamstress, sculptor, and later writer—a list that only hints at her intelligence and abilities—Ella Elgar Bird Dumont was one of those remarkable women who helped tame the Texas frontier. First married at sixteen to a Texas Ranger, she followed her husband to Comanche Indian country in King County, where they lived in a tepee while participating in the final slaughter of the buffalo. Living off the land until the frontier was opened for ranching, Ella and Tom Bird typified the Old West ideals of self-sufficiency and generosity, with a hesitancy to complain about the hard life in the late 1800s.

Yet, in one important way, Ella Dumont was unsuited for life on the frontier. Endowed with an instinctive desire and ability to carve and sculpt, she was largely prevented from pursuing her talents by the responsibilities of marriage and frontier life and later, widowhood with two small children. Even though her second marriage, to Auguste Dumont, made life more comfortable, the realities of her existence still prevented the fulfillment of her artistic longings.

Ella Bird Dumont’s memoir is rich with details of the frontier era in Texas, when Indian depredations were still a danger for isolated settlers, where animals ranged close enough to provide dinner and a new pair of gloves, and where sheer existence depended on skill, luck, and the kindness of strangers. The vividness and poignancy of her life, coupled with the wealth of historical material in the editor’s exhaustive notes, make this Texas pioneer’s autobiography a very special book.

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Engine Running
Essays
Cade Mason
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Runner Up, 2021 Gournay Prize

Engine Running explores debut author Cade Mason’s gradual distancing from home and old selves alongside an increasingly fractured family doing the same. Starting at the beginning of his parents’ love and working past its end, he combs through memory to piece together a portrait of a family then and now: of a father, reeling after a blindsiding divorce; of a mother, anxious to move on; of a sister, caught in the crossfire; and of a son, learning to embrace his sexuality even as he fears that his own loves may have deepened the rift between his parents. 
 
Lush and innovative, these essays contemplate childhood memories and family secrets, religion and queerness in the rural South, and the ways rituals and contours of manhood are passed through generations. Most of all, we feel with Mason what it is to grapple with and love a place even as you yearn to leave.
 
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Essayons
Autobiography of John W. Sweetland
John W. Sweetland
Michigan Publishing Services, 2019
From the humble roots of a small town in Michigan to the building of an entrepreneurial empire, John Sweetland’s life story captures the spirit of the American Dream. This adventurous narrative explores the journey of a young American growing up in the Midwest, his formative years in the military and at university, and his career as a leader of commerce. His background not only laid the foundation for an economist, but also a visionary and philanthropist. Spanning nearly a century, John Sweetland’s autobiography travels broadly with a voice that is reflective and humorous as well as relatable and inspirational.
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Every Farm Tells a Story
A Tale of Family Values
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Jerry Apps details the virtues and hardships of rural living. 

“Do your chores without complaining. Show up on time. Do every job well. Always try to do better. Never stop learning. Next year will be better. Care for others, especially those who have less than you. Accept those who are different from you. Love the land.”

In this paperback edition of a beloved Jerry Apps classic, the rural historian captures the heart and soul of life in rural America. Inspired by his mother’s farm account books—in which she meticulously recorded every farm purchase—Jerry chronicles life on a small farm during and after World War II. Featuring a new introduction exclusive to this 2nd edition, Every Farm Tells a Story reminds us that, while our family farms are shrinking in number, the values learned there remain deeply woven in our cultural heritage. 
 
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Evidence of My Existence
Jim Lo Scalzo
Ohio University Press, 2007

From a leper colony in India to an American research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, from the back rooms of the White House to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, Evidence of My Existence tells a unique and riveting story of seventeen years spent racing from one photo assignment to the next. It is also a story of photojournalism and theconsequences of obsessive wanderlust.

When the book opens, Jim Lo Scalzo is a blur to his wife, her remarkable tolerance wearing thin. She is heading to the hospital with her second miscarriage, and Jim is heading to Baghdad to cover the American invasion of Iraq. He hates himself for this—for not giving her a child, for deserting her when she soobviously needs him, for being consumed by his job—but how to stop moving? Sure, there have been some tough trips. He’s been spit on by Mennonites in Missouri, by heroin addicts in Pakistan, and by the KKK in South Carolina. He’s contracted hepatitis on the Navajo Nation, endured two bouts of amoebic dysentery in India and Burma and four cases of giardia in Nepal, Peru, Afghanistan, and Cuba. He’s been shot with rubber bullets in Seattle, knocked to the ground by a water cannon in Quebec, and sprayed with more teargas than he cares to recall. But photojournalism is his career, and travel is his compulsivecraving.

We follow Lo Scalzo through the maze of airports and crowds and countries as he chases the career he has always wanted, struggles with his family problems, and reveals the pleasures of a life singularly focused. For him, as for so many photojournalists, it is always about the going.

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Evolution of Desire
A Life of René Girard
Cynthia L Haven
Michigan State University Press, 2018
René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the leading thinkers of our era—a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history, and human destiny. His oeuvre, offering a “mimetic theory” of cultural origins and human behavior, inspired such writers as Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee, and earned him a place among the forty “immortals” of the Académie Française. Too often, however, his work is considered only within various academic specializations. This first-ever biographical study takes a wider view. Cynthia L. Haven traces the evolution of Girard’s thought in parallel with his life and times. She recounts his formative years in France and his arrival in a country torn by racial division, and reveals his insights into the collective delusions of our technological world and the changing nature of warfare. Drawing on interviews with Girard and his colleagues, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard provides an essential introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and original minds.
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EXILE
A MEMOIR OF 1939
Bronka Schneider. Edited with Forewords by Erika Bourguignon and Barbara Hill Rigney.
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

Bronka Schneider and her husband, Joseph, were two of the thirty thousand Austrian Jews admitted as refugees to Great Britain between March 1938 and 2 September 1939. It was not until 1960, however, that Schneider wrote her memoir about the year she spent as a housekeeper, with Joseph as a butler, in a Scottish castle.

Schneider tells of daily encounters—with her employers, the English lady and her husband, a retired British civil servant who had spent many years in India; the village locals; other refugees; and a family of evacuees from the slums of Glasgow.

The editors have divided this memoir into chapters, adding headlines from the London Times as epigraphs. These headlines, reporting the escalating events of World War II, are in stark contrast to daily activities of the residents of this isolated region of Scotland. A commentary by Erika Bourguignon provides historical, political, and cultural background of this period.

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Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote
Megan Riley McGilchrist
University of Nevada Press, 2021
Combining a breadth of scholarship, insightful critical thinking, and an engaging personal interaction with Mary Hallock Foote’s substantial collection of illustrations and writings, Megan Riley McGilchrist provides a significant contribution to western literature and the lives of western writers. 

Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote opens a window into the remarkable, little-known nineteenth-century personal history of accomplished American author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote, a woman both of her time, and ahead of it. When Mary gave up a successful career as an illustrator in New York to follow her husband, a mining engineer, to the West, she found herself in a new, unfamiliar, and often challenging world—sometimes feeling like an exile. The thousands of pages of her unpublished letters, which form the foundation of this book, give rare insight into the process of acculturation and eventually the transformation that she experienced. This wide-ranging analysis also examines the role that nature and Mary’s lifelong connection with the natural world played in her adaptation to the western mining towns where she spent much of the rest of her life. 

In many ways, Mary’s life mirrored that of author Megan Riley McGilchrist, whose parallel exile began in 1977 when she left America for England. Drawing equivalences with Mary’s life as an exile and her own life as an expatriate American woman, Megan provides a meditation on her own transformation, as much as on Mary’s. Megan demonstrates what it has been like to be a twenty-first-century American expatriate, Californian-turned-Londoner—to find common ground in the life of a nineteenth-century woman.

Comprising elements of biography, literary analysis, history, and personal history, and containing many unpublished excerpts from Mary’s voluminous correspondence, Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote offers insight into the ways Mary perceived the world around her. It also provides insight into the experiences of exiles of any time—people who have left a familiar environment to embark on a new life in a new and not necessarily comfortable setting.
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An Exile on Planet Earth
Articles and Reflections
Brian Aldiss
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2012

Brian Aldiss is one of the great figures in science fiction. Classics in the genre, his books serve as portals to other worlds, captivating readers with strange and shocking narratives that have been a force for further experimentation within the genre. In addition to a highly successful career as a writer of both fiction and science fiction, Aldiss is also an accomplished artist and literary critic.

An Exile on Planet Earth presents a selection of Aldiss’s essays that look back at the landmark events in his life. Writing with eloquence and raw honesty, Aldiss reveals unexpected connections between his life and literary work. From boarding school and boyhood summers spent alone at the shore comes the lonely boy playing on the beach in Walcot. The bitter break-up of Aldiss’s first marriage is revealed to be the inspiration behind the post-apocalyptic Greybeard, in which a nuclear accident results in a world without children. Exile is a recurring theme throughout Aldiss’s work, and the essays shed light on the ways in which he identified with this theme and constructed elaborate metaphors informed by it. Also included is Aldiss’s introduction to H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and an imagined conversation with English novelist Thomas Hardy.
 
For the many fans of Aldiss’s weird and wonderful work, An Exile on Planet Earth offers a look at the man behind the books and short stories, including new insights into the events that fueled his creative talent, as well as reflections on his place in the genre and the cultural significance of science fiction as a whole.
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Expecting Teryk
An Exceptional Path to Parenthood
Dawn Prince-Hughes
Ohio University Press, 2005

Expecting Teryk is a rich and sumptuous work that speaks to the deeper realities and represents a unique viewpoint of experiences shared by all individuals who choose the path to parenthood.”—Disability, Pregnancy, and Parenthood

The period just prior to the birth of a child is a time of profound personal transformation for expectant parents. Expecting Teryk: An Exceptional Path to Parenthood is an intimate exploration, written in the form of a letter from a parent to her future son, that reclaims a rite of passage that modern society would strip of its magic.

Dawn Prince-Hughes, renowned author of Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism, considers the ways being autistic might inform her parenting. She also candidly narrates her experience of becoming a parent as part of a lesbian couple—from meeting her partner to the questions they ask about their readiness to become parents and the practical considerations of choosing a sperm donor.

Expecting Teryk is viewed through the lens of autism as Prince-Hughes shares the unique way she sees and experiences the world—as well as her aching will to be fully present for her son. Contemplating the evolutionary traditions of parenting from both animal and human perspectives and the reassurances that nature offers, Expecting Teryk is a work of sensuous wonder that speaks to the deeper realities and archetypal experiences shared by all who embark on the journey of parenthood.

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Expedition Escape from the Classroom
Political Outings on the Campus and the Anxiety of Teaching IR
Oded Löwenheim
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Despite facing profound teaching anxiety stemming from the politically intense surroundings in Israel and his own writer’s block, Oded Löwenheim crafted an innovative college course that breaks free from the traditional classroom setting to explore the depths of Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus campus. He takes his class—and by extension, the reader—to explore the political and historical imprints scattered throughout Mount Scopus, such as the Jerusalem British War Cemetery, the botanical garden of the campus, and the bomb shelter of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute. Drawing from a rich tapestry of disciplines that include political geography, botany, literature, history, and archaeology, this book invites readers to find the international in the everyday.

Expedition Escape from the Classroom offers a unique narrative where teaching and its inherent challenges intersect with the intricacies of global politics, history, and identity. While recounting his academic experiment, Löwenheim grapples with the changing landscape of academia in a neoliberal age, while illustrating how personal vulnerabilities can transform into powerful tools for growth, exploration, and enlightenment. Whether you’re an educator, student, or just a curious reader, Expedition Escape from the Classroom promises a journey of reflection, critical thinking, and profound revelations.
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The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing
Annie Ray's Diary
Jennifer Sinor
University of Iowa Press, 2002

Exciting and beautifully crafted, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing provides an entirely new way of viewing “ordinary writing,” the everyday writing we typically ignore or dismiss. It takes as its center the diary of Jennifer Sinor's great-great-great-aunt Annie Ray, a woman who homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. Diaries such as this have long been ignored by scholars, who prefer instead to focus on diaries with literary features. Reading diaries through this lens gives privileged status to those that are coherently crafted and ignores the very diaries that define the form through their relentless inscription of dailiness.

Annie Ray’s diary is not literary. By considering her ordinary writing as a site of complex and strategic negotiations among the writer, the form of writing, and dominant cultural scripts, Sinor makes visible the extraordinary work of the ordinary writer and the sophistication of these texts. In providing a way to read diaries outside the limits and conventions of literature, she challenges our approaches to other texts as well. Furthermore, because ordinary writing is not crafted for aesthetic reception (in contrast to autobiography proper, memoirs, and literary diaries), it is a productive site for investigating how both writing and culture get made every day.

The book is truly original in its form: nontraditional, storied, creative. Sinor, an accomplished creative writer, includes her own memories as extended metaphors in partnership with critical texts along with excerpts from her aunt's diary. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing will be a fascinating text for students of creative writing as well as of women's studies and diaries.

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