Garbage is a memoir of an exceptional trash collector from the streets and wharves of San Francisco. This is a rollicking first-person narrative that recounts an incredible life led and has amazing nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout its pages.
 
Stefanelli was trained to be a scavenger by his uncles in the 1940s and 50s at a time when rampant discrimination prevented Italian immigrants and their families from pursuing any other career. From there, he became a ‘boss scavenger’, married a garbage man’s daughter, and climbed the ranks of the Sunset Scavenger Company where he eventually took part in a corporate shakeup that made him the company’s president at only 31 years old. As one of the men at the helm of this booming industry, he became the chief advocate for increasingly innovative recycling and waste management practices in the Bay Area, and a foremost leader of environmentally-conscious business in the world.
 
Stefanelli’s lively memoir will enlighten readers to the waste management business, an industry that was once considered the lowest rung on the social ladder, but will also show his unparalleled capacity for transformation and vision.

Lily Nakai and her family lived in southern California, where sometimes she and a friend dreamt of climbing the Hollywood sign that lit the night. At age ten, after believing that her family was simply going on a “camping trip,” she found herself living in a tar-papered barrack, nightly gazing out instead at a searchlight. She wondered if anything would ever be normal again.
     In this creative memoir, Lily Havey combines storytelling, watercolor, and personal photographs to recount her youth in two Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. In short vignettes snapshots of people, recreated scenes and events a ten-year-old girl develops into a teenager while confined. Vintage photographs reveal the historical, cultural, and familial contexts of that growth and of the Nakais’ dislocation. The paintings and her animated writing together pull us into a turbulent era when America disgracefully incarcerated, without due process, thousands of American citizens because of their race.
     These stories of love, loss, and discovery recall a girl balancing precariously between childhood and adolescence. In turn wrenching, funny, touching, and biting but consistently engrossing, they elucidate the daily challenges of life in the camp and the internees’ many adaptations. 

Winner of the Evans Biography Award. 
Selected by the American Library Association as one the Best of the Best from University Presses.
Finalist in the cover design category in the Southwest Book Design and Production Awards. 
 

The noise gathered from a lifetime of engaging with war, race, religion, memory, illness, and family echoes through the vignettes, quotations, graffiti, and poetry that Donald Anderson musters here, fragments of the humor and horror of life, the absurdities that mock reason and the despair that yields laughter. Gathering Noise from My Life offers sonic shards of a tune at once jaunty and pessimistic, hopeful and hopeless, and a model for how we can make sense of the scraps of our lives. “We are where we’ve been and what we’ve read,” the author says, and gives us his youth in Montana, the family tradition of boxing, careers in writing and fighting, the words of Mike Tyson, Frederick the Great, Fran Lebowitz, and Shakespeare. In his camouflaged memoir, the award-winning short-story writer cobbles together the sources of the vision of life he has accrued as a consequence of his six decades of living and reading. 

As a child, Grant Schnarr was haunted (as many children are) by a fear of the dark, a fear of the unknown, of monsters in his closet. But more than that, he was haunted by a real ghost—a dark presence that lingered in his family’s house, occasionally moving objects, making noises, or even appearing to unsuspecting family members and guests.

As an adult, Grant had almost forgotten about the ghost until a series of brushes with death began to awaken old memories. Over the course of several months, a series of “coincidences” led him to dig deeper and deeper into a long-buried family tragedy. Forced to confront his deepest fears, armed with the lessons he learned from the spiritual warriors in his life, he finally learns the truth on a dark night in the woods of Wisconsin.

Anyone who has suffered a loss or struggled with fears will relate to this real-life tale of facing your inner—and outer—demons, told from Grant’s uniquely Swedenborgian perspective.

In his new book, The Glen Canyon Country, archaeologist Don D. Fowler shares the history of a place and the peoples who sojourned there over the course of several thousand years. To tell this story, he weaves his personal experience as a student working on the Glen Canyon Salvage Project with accounts of early explorers, geologists, miners, railroad developers, settlers, river runners, and others who entered this magical place. The book details the canyon’s story via historical and scientific summaries, biographical sketches, personal memoir, and previously unpublished photos of the land and its explorers.

In this funny and perceptive collection, novelist and essayist Robert Cohen shares his thoughts on the writing process and then puts these prescriptions into practice—from how to rant effectively as an essayist and novelist (“The Piano has been Drinking”), how to achieve your own style, naming characters (and creating them), how one manages one’s own identity with being “a writer” in time and space, to the use of reference and allusion in one’s work. Cohen is a deft weaver of allusion himself. In lieu of telling the reader how to master the elements of writing fiction, he shows them through the work of the writers who most influenced his own development, including Bellow, Lawrence, Chekhov, and Babel. Rooted in his own experiences, this collection of essays shows readers how to use their influences and experiences to create bold, personal, and individual work. While the first part of the book teaches writing, the essays in the second part show how these elements come together.

When brothers Ethan and Hosea Grosh left Pennsylvania in 1849, they joined throngs of men from all over the world intent on finding a fortune in the California Gold Rush. Their search for wealth took them from San Francisco into the gold country and then over the Sierra into Nevada’s Gold Canyon, where they placer-mined for gold and discovered a deposit of silver. The letters they sent back to their family offer vivid commentaries on the turbulent western frontier, the diverse society of the Gold Rush camps, and the heartbreaking labor and frustration of mining. Their lively descriptions of Gold Canyon provide one of the earliest accounts of life in what would soon become the fabulously wealthy Comstock Mining District.

The Groshes’ letters are rich in color and important historical details. Generously annotated and with an introduction that provides a context for the brothers’ career and the setting in which they tried to make their fortune, these documents powerfully depict the often harsh realities of Gold Rush life and society.

Winner of the Ohioana Library’s 2008 Ohio Legacy Citation
2014-2015 Choose to Read Ohio selection

“A good place to be from.” That’s how some people might characterize the Buckeye State. The writings in Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, are testimony to the truth of that statement. By prominent writers such as P. J. O’Rourke, Susan Orlean, and Alix Kates Shulman, these contributions are alternately nostalgic, irreverent, and sincere, and offer us a personal sense of place. Their childhoods are as varied as their work. Some were raised in urban Cleveland, Akron, and Cincinnati, others in the small Ohio towns that typify the Midwest, and still others in the countryside. Yet what they have to tell us about their roots resonates with a shared heritage, a sense of what is universal and enduring about growing up in the heartland.

Their collective résumé reads like a literary Who’s Who, including four Pulitzer Prizes, several National Book Awards, and many prestigious fellowships. Good Roots is also plain good reading from some of our country’s most accomplished contemporary writers.

Contributors include: Jill Bialosky, Dan Cryer, Michael Dirda, Elizabeth Dodd, Anthony Doerr, Rita Dove, Ian Frazier, Dale Keiger, Andrea Louie, Kathleen Dean Moore, Mary Oliver, Susan Orlean, P. J. O’Rourke, Julie Salamon, Scott Russell Sanders, Alix Kates Shulman, Jeffery Smith, James Toedtman, and Mark Winegardner.

In essays that combine memoir with biography of place, Kevin Holdsworth creates a public history of the land he calls home: Good Water, Utah. The high desert of south-central Utah is at the heart of the stories he tells here—about the people, the “survivors and casualties” of the small, remote town—and is at the heart of his own story.

Holdsworth also explores history at a personal level: how Native American history is preserved by local park officials; how Mormon settlers adapted to remote, rugged places; how small communities attract and retain those less likely to thrive closer to population centers; and how he became involved in local politics. He confronts the issues of land use and misuse in the West, from the lack of water to greed and corruption over natural resources, but also considers life’s simple pleasures like the value of scenery and the importance of occasionally tossing a horseshoe.

Good Water’s depiction of modern-day Utah and exploration of friendships and bonding on the Western landscape will fascinate and entice readers in the West and beyond.

Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus is Vic Sizemore’s collection of personal essays chronicling two simultaneous transformations. One is the gathering of unconnected—and nonpolitical—evangelical congregations across the nation into the political juggernaut called the Religious Right; the other is the author’s own coming to terms with the emotional and spiritual trauma of his life deep inside fundamentalist Christianity, and his struggle to free himself from its grasp. Sizemore, whose father was a preacher and professor at a small West Virginia Bible college, attended Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, arguably the crucible of American evangelical Christianity.
 
Sizemore began writing these essays with the aim of exploring and understanding what happened when the mythology of his “tribe” crumbled from beneath his feet. He draws heavily on his upbringing and his family history as a framework for how his “tribe” of white evangelicals have found ways to reconcile Christianity with what the author finds to be troubling stances on many social issues, among them race, gender, sexuality, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy.
 
In a clear-eyed and eloquent voice, Sizemore grapples movingly with his own bewilderment and chagrin as he struggles to reconcile the essential philosophical and moral decay that he believes many evangelicals have come to embrace. His insights, arranged topically and thematically and told through graceful and accessible prose, toggle between memoir and literary journalism, along a spectrum that touches on history, philosophy, theology, and personal reflections.

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“‘Nothing is nicer,’ Grandpa used to say, ‘than a full barn and a full granary.’ He might have said a full cellar too, for the rows of bottled fruit loomed on the shelves in the dim light, and the aroma of apples filled the nostrils. We could sit down at the dinner table knowing where everything on it had come from, and the process by which it had been prepared. We had before us and around us tangible evidence of the interconnection of things, of tilling, and seedtime, and harvest, of process and product, work and reward. Abundance is what remained when the threshing was done and the mellow Utah autumn slid gradually into winter, abundance in the storehouse for man and beast, evidence that we reap as we have sown. And abundance in the memory which lasts long after the barn and granary are empty hulks, for sometimes we also reap where others have sown.”—from chapter sixteen 
 

"Ever since I was 10 years old, I’d felt myself yearning to 'go astray.' For me, that didn’t mean drinking and cavorting with boys; it meant being myself without fear."—from the book

What happens when a trained singer who grew up in a "house of vowels" finds that her voice is not her own? What happens when a woman loses the Mormon faith of her childhood and abandons the rituals she’s always known? What does a woman, already married for thirteen years by her early thirties, do when she realizes she has been "lying for years?" How does one sing, with grace, from the heart?

In the spirit of Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life and Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk, Heidi Hart’s luminous memoir retraces her search for an opening to her heart’s path. She finds that the religious life of her Latter-day Saint family—which includes a revered General Authority—robs her of her voice and her spirit. When she discovers Catharine, a mute, Quaker ancestor, Hart begins a vital journey—a journey blessed by her devout and devoted husband; a journey that leads her as she studies Zuni mythology, Jewish tradition, Benedictine monastic ritual, Emily Dickinson, and Saint Hildegard of Bingen—a journey that leads her to a place that feels like home: the company of Friends, the Quaker community of Salt Lake City.

With grace and lyricism, Hart shares the private, personal wisdom she has earned in her community of friends, a community that embraces silences and dissonance, a place where she can't keep from singing.

In the thirteen personal essays in Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students, she learned to translate and interpret her past and present worlds—to study the surprising moments of communication—as a way to make sense of language and meaning, longing and memory.
    Morano focuses first on her year of living in Oviedo, in the early 1990s, a time spent immersing herself in a new culture and language while working through the relationship she had left behind with an emotionally dependent and suicidal man. Next, after subsequent trips to Spain, she explores the ways that travel sparks us to reconsider our personal histories in the context of larger historical legacies. Finally, she turns to the aftereffects of travel, to the constant negotiations involved in retelling and understanding the stories of our lives. Throughout she details one woman’s journey through vocabulary and verb tense toward a greater sense of her place in the world.
    Grammar Lessons illustrates the difficulty and delight, humor and humility of living in a new language and of carrying that pivotal experience forward. Michele Morano’s beautifully constructed essays reveal the many grammars and many voices that we collect, and learn from, as we travel.

In Granite and Grace Michael Cohen reflects on a lifetime of climbing, walking, and pondering the granite in Yosemite National Park at Tuolumne Meadows. This high-country region of Yosemite is dominated by a young, beautifully glaciated geological formation known as the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite. It does not include familiar Yosemite icons like Half Dome, yet geologists describe this granitic realm at over 8,000 feet as “an iconic American landscape.”

Drawing together the humanistic and scientific significance of the wild landscapes he traverses, Michael uncovers relationships between people and places and meaning and substance, rendering this text part memoir—but also considerably more. On-the-rock encounters by hand and foot open up a dialogue between the heart of a philosopher and the mind of a geologist. Michael adds a literary softness to this hard landscape, blending excursions with exposition and literature with science. It is through his graceful representations that the geological becomes metaphorical, while the science turns mythological.

This high country, where in 1889 John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson planned what would become Yosemite National Park, is significant for cultural as well as natural reasons. Discoursing on everything from Camus’s “Myths of Sisyphus” to the poems of Gary Snyder, Michael adds depth to an already splendorous landscape. Premier early geologists, such as François Matthes, shaped the language of Yosemite’s landscape. Even though Yosemite has changed over half a century, the rock has not. As Michael explores the beauty and grace of his familiar towering vistas, he demonstrates why, of the many aspects of the world to which one might get attached, the most secure is granite.

“The sound of parenthood is the sigh.” So begins Gravity Hill, written from the perspective of a new father seeking hope, beauty, and meaning in an uncertain world. Many memoirs recount the author’s experiences of growing up and struggling with demons; Werner’s shows how old demons sometimes return on the heels of something as beautiful as children. Werner’s memoir is about growing up, getting older, looking back, and wondering what lies ahead—a process that becomes all the more complicated and intense when parenting is involved. Moving backward and forward between past, present, and future, Gravity Hill does not delineate time so much as collapse it.

Werner narrates his struggle growing up in suburban Utah as anon-Mormon and what it took for him, his siblings, and his friends to feel like they belonged. Bonding in separation, they indulged in each other, in natural and urban landscapes, and sometimes in the destructive behaviors that are the native resort of outsidersincluding promiscuous and occasionally violent sexual behavior—and for some, paths to death and suicide. Gravity Hill is the story of the author’s descent into and eventual emergence from his dysfunction and into a newfound life. Infused with humor, honesty, and reflection, this literary memoir will resonate with readers young and old.

In Great Expectation, Dan Roche gives a man's perspective on what it means to start and expand a family relatively later in life. Through a series of diary entries in turns humorous, angst ridden, and full of hope and joy, Roche describes his own thoughts and concerns during the nine months of his wife's pregnancy.

With five years of parenting his irrepressible daughter Maeve under his belt, Roche, already forty-five years old, and his wife, Maura, face the prospect of another arrival and the myriad of emotions that come with a second child. From revelling in the joys of pregnancy such as Maura's delight at "having cleavage" and being able to eat whatever she desires; to assuaging the parental anxieties of choosing the right obstetrician, correcting the mistakes one made with the first child, and sending children to college in the future; to navigating the unforeseen, experiencing the unexpected death of a parent, and feeling trepidation toward the thought of having a son, Roche records his emotions with unusual candidness and intimacy.

Reflecting on day-to-day events and their significance in his family’s life together, Roche wonders what he is getting himself into and how much deeper he can immerse himself into parenting. Together, he and his wife face the bittersweet intersections of death and new life, menace and hopefulness. With sincerity and a mature wit, Great Expectation stands as a wise recounting of nine months’ time, with all of its chaos and charms, and offers a fresh perspective for first-time and veteran parents alike.

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.

Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim’s world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature—comic and tragic—can help us brave every kind of anguish.

Guns of February shows the Fall of Singapore and Japan's 1941 military campaign in Malaya through the eyes of Japanese soldiers who took part, based on interviews, memoirs, war diaries, and other Japanese-language sources. Although an enormous number of books have been published on Japan's wartime advance into Southeast Asia, few books in English make much use of Japanese sources, and they reveal little of what happened on the Japanese side. In the words of the author, the Japanese"'advance by brigade groups', 'outflank the defence', 'sustain many casualties', and remain altogether a largely faceless mass bicycling their way down to Singapore." In Guns of February some of the voices of these soldiers are finally heard, and they tell a fascinating story. A few of them were professional soldiers who served their country with commitment and dedication, but many were conscripts hoping to stay alive, curious and apprehensive about the countries they entered, and moved by the plight of the people whose cities and towns they sometimes destroyed. Many were young men, interested in girls and in the sights and sounds of Southeast Asia, but also missing their families and the familiar world of Japan. It is a picture far removed from the staple view of the remorseless and fanatic Japanese soldier totally devoted to his Emperor and determined to die for his country. In writing this account of the Japanese advance on Singapore, the author attempted to show the universal humanity of the actors concerned.