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Like many boys, Luis Gabriel Aguilera grew up with cartoons, music, friends, and first loves. As he entered his teenage years, he faced the typical questions of adolescence—what kind of person did he want to be? how should he live his life? But for Aguilera, now in his twenties, these questions had a particular urgency. A Mexican immigrant, he came of age in a Polish neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that was encroached upon by threats of gangs and drugs. He attended Catholic school and, at age thirteen, began an affair with one of the teachers at the local elementary school. All the while he documented his teenage years in a series of journals, which have now grown into Gabriel's Fire.

Aguilera's memoir is not just an account of race relations and street life in the inner city, nor of the plight of the immigrant and the dilemma of class identity for a "minority" family. Gabriel's Fire also movingly recounts the peculiarly daunting and inspiring moments of a particular age, riddled with confusion, desires, and duties and recorded by an exceptionally observant and articulate young man. Aguilera writes that he "grew into" the English language when he was eleven or twelve, and his recollections reflect his newfound delight with words—the conversations, arguments, taunts, song lyrics, and casual interchanges of his youth are rendered here with an immediacy and directness rare in contemporary memoirs.

Both a picture of American culture of the 1980s and 1990s and a coming-of-age story, Gabriel's Fire counters mainstream and mass-mediated images of the inner city, Hispanic culture, and troubled youth. In its honesty and energy, it is a poignant and compelling story of one man's formative years.

In this candid and revelatory memoir, Erin O. White shares her hunger for both romantic and divine love, and how these desires transformed her life. In the late 1990s, she spent Saturday nights with her girlfriend and Sunday mornings in Catholic confirmation classes. But when the Church closed its doors to her, she was faced with a question: What does a lesbian believer do with her longing for God? Given Up for You explores these yearnings with bittersweet conviction, plumbing the depths of heart and soul.

“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.