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Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether those be learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico, or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Béjar.

Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last goodbye, she is obsessed by the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope, in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity.

Renowned Nevada writer Robert Laxalt has embraced a wide range of subjects in his nearly half-century career. In this candid memoir, he explores what is perhaps his most difficult subject ever—himself and his life as a writer.

The book opens with a series of vignettes about his youth in Carson City as the second son of an immigrant Basque family and his later experiences as a student at the University of Nevada in Reno.

The second part of the book tells of Laxalt's career as a writer—his early days as a reporter when his assignments included interviews with gangsters and obligatory attendance at executions; his later adventures as a contract writer for National Geographic, and his two stays in the Basque Country. He also recounts his days as director of the University of Nevada's news service and his role in the founding of the University of Nevada Press.

The third section discusses the writing of several of his major books—where the ideas came from, what he tried to accomplish in each book, the challenges he faced, and the ways he chose to resolve them. Foreword by Cheryll Glotfelty.

A series of vividly rendered personal narratives, Trespasses: A Memoir recounts the coming of age of three generations in the rural Great Plains. In examining how class, race, and gender play out in the lives of two farm families who simultaneously love and hate the place they can’t escape, Lacy Johnson presents rural whiteness as an ethnicity worthy of study. As she dismantles the complex history of a forgotten place while fighting to keep its people whole, Johnson reflects on a place that outsiders can cross into or pass through, but may never fully know. From formal and informal research methods, Johnson has produced an innovative collection of prose poems and essays that together create an exciting work of contemporary nonfiction.

Examining region through the lenses of memory (experience), history (memory made public), and theory (experience abstracted), Trespasses is a deeply intelligent work, at the center of which is the author, always feeling as if she doesn’t belong but not sure where she else she should be. In this profound work, Johnson drifts gracefully back and forth between timelines and voices in a way that illustrates how her present is connected to the many pasts she chronicles.