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A bighearted memoir of fidelity and forgiveness, A Beginner’s Guide to Faults draws on the language of geology to explore fault lines in a long marriage—deep fractures formed by unmet needs, quiet betrayals, and the human longing for connection and freedom.

After twenty-five years of marriage, Denice is blindsided when her husband reveals his romance with a Las Vegas stripper. This latest move in their tit-for-tat game of infidelity is too much for her. She files for divorce and heads to South Dakota, where she hopes to fulfill her wildest fantasies. Instead, plagued by guilt about her own faults, she wrecks each new relationship, convinced that she is unforgivable.

Through fleeting romances and soul-deep self-reflection, Denice rebuilds a life and a family on her own terms. A Beginner’s Guide to Faults is a memoir of transformation—one that shows how love can change without ever being lost.

A bighearted memoir of fidelity and forgiveness, A Beginner’s Guide to Faults draws on the language of geology to explore fault lines in a long marriage—deep fractures formed by unmet needs, quiet betrayals, and the human longing for connection and freedom.

After twenty-five years of marriage, Denice is blindsided when her husband reveals his romance with a Las Vegas stripper. This latest move in their tit-for-tat game of infidelity is too much for her. She files for divorce and heads to South Dakota, where she hopes to fulfill her wildest fantasies. Instead, plagued by guilt about her own faults, she wrecks each new relationship, convinced that she is unforgivable.

Through fleeting romances and soul-deep self-reflection, Denice rebuilds a life and a family on her own terms. A Beginner’s Guide to Faults is a memoir of transformation—one that shows how love can change without ever being lost.

What does it mean to belong to a place that can never belong to you?

Set in the high country above June Lake on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, this reflective narrative explores the enduring relationship between people and landscape. From their modest cabin near the headwaters of Reversed Creek, Michael and Valerie Cohen look across June Lake toward the vast expanse of the Great Basin. They are drawn to the region by its beauty and solitude, and the conviction that they are exactly where they ought to be.

Yet living in a place also means witnessing its transformation. Over nearly fifty years, the Cohens observe changes that reshape the Mono Basin and surrounding mountains: shifting economies, expanding development, record-breaking winters, wildfire threats, and the gradual erosion of community traditions.

Part memoir, part environmental reflection, part cultural history, this meditative narrative draws on writers and thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldo Leopold, and Lew Welch. The Cohens’ efforts to maintain an aging cabin and a life together become a lens through which to examine stewardship, memory, resilience, and loss. This meditation on place returns to a question that has occupied generations of writers and naturalists: As the world continually reinvents itself, how must those who live within it respond?

Southwest Books of the Year Top Pick
 

John P. Schaefer was only thirty-six years old when he assumed the role of fifteenth president of the University of Arizona in 1971. The son of hardworking German immigrants, Schaefer grew up in Queens, New York, where childhood centered on sports, academics, and the great outdoors.

Earning a PhD in chemistry in 1958, Dr. Schaefer’s career skyrocketed through the ranks of academia, moving him from junior faculty to university president in a mere decade. As president, he led the University of Arizona through a transformational period of growth and is credited with securing the university’s status as a top-tier research institution.

A Chance to Make a Difference recounts poignant, eye-opening, and often humorous stories from childhood to presidency, revealing the characteristics of an inspiring university leader.
 

Immigration and the growing Latino population of the United States have become such contentious issues that it can be hard to have a civil conversation about how Latinoization is changing the face of America. So in the summer of 2007, Louis Mendoza set out to do just that. Starting from Santa Cruz, California, he bicycled 8,500 miles around the entire perimeter of the country, talking to people in large cities and small towns about their experiences either as immigrants or as residents who have welcomed—or not—Latino immigrants into their communities. He presented their enlightening, sometimes surprising, firsthand accounts in Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States.

Now, in A Journey Around Our America, Mendoza offers his own account of the visceral, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of traveling the country in search of a deeper, broader understanding of what it means to be Latino in the United States in the twenty-first century. With a blend of first- and second-person narratives, blog entries, poetry, and excerpts from conversations he had along the way, Mendoza presents his own aspirations for and critique of social relations, political ruminations, personal experiences, and emotional vulnerability alongside the stories of people from all walks of life, including students, activists, manual laborers, and intellectuals. His conversations and his experiences as a Latino on the road reveal the multilayered complexity of Latino life today as no academic study or newspaper report ever could.

lbert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” It is in this vein that Sholeh Wolpé’s mesmerizing memoir in verse unfolds. In this lyrical and candid work, her fifth collection of poems, Wolpé invokes the abacus as an instrument of remembering. Through different countries and cultures, she carries us bead by bead on a journey of loss and triumph, love and exile. In the end, the tally is insight, not numbers, and we arrive at a place where nothing is too small for gratitude.

An intensely moving and revelatory memoir of enduring and emerging from exceptional grief

To grieve after a profound loss is perfectly natural and healthy. To be debilitated by grief for more than a decade, as Andrea Gilats was, is something else. In her candid, deeply moving, and ultimately helpful memoir of breaking free of death’s relentless grip on her life, Gilats tells her story of living with prolonged, or “complicated,” grief and offers insight, hope, and guidance to others who suffer as she did. 

Thomas Dayton, Andrea Gilats’s husband of twenty years, died at 52 after a five-month battle with cancer. In After Effects Gilats describes the desolation that followed and the slow and torturous twenty-year journey that brought her back to life. In the two years immediately following his death, Gilats wrote Tom daily letters, desperately trying to maintain the twenty-year conversation of their marriage. Excerpts from these letters reveal the depth of her despair but also the glimmer of an awakening as they also trace a different, more typical course of the grief experienced by one of Gilats's colleagues, also widowed. Gilats’s struggle to rescue herself takes her through the temptation of suicide, the threat of deadly illness, the overwhelming challenges of work, and the rigor of learning and eventually teaching yoga, to a moment of reckoning and, finally, reconciliation to a life without her beloved partner. Her story is informed by the lessons she learned about complicated grief as a disorder that, while intensely personal, can be defined, grappled with, and overcome.

Though complicated grief affects as many as one in seven of those stricken by the loss of a close loved one, it is little known outside professional circles. After Effects points toward a path of recuperation and provides solace along the way—a service and a comfort that is all the more timely and necessary in our pandemic-ravaged world of loss and isolation.