"Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, [Rick Bragg] explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast. Everything is explored, from regional obsessions from college football and fishing, to mayonnaise and spoon bread, to the simple beauty of a fish on the hook. Collected from over a decade of...

After a decade of heavy partying and hard drinking in London, Amy Liptrot returns home to Orkney, a remote island off the north of Scotland. The Outrun maps Amy's inspiring recovery as she walks along windy coasts, swims in icy Atlantic waters, tracks Orkney's wildlife, and reconnects with her parents, revisiting and rediscovering the place the shaped her.

In 1973, Norma Cobb, her husband Lester, and the their five children, the oldest of whom was nine-years-old and the youngest, twins, barely one, pulled up stakes in the Lower Forty-eight and headed north to Alaska to follow a pioneer dream of claiming land under the Homestead Act. The only land available lay north of Fairbanks near the Arctic Circle where grizzlies outnumbered humans twenty to one. In addition to fierce winters and predatory animals,...

"From the best-selling, Pulitzer prize-winning author of All Over But the Shoutin' and The Best Cook in the World, a collection of his irresistible columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun. A collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns by the celebrated author, newspaper columnist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg, culled from his best-loved pieces in Southern Living and Garden & Gun. From his love of Tupperware ("My Affair...

Thoreau's autobiographical account of his experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth and, above all, the freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him.

In the tradition of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Alice Taylor's To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan's We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. Tom Phelan, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish midlands, spent his formative years working under his wise and demanding father, JohnJoe, on a farm that was often wet, muddy, and back-breaking. These stories...

This book tells the story of author's life for two years and two months in second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord, Massachusetts. It was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. This book is neither a novel nor a true autobiography, but a social critique of the Western World, with each chapter heralding some aspect of humanity that needed to be...

Elmer Kelton writes of his boyhood in the sandhills of West Texas. The sons of Buck Kelton, a respected third-generation cowboy and ranch foreman, were expected to follow in Buck's footsteps, but Elmer strayed. Never much of a horseman, nor adept at the cowboy's trade, he went off to college and then into journalism and novel writing -- a good career choice, as it turned out.

"Grace M. Cho grew up in a small, rural American town as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. When Grace was fifteen, her Korean mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, TASTES LIKE WAR is a hybrid text about a daughter's search through intimate and global history to understand herself...