A young Abe Lincoln stumbles across a pig in trouble and decides he must help, even though it will mean arriving late and muddy for the important speech he is scheduled to make.

A great book about becoming an artist, Woolgathering tells of a youngster finding herself as she learns the noble vocation of woolgathering, “a worthy calling that seemed a good job for me.” She discovers-often at night, often in nature-the pleasures of rescuing “a fleeting thought.” Deeply moving, Wool- gathering calls up our own memories, as the child “glimpses and gleans, piecing together a crazy quilt of truths.” Smith introduces us...

In her first work of nonfiction, winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize Dina Nayeri--an author whose "exploration of the exile's predicament is tender and urgent" (The New Yorker)--examines what it means to be a refugee through her own story of childhood escape from Iran, and through the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers. What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought to, and...

An autobiography describing the author's childhood and life in Pittburgh during the fifties.

A new, brash, and unexpected view of the president we thought we knew, from the bestselling author of Astoria. Two decades before he led America to independence, George Washington was a flailing young soldier serving the British Empire in the vast wilderness of the Ohio Valley. Naive and self-absorbed, the twenty-two-year-old officer accidentally ignited the French and Indian War--a conflict that opened colonists to the possibility of an American...

Fans of Russo's fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York, where the author grew up. By the 1950's, prosperity in that manufacturing town was being replaced by poverty and illness, everyone barely scraping by. A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations--beautifully recounted here--were to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both....

Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men -- bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can...

David Benjamin pays homage to the exuberance of countless untamed boys who grew up in Middle America at mid-century. Whether he's stalking snakes in the bogs of Wisconsin, playing four-kid baseball with his bothersome little brother and two favorite cousins, leaping garbage cans for a beautiful little redheaded girl, or joining Chucky Dutcher for a movie marathon at the Erwin Theater, Benjamin is the kind of precocious ironist who would have found...

"As Derek and his team tackle playoffs, everyone deals with the pressure in different ways. And practice gets intense! One of Derek's teammates, Avery, starts being especially hard on herself. She isn't even enjoying the game anymore. Can Derek and the rest of the team pull her out of her funk?"--

"Imagines an alternate 1826 London, where Ada Lovelace (the world's first computer programmer) and Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) meet as girls and form a secret detective agency. Their first case involves a stolen heirloom, a false confession, and an array of fishy suspects"--