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In the wake of her mother's death, Cheryl Strayed's family scattered and her marriage was destroyed. Four years later, twenty-six years old with nothing to lose, Cheryl made the decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State - alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker and the trail was little more than an idea. But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

"In the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Ruth Reichl, [this book] is a narrative in which food--eating it, cooking it, reflecting on it--becomes the vehicle for unpacking a life. Christensen explores her history of hunger--not just for food but for love and confidence and a sense of belonging--with a profound honesty, starting with her unorthodox childhood in 1960s Berkeley as the daughter of a mercurial legal activist who ruled the...

The award-winning author of Super Sad True Story traces his uproarious experiences as a young bullied Jewish-Russian immigrant in Queens, his haphazard college pursuits and his initial forays into a literary career. -- Publisher's description. "Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family...

"At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J.D. Salinger. She spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office, where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches. At night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Williamsburg apartment she shares with...

"Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents' lives--or so he was told. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. Fitzgerald's memoir-in-essays...

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met, a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves...

""Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself." So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar"-- Provided by publisher. As a teenagers, Kumar's family moved from the feet of the Himalayas in northern India to North America. She found herself discouraged by the civilization that she saw contributing to the destruction of nature, and the lives it contained. She began to rediscover...

"A single woman considers her life, the life of the bold single ladies who have gone before her, and the long arc of slowly changing attitudes towards women"-- Provided by publisher.

Presents a humorous collection of stories about the author's relationships with the opposite sex told chronologically, from his first kiss to getting engaged.

"Explores the surprising truth about women's most popular body part with vulnerable, witty frankness and true nuggets of American culture that will resonate with everyone who has breasts--or loves them. ...At turns funny and heartbreaking, A Boob's Life explores both the joys and hazards inherent to living in a woman's body. Lehr deftly blends her personal narrative with national history, starting in the 1960s with the women's liberation movement...