NCW Libraries

Born to Chinese immigrant parents into 1950's America, it would be decades before Ms. Tan would come to fully understand how her mother's self-destructive tendencies were rooted in watching her own mother kill herself after being forced into the former marital system of concubinage. This painful family legacy inspired her stories of women without the power to choose their lives. An interweaving of archival imagery, artful animation and live performance...

A first publication of the acclaimed writer's personal correspondences includes whimsical teenage reports of her 1880s Red Cloud life, letters written during her early journalism years and the 1940s exchanges penned in observation of World War II and her own struggles with aging. -- Publishers Description.

"From New York Times bestselling author Amy Tan, a memoir on her life as a writer, her childhood, and the symbiotic relationship between fiction and emotional memory"-- "In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate, revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of...

Zora was a girl who hankered for tales like bees for honey. Now, her mama always told her that if she wanted something, "to jump at de sun", because even though you might not land quite that high, at least you'd get off the ground. So Zora jumped from place to place, from the porch of the general store where she listened to folktales, to Howard University, to Harlem. And everywhere she jumped, she shined sunlight on the tales most people hadn't been...

Gene Stratton-Porter was a farm girl who fell in love with birds, from the chickens whose eggs she collected to the hawks that preyed on them. When she grew up, Gene wanted nothing more than to share her love of birds with the world. She wrote stories about birds, but when a magazine wanted to publish them next to awkward photos of stuffed birds, she knew she had to take matters into her own hands. Teaching herself photography, Gene began to take...

Born into a family who believed in fate, Amy Tan has always looked for alternative ways to make sense of the world. And now, in The Opposite of Fate, her first book of non-fiction she shares her thoughts on how she escaped the expectations and curses of her past, and created her own destiny.

"The Letters of Ernest Hemingway documents the life and creative development of a gifted artist and outsized personality whose work would both reflect and transform his times. Volume 2 (1923-1925) illuminates Hemingway's literary apprenticeship in the legendary milieu of expatriate Paris in the 1920s. We witness the development of his friendships with the likes of Sylvia Beach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos. Striving to 'make it new', he...

Warhorse, gadfly, storyteller, naturalist--there is no simple category to contain the vibrant prose voice of Edward Abbey. And this snappy collection of es says displays the author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey-Wrench Gang at the height of his curmudgeonry.

"Okey Ndibe's funny, charming, and penetrating memoir tells of his move from Nigeria to America, where he came to edit the influential--but forever teetering on the verge of insolvency--African Commentary magazine. It recounts stories of Ndibe's relationships with Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and other literary figures; examines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; recalls an incident of racial profiling just 13 days...

"When the elite St. Paul's School came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she'd put behind her the assault she'd suffered decades before, when she was fifteen. Still, when detectives asked for victims to come forward, she sent a note. With her criminal case file reopened, she saw for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the naïve, hardworking...