During what came to be called the Great Depression, families struggled to make ends meet. In 1933 at the depth of the Depression, sixteen million peopleone-third of the labor forcewere unemployed. In January 1934, while sixteen years old, I was a sophomore, a liberal arts major, at Alexander Hamilton High School on Albany Avenue and the corner of Bergin Street. My mother worked in Commercial Credit at National City Bank, 55 Wall Street, Manhattan. I walked both going to school as well as r...

It's safe to say that world-famed speaker and author Og Mandino has as many friends as any man alive, thanks to his inspiring motivational lectures and his bestselling books. This new book is a special gift to all his friends, old and new, a book they may cherish above all the rest. Secrets for Success and Happiness is Og's beautifully written journal, an intimate record of his innermost thoughts and feelings, the heartwarming events of his day-to-day life.Whether he's writing in hi...

“Lake Wobegon Days is about the way our beliefs, desires and fears tail off into abstractions--and get renewed from time to time. . . this book, unfolding Mr. Keillor's full design, is a genuine work of American history.” -The New York Times“A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life…Keillor’s strength as a writer is to make the ordinary extraordinary.” -Chicago Tribune

The former U.S. Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these "a lternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny " essays ( The New York Times).From an early age, Donald Hall dedicated his life to the written word. In his long and celebrated career, he was an accomplished poet, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and children's author. Now, in the "unknown, unanticipated galaxy" of very old age, his ...

Told in her own words, My Own Two Feet is Newbery Medal–winning author Beverly Cleary’s second heartfelt and relatable memoir.The New Yorker called Beverly Cleary's first volume of memoirs, A Girl From Yamhill, "a warm, honest book, as interesting as any novel."Now the creator of the classic children's stories millions grew up with continues her own fascinating story. Here is Beverly Cleary, from college years to the publication of her first book. It is a f...

Eavesdroppings recounts life in the small towns of Ontario before sin arrived on the Internet - a time when churches were never locked and parents, not wishing to be disturbed while they listened to the radio, shooed their children out to play in the dark, unguarded streets without fear. Here you’ll find comedy, outrage, and tragedy but no disguise. Included are actual events and the names of all persons involved.The author tracks the quaint immorality of smalltown sin in ...

Essays from the award-winning New Yorker writer and author of This Old Man: "Witty, worldly, deeply elegiac, and…heartbreaking."— The Boston GlobeFor more than fifty years, as both editor of and contributor for The New Yorker, Roger Angell has honed a reputation as a master of the autobiographic essay—sharp-witted, plucky, and at once nostalgic and unsentimental.In Let Me Finish, Angell reflects ...

Advance praise for Memories of the Beach:"Lorraine O’Donnell Williams has given us a charming and evocative memoir of the Beach district six or seven decades ago, when it was a separate world in the southeast corner of Toronto. Everyone who knew the Beach that was, and everyone who knows the Beach of today, will enjoy her account of growing up in that special place." – Robert Fulford, author of Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto"In this richly ...

Fruitcake Hill is a cleverly written history and personal memoir of an Irish family from the Chicago suburbs that has continuously occupied a single farmhouse property for over 137 years. The story focuses on the family's struggles to preserve the life they knew before urban sprawl became a reality. A humorous and informative read!

A collection of humorous short stories from the award-winning author of The Plover and Mink River.Welcome to the peculiar, headlong world of Brian Doyle's fiction, where the odd is happening all the time, reported upon by characters of every sort and stripe. Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling—these stories will remind readers of the late giant David Foste...

Broadcaster and bestselling author Mike McCardell haunts British Columbia’s past in order to summon spellbinding tales of Western Canada.Reprising his 2013 bestseller Haunting Vancouver, Mike McCardell summons the ghost of real-life pioneer Jock Linn to provide hair-raising and humorous versions of what really happened during some of the formative events that shaped British Columbia. McCardell’s ghostly narrator explains how Victoria became BC’s capital (s...

In this memoir Jim Bennet introduces us to Halifax of the 1930s and '40s: one full of coal smoke and rival gangs, chuffing freight trains and pine tar soap. He takes the reader along with him ''down the bank'' and off to adventures all over the city's south end and beyond, offering a glimpse of childhood where a young boy had free rein far beyond his backyard.For Jim and his neighbours, the playground was the seashore, the tracks, the ponds and parks, the tramcars, the Commons, the...