Narrative Non-fiction

Lead from the Outside (USED)

Lead from the Outside (USED)

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Lead from the Outside is a necessary guide to harnessing the strengths of being an outsider by Stacey Abrams, one of the most prominent black female politicians in the U.S.

Leadership is hard. Convincing others--and often yourself--that you possess the answers and are capable of world-affecting change requires confidence, insight, and sheer bravado. Lead from the Outside is the handbook for outsiders, written with the awareness of the experiences and challenges that hinder anyone who exists beyond the structure of traditional white male power--women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make a difference.

In Lead from the Outside, Stacey Abrams argues that knowing your own passion is the key to success, regardless of the scale or target. From launching a company, to starting a day care center for homeless teen moms, to running a successful political campaign, finding what you want to fight for is as critical as knowing how to turn thought into action. Stacey uses her experience and hard-won insights to break down how ambition, fear, money, and failure function in leadership, while offering personal stories that illuminate practical strategies.

Stacey includes exercises to help you hone your skills and realize your aspirations. She discusses candidly what she has learned over the course of her impressive career: that differences in race, gender, and class are surmountable. With direction and dedication, being in the minority actually provides unique and vital strength, which we can employ to rise to the top and make real change.

LIBRARY BOOK

LIBRARY BOOK

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Susan Orlean's bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is "a sheer delight...as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library" (USA TODAY)--a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. "Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book" (The Washington Post).

On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library--and if so, who?

Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a "delightful...reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America" (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

In the "exquisitely written, consistently entertaining" (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago.

"A book lover's dream...an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories" (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean's thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books--and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.

Love Lessons: 104 Dates and the Stories That Led Me to True Love

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Have you ever wondered what true love looks like? How would it feel to meet your actual partner? How do you know that the relationship you are in is the right one for you? How can you be sure you do not settle? Love Lessons: 104 Dates and the Stories that Led Me to True Love shares the results of a research project designed to help answer these questions through many conversations with individuals of all backgrounds who found love and made it work. Collectively, these love stories provide practical themes that any individual looking for love can internalize and apply to their quest.

Love Lessons also shares the personal story of the author and her own thoughts about love after surviving 104 dates over ten years until she finally was fixed up with the love of her life and her true partner. Heidi's witty and authentic retelling of her experiences collecting the research about love, surviving so many forced connections and bad dates, and finally finding true love will make you laugh out loud. The book is full of practical, tangible wisdom that will provide support to any person evaluating their current relationship, looking for love for the first time, or giving love a second try with the hope of finding the one.

Lucky Child : A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites With the Sister She Left Behind

Lucky Child : A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites With the Sister She Left Behind

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After enduring years of hunger, deprivation, and devastating loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, ten-year-old Loung Ung became the "lucky child," the sibling chosen to accompany her eldest brother to America while her one surviving sister and two brothers remained behind. In this poignant and elegiac memoir, Loung recalls her assimilation into an unfamiliar new culture while struggling to overcome dogged memories of violence and the deep scars of war. In alternating chapters, she gives voice to Chou, the beloved older sister whose life in war-torn Cambodia so easily could have been hers. Highlighting the harsh realities of chance and circumstance in times of war as well as in times of peace, Lucky Child is ultimately a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and to the salvaging strength of family bonds.

Memoirs of Hecate County (USED)

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My Time Will Come

My Time Will Come

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The inspiring story of activist and poet Ian Manuel, who at the age of fourteen was sentenced to life in prison. He survived eighteen years in solitary confinement--through his own determination and dedication to art--until he was freed as part of an incredible crusade by the Equal Justice Initiative.

"Ian is magic. His story is difficult and heartbreaking, but he takes us places we need to go to understand why we must do better. He survives by relying on a poetic spirit, an unrelenting desire to succeed, to recover, and to love. Ian's story says something hopeful about our future." --Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy

The United States is the only country in the world that sentences thirteen- and fourteen-year-old offenders, mostly youth of color, to life in prison without parole. In 1991, Ian Manuel, then fourteen, was sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime. In a botched mugging attempt with some older boys, he shot a young white mother of two in the face. But as Bryan Stevenson, attorney and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has insisted, none of us should be judged by only the worst thing we have ever done.

Capturing the fullness of his humanity, here is Manuel's powerful testimony of growing up homeless in a neighborhood riddled with poverty, gang violence, and drug abuse--and of his efforts to rise above his circumstances, only to find himself, partly through his own actions, imprisoned for two-thirds of his life, eighteen years of which were spent in solitary confinement. Here is the story of how he endured the savagery of the United States prison system, and how his victim, an extraordinary woman, forgave him and bravely advocated for his freedom, which was achieved by an Equal Justice Initiative push to address the barbarism of our judicial system and bring about "just mercy."

Full of unexpected twists and turns as it describes a struggle for redemption, My Time Will Come is a paean to the capacity of the human will to transcend adversity through determination and art--in Ian Manuel's case, through his dedication to writing poetry.

Naked (USED)

Naked (USED)

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In "Naked," David Sedaris's message--alternately rendered in "Fakespeare, " Italian, Spanish, and pidgin Greek--is the same: pay attention to me.
Oh! Susannah

Oh! Susannah

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What was it really like living as a woman in rural Ohio before, during, and after the Civil War? Beckley's grandfather's grandfather was the son of an unpretentious woman who did just that. Unknowingly, she became a family matriarch; and through the use of family documents handed down over the generations, along with governmental archives, and courthouse documents, Beckley is able to reconstruct her life. His research leads him to overgrown vacant lots, dilapidated cemeteries, and down many dusty gravel roads between Ohio and Kentucky, where on the 156th anniversary of the Perrysville Battle, he lies on the ridge where his distant ancestor's brother dies in combat.

No effort is spared to reveal the emotion, life, and times of this woman who is long forgotten and yet one who should be forever remembered, thanked, and loved for her devotion to her family.

On Community

On Community

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Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction - Shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction - Finalist for the 2024 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature - One of CBC Books' Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the Fall - A Tyee Best Book of 2023 - A CBC Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 - A Hamilton Review of Books Best Book of 2023 - An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of 2023

We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it's slipping away?

We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.

Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community's boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.

ON LIGHTHOUSES

ON LIGHTHOUSES

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"This book is a light at the end of the tunnel." --The Paris Review

Far from home, in the confines of a dim New York apartment where the oppressive skyscrapers further isolate her, Jazmina Barrera offers a tour of her lighthouses--those structures whose message is "first and foremost, that human beings are here."

Starting with Robert Louis Stevenson's grandfather, an engineer charged with illuminating the Scottish coastline, On Lighthouses artfully examines lighthouses from the Spanish to the Oregon coasts and those in the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others.

In trying to "collect" lighthouses by obsessively describing them, Barrera begins to question the nature of writing, collecting, and how, by staring so intently at one thing we are only trying to avoid others. Equal parts personal memoir and literary history, On Lighthouses takes the reader on a desperate flight from raging sea to cold stone--from a hopeless isolation to a meaningful one--concluding at last in a place of peace: the home of a selfless, guiding light.