Bøker i American Lives-serien

Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain.

In Autumn Song Patrice Gopo invites readers into her personal stories of encountering absences, examining the details as one might turn around a prism, looking for the splinters of color each angle reveals.

A memoir in essays, The Sound of Undoing deconstructs the way sound has overwhelmingly shaped Paige Towers’s life.

Chachi D. Hauser combines memoir, cultural criticism, and poetic modes to examine gender identity and her relationship to Walt Disney and the Disney company.

A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids.

Shadow Migration recounts Suzanne Ohlmann's boomerang travels away from her Nebraska home, until a haunted basement forces her to confront the truth of her biological past.

Let Me Count the Ways is Tomas Q. Morin's memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability that eventually became a prison he would struggle for decades to escape.

Through ancient temples and the lush greenery of Thailand, to the confines of a stranger's bed and a devouring couch, This Jade World chronicles a year of mishap, exploration and experimentation, self-discovery, and eventually healing. It questions the very nature of love and heartbreak, uncovering the vulnerability of being human.

Dinty W. Moore asks: What would the world be like if eternal damnation was not hanging constantly over our sheepish heads? Why do we persist in believing something that only makes us miserable?

Aaron Raz Link began life as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. This memoir documents the extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal processes involved in a complete identity change.

Offers an account of the author's life during a racially turbulent period in Detroit. This memoir tells the story of the author's childhood with subversive allusions to the Victorian-era coming-of-age stories she consumed while growing up and the moral lessons she absorbed in such readings but could not reconcile with her own experience.

Shortly before her eighth birthday, in the fall of 1954, Brenda Serotte came down with polio - painfully singled out in a world already marked by differences. Her bout with the dreaded disease is at the heart of this poignant and heartbreakingly hilarious memoir of growing up a Sephardic Jew among Ashkenazi neighbors in the Bronx.

A memoir that guides us through the New York of the 1960s. Caught between his uncle Fred, a man-about-town, and his aunt Linda, a secretary at Paramount Pictures, 16-year-old John Skoyles finds himself exploring everything from the bars and swank apartments of Manhattan's Upper East Side to the flophouses and haunts of Forty-second Street.

Describes what it means to be married for almost forty years. Here, the author talks about growing up in an immigrant Jewish family, coming of age in New York in the 1950s, marrying her high school beau, and then arriving at feminist consciousness in the 1970s like so many others of her generation.

In December 1988 the author was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain, leaving him totally disabled and utterly changed. This book presents a picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory and unstable balance, and confronted by wholesale changes in both cognitive and emotional powers.

Describes with detail and humour the place the author calls home in the Bohemian Alps of southeastern Nebraska.

Mary Felstiner went to bed one night an active professional and healthy young mother and woke the next morning literally out of joint. With hands and arms no longer working right, she had discovered a first sign of rheumatoid arthritis. This book tells both the personal and the public story of this prevalent yet neglected disease.

Sky Songs is a collection of essays that takes inspiration from the ancient seabed in which Jennifer Sinor lives, an elemental landscape that reminds her that our lives are shaped by all that has passed through.

This memoir recounts Bethany Maile's efforts, informed by a steady diet of "western" activities, to understand the ways in which the western myth is outdated yet persistent.

An edgy memoir by a daughter of a murder victim, narrating her emotional journey after the death of her father.

Offers a rare look into the heart of the average socialist trying to survive the Nazis and rebuild a broken world

Mary Clearman Blew's education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband. This Is Not the Ivy League is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman.

In 1966, twelve-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China's Cultural Revolution. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, this work is a memoir of a young man's harrowing experience during a time of terror. It recounts how Shen escaped, again and again, from his appointed fate.

Tamsen Donner. For most the name conjures the ill-fated Donner party trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. For Gabrielle Burton, Tamsen's story had long seemed the story of a woman's life writ large. This book tells of Burton's search to solve the mystery of Tamsen Donner for herself.

A memoir of childhood and family which testifies to the power of collective empathy in the transformations that make and remake us throughout our lives. It enacts our human desire to understand the fragmented self.

Follow Sue William Silverman, a one-woman cultural mash-up, on her exploration of identity among the mishmash of American idols and ideals that confuse most of us - or should. This searching, bracing, hilarious and moving book tries to make sense of that most troubling American condition: belonging, but to what?

In these thematically linked pieces, Sue William Silverman explores the fear of death, and her desire to survive it, through gallows humor, realism, and speculation. Although defeating death is physically impossible, language, commemoration, and metaphor can offer slivers of transcendent immortality.

What does it mean to be a citizen of the world in the twenty-first century? Robin Hemley wrestles with this question in Borderline Citizen as he takes the reader on a singular journey through the hinterlands of national identity.