Bøker i Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction Series-serien

An exploration of perfection. Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection's exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste.

At forty, Sarah Einstein is forced to face her own shortcomings. She must come to terms with the facts that she is not tough enough for her job managing a local drop-in centre and that her new marriage is already faltering. Just as she reaches her breaking point, she meets Mot, a homeless veteran who lives a life dictated by frightening delusion.

Follows a part-time soldier's experience over seven years in the Iowa Army National Guard. He bounces between college, army training, disaster relief, civilian jobs, and deployment in Afghanistan. His stories are about having one foot on each side of the civilian-military divide, and the difficulty of describing one side to those on the other.

Americans are among the most mobile people on the planet, moving house an average of nine times in adulthood. Mobile Home explores one family's extreme and often international version of this common experience.

Set primarily in Mexico and the American Northwest, yet equally at home with Achilleus on the Trojan plains or with Walt Whitman in his New Jersey home, these fifteen essays pass back and forth across international boundaries as easily as they cross the more fluid lines separating past and present.

In this soul-piercing memoir, David McKain penetrates the secret world of a poor boy coming of age on his own in ""God's Country"", a small oil-drilling town in the Allegheny Mountains during the 1940s and 1950s. Spellbound is an unforgettable story of a family enmeshed in tenderness and poverty, faith and affliction.

Uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long-term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. Paisley Rekdal draws on a range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and by American-born veterans.

One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. Eschewing sentimentality, this memoir offers a meditation on what it means to hunger and shows that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down.