Download or read book Growing Up in San Francisco and Other Stories written by Claude J. Boyd and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a young boy growing up in California, Claude Boyd rode precariously down the famous San Francisco hills on homemade coasters made of doors and old roller skate wheels. As a teenager, he chased purse snatchers in his father's 1939 Graham Paige automobile. With such an adventurous beginning to his life, it's no surprise that Claude Boyd's autobiography is filled with many more lively anecdotes, one of which involves a fake turkey made from a brown paper bag and two turkey legs, placed in the street for some unsuspecting soul to discover on Thanksgiving. He describes his enlistment in the Army and his subsequent year spent in peacetime Korea, where his first assignment is to set up a prison library. After he earns his college degree, he eventually moves to Thule Air Force Base in northern Greenland, where he begins a new experience in the arctic tundra. Boyd concludes with the story of his transcontinental courtship and subsequent marriage that has lasted over fifty years. Combined with photographs, Claude Boyd's humorous true story captures the essence of what life was really all about before, during, and after World War II.
Download or read book Growing Things and Other Stories written by Paul Tremblay and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Bram Stoker Award "One of the best collections of the 21st century." — Stephen King A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national bestseller The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts. A masterful anthology featuring nineteen pieces of short fiction, Growing Things is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay’s fantastically fertile imagination. In “The Teacher,” a Bram Stoker Award nominee for best short story, a student is forced to watch a disturbing video that will haunt and torment her and her classmates’ lives. Four men rob a pawn shop at gunpoint only to vanish, one-by-one, as they speed away from the crime scene in “The Getaway.” In “Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks,” a meth addict kidnaps her daughter from her estranged mother as their town is terrorized by a giant monster . . . or not. Joining these haunting works are stories linked to Tremblay’s previous novels. The tour de force metafictional novella “Notes from the Dog Walkers” deconstructs horror and publishing, possibly bringing in a character from A Head Full of Ghosts, all while serving as a prequel to Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. “The Thirteenth Temple” follows another character from A Head Full of Ghosts—Merry, who has published a tell-all memoir written years after the events of the novel. And the title story, “Growing Things,” a shivery tale loosely shared between the sisters in A Head Full of Ghosts, is told here in full. From global catastrophe to the demons inside our heads, Tremblay illuminates our primal fears and darkest dreams in startlingly original fiction that leaves us unmoored. As he lowers the sky and yanks the ground from beneath our feet, we are compelled to contemplate the darkness inside our own hearts and minds.
Download or read book Virgin and Other Stories written by April Ayers Lawson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A confident and mesmerizing fiction debut, from the winner of the Plimpton Prize Set in the South, at the crossroads of a world that is both secular and devoutly Christian, April Ayers Lawson's stories evoke the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings. In "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," Conner, sixteen, accompanies his grieving mother to the funeral of her best friend, Charlene, a woman who was once a man. In "The Way You Must Play Always," Gretchen, who looks young even for thirteen, heads into her weekly piano lesson in nervous anticipation of her next illicit meeting with her teacher's brother, Wesley. Thin and sickly, wasting from a brain tumor, Wesley spends his days watching pornography and smoking pot, and yet Gretchen can only interpret his advances as the first budding of love. And in the title story, Jake grapples with the growing chasm between him and his wife, Sheila, who was still a virgin when they wed. At a cocktail party thrown by a wealthy donor to his hospital, he ponders the intertwining imperatives of marriage--sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire--even as he finds himself succumbing to the temptations of his host. Self-assured and sensual, Virgin and Other Stories is the first work of a young writer of unusual mastery.
Download or read book The Hard Crowd written by Rachel Kushner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A career-spanning anthology of essays on politics and culture by the best-selling author of The Flamethrowers includes entries discussing a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal Baja Peninsula motorcycle race, and the 1970s Fiat factory wildcat strikes.
Download or read book Stories I Tell Myself written by Juan F. Thompson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hunter S. Thompson, “smart hillbilly,” boy of the South, born and bred in Louisville, Kentucky, son of an insurance salesman and a stay-at-home mom, public school-educated, jailed at seventeen on a bogus petty robbery charge, member of the U.S. Air Force (Airmen Second Class), copy boy for Time, writer for The National Observer, et cetera. From the outset he was the Wild Man of American journalism with a journalistic appetite that touched on subjects that drove his sense of justice and intrigue, from biker gangs and 1960s counterculture to presidential campaigns and psychedelic drugs. He lived larger than life and pulled it up around him in a mad effort to make it as electric, anger-ridden, and drug-fueled as possible. Now Juan Thompson tells the story of his father and of their getting to know each other during their forty-one fraught years together. He writes of the many dark times, of how far they ricocheted away from each other, and of how they found their way back before it was too late. He writes of growing up in an old farmhouse in a narrow mountain valley outside of Aspen—Woody Creek, Colorado, a ranching community with Hereford cattle and clover fields . . . of the presence of guns in the house, the boxes of ammo on the kitchen shelves behind the glass doors of the country cabinets, where others might have placed china and knickknacks . . . of climbing on the back of Hunter’s Bultaco Matador trail motorcycle as a young boy, and father and son roaring up the dirt road, trailing a cloud of dust . . . of being taken to bars in town as a small boy, Hunter holding court while Juan crawled around under the bar stools, picking up change and taking his found loot to Carl’s Pharmacy to buy Archie comic books . . . of going with his parents as a baby to a Ken Kesey/Hells Angels party with dozens of people wandering around the forest in various stages of undress, stoned on pot, tripping on LSD . . . He writes of his growing fear of his father; of the arguments between his parents reaching frightening levels; and of his finally fighting back, trying to protect his mother as the state troopers are called in to separate father and son. And of the inevitable—of mother and son driving west in their Datsun to make a new home, a new life, away from Hunter; of Juan’s first taste of what “normal” could feel like . . . We see Juan going to Concord Academy, a stranger in a strange land, coming from a school that was a log cabin in the middle of hay fields, Juan without manners or socialization . . . going on to college at Tufts; spending a crucial week with his father; Hunter asking for Juan’s opinion of his writing; and he writes of their dirt biking on a hilltop overlooking Woody Creek Valley, acting as if all the horrible things that had happened between them had never taken place, and of being there, together, side by side . . . And finally, movingly, he writes of their long, slow pull toward reconciliation . . . of Juan’s marriage and the birth of his own son; of watching Hunter love his grandson and Juan’s coming to understand how Hunter loved him; of Hunter’s growing illness, and Juan’s becoming both son and father to his father . . .
Download or read book Nochita written by Dia Felix and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poetic debut novel, formally experimental, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny and brutally real. Nochita is tender, fierce, and unforgettable. Daughter to a divorced new age guru, Nochita wanders through the cracks of California's counter-culture, half feral child, half absurdist prophet. When tragedy strikes she is sent to live with her father, a working-class cowboy with a fragile grasp on sobriety and a dangerously mean fiancée. Stuck with adults chillingly unable to care for her, Nochita takes to the streets, a runaway with nothing to run from, driven forward by desperation, hope, and an irrepressible wonder. Nochita is a poetic novel dazzling in its detail, stylistically daring, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny, and brutally real. At its heart is the singular voice of Nochita, tender and fierce, alone and alive and utterly unforgettable. Praise for Nochita: "Nochita shimmers with humor and delight, she burns with stark raving intelligence."—Mary Gaitskill "In Nochita, Dia Felix builds an extraordinarily rich and inventive language to carry the kaleidoscopic point of view of her young protagonist. What a pleasure to open a book and find such exuberant and committed artistry. A stunning debut."—Janet Fitch "There is a way some writers say hello on the first page that gets me excited to be in their conversation. Nochita has it with teeth!! I love this book and the weird strong eye it has on the world, melting clothes off bodies with a crème brulée torch. Nochita is quite the dance to read through, kind of like shaking a bad morning off and realizing you really love this world. Makes me smile, like Dia Felix writes, 'I think I can latch on to this machine now.' BUY THIS BOOK, don’t just stand there reading my fucking blurb!!"— CAConrad "In the vein of extra-sensitive displaced daughters à la White Oleander, with the crystallized hyper-perception at the center of The Bluest Eye, Nochita is singular, resonant—her pictures get under your skin and stay there; more than lines embedded, here are things you've seen before, numbed and fallen away with the process of becoming adult. Against writers who make a phalanx of accuracy and precision, Felix delivers synesthetic gut-sense in a visual pile-on that picks up and turns over your sense of being human, dirt and M&Ms and kundalini shakti, written by a gifted seer whose inner child is alive and screaming … Nochita brings it down to the roots."—Mila Jaroniec
Download or read book Growing Up in San Francisco More Boomer Memories from Playland to Candlestick Park written by Frank Dunnigan and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2016 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From football games at Kezar Stadium to a perfectly broiled Zim burger, San Franciscans have fond memories of the decades after World War II. Dressing up for a movie at the Fox Theatre on Market Street, catching the train at the old S.P. Station on Third and Townsend, taking the streetcar downtown to see magnificent displays in the Emporium's windows or spending a day at Golden Gate Park, the outside lands of San Francisco were teeming with youngsters and the young-at-heart alike. Western Neighborhoods Project columnist and San Francisco native Frank Dunnigan offers a charming collection of nostalgic vignettes about the thriving Western communities of unforgettable people and places that defined generations.
Download or read book Free Spirit written by Joshua Safran and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Unforgettable Journey Through an Unconventional Childhood When Joshua Safran was four years old, his mother--determined to protect him from the threats of nuclear war and Ronald Reagan -- took to the open road with her young son, leaving the San Francisco countercultural scene behind. Together they embarked on a journey to find a utopia they could call home. InFree Spirit, Safran tells the harrowing, yet wryly funny story of his childhood chasing this perfect life off the grid--and how they survived the imperfect one they found instead. Encountering a cast of strange and humorous characters along the way, Joshua spends his early years living in a series of makeshift homes, including shacks, teepees, buses, and a lean-to on a stump. His colorful youth darkens, however, when his mother marries an alcoholic and abusive guerrilla/poet. Throughout it all, Joshua yearns for a "normal" life, but when he finally reenters society through school, he finds "America" a difficult and confusing place. Years spent living in the wilderness and discussing Marxism have not prepared him for the Darwinian world of teenagers, and he finds himself bullied and beaten by classmates who don't share his mother's belief about reveling in one's differences. Eventually, Joshua finds the strength to fight back against his tormentors, both in school and at home, and helps his mother find peace. But Free Spirit is more than just a coming-of-age story. It is also a journey of the spirit, as he reconnects with his Jewish roots; a tale of overcoming adversity; and a captivating read about a childhood unlike any other.
Download or read book Like Water and Other Stories written by Olga Zilberbourg and published by Wtaw Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. California Interest. Short Stories. With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies--of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. LIKE WATER is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg's stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self--and in ways that are often bewildering--against an uncharted landscape of American culture. In "Dandelion," a child turns into a novel and is shipped off to an agent in New York. In "Doctor Sveta," a young Soviet woman finds herself on a ship bound for Cuba at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In "Companionship," a young boy decides to return to his mother's uterus. Anthony Marra calls LIKE WATER "A book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope," and of these stories, Karen E. Bender says, they "cast a clear, illuminating light on topics ranging from motherhood, the workplace, birth, death, ambition, and immigration, all explored through exquisitely wrought characters in Russia and the United States. Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now."
Download or read book Count Us In written by Jason Kingsley and published by HMH. This book was released on 1994-01-12 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award winner: “Hearing about Down syndrome directly from these young men has a good deal more impact than reading any guide from a professional.” —Booklist This book is in Mitchell and Jason’s own words. . . . We wanted readers to have a true-to-life sense of their charm, their directness, their humor and warmth, and, yes, their intelligence. At ages nineteen and twenty-two, respectively, Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz shared their innermost thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams―and their experiences growing up with Down syndrome. Their frank discussion of what mattered most in their lives―careers, friendships, school, sex, marriage, finances, politics, and independence―earned Count Us In numerous national awards, including the EDI Award from the National Easter Seal Society. More important, their wit, intelligence, candor, and charm made for a powerful and inspirational statement about the full potential of people with developmental disabilities, challenging prevailing stereotypes. In this edition, with a new afterword, the authors also discuss their lives since then: milestones and challenges, and changes both expected and unexpected. “Their parents were told to expect nothing. But Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz were lucky, because their parents didn’t listen. They gave their sons that chance to show how far they could go—and they’ve astounded everyone!” —Jane Pauley “This single volume will do more to change stereotypes about Down syndrome than any book I have read. These two young men steal our hearts and wash away generations of misconceptions.” —Mary L. Coleman, MD, Emeritus, Georgetown University “An excellent illustration of what it’s like to have Down syndrome . . . Most moving here are the portrayals of strong family relationships.” —Publishers Weekly “Will open eyes and touch the heart.” —Library Journal
Download or read book The Far Away Brothers written by Lauren Markham and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California—fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong. Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores—until, at age seventeen, a deadly threat from the region’s brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they’ve ever known. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of teenage life with only each other for support. With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | WINNER OF THE RIDENHOUR BOOK PRIZE | SILVER WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD | FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE | SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/BOGRAD WELD PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY
Download or read book The Bear Tree and Other Stories from Cazenovia s History written by Erica Barnes and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historic lakeside village of Cazenovia in the scenic Finger Lakes region is one of the jewels of Central New York, and yet very few books have told its story. Cazenovia is a town founded by wealthy men, and much of what has been written about it has focused on the elite and the grand lakeshore mansions in which they lived. In contrast, Barnes and Emerson’s new book chronicles the story of everyday Cazenovia: the fascinating people, places, and history of this 225-year-old community. The Bear Tree and Other Stories from Cazenovia’s History explores the unheralded, inaccurately told, and long-forgotten tales of the town. Readers will encounter historical characters such as elephant and lion tamer Lucia Zora Card, "The Bravest Woman in the World"; educator Susan Blow, "The Mother of American Kindergarten"; and World War I soldier Cecil Donovan, whose letters home vividly depicted the experience of war for those awaiting his return in Cazenovia.
Download or read book Writing America written by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-11 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John S. Tuckey 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award for Mark Twain Scholarship from The Center for Mark Twain Studies American novelist E.L. Doctorow once observed that literature “endows places with meaning.” Yet, as this wide-ranging new book vividly illustrates, understanding the places that shaped American writers’ lives and their art can provide deep insight into what makes their literature truly meaningful. Published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Historic Preservation Act, Writing America is a unique, passionate, and eclectic series of meditations on literature and history, covering over 150 important National Register historic sites, all pivotal to the stories that make up America, from chapels to battlefields; from plantations to immigration stations; and from theaters to internment camps. The book considers not only the traditional sites for literary tourism, such as Mark Twain’s sumptuous Connecticut home and the peaceful woods surrounding Walden Pond, but also locations that highlight the diversity of American literature, from the New York tenements that spawned Abraham Cahan’s fiction to the Texas pump house that irrigated the fields in which the farm workers central to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry picked produce. Rather than just providing a cursory overview of these authors’ achievements, acclaimed literary scholar and cultural historian Shelley Fisher Fishkin offers a deep and personal reflection on how key sites bore witness to the struggles of American writers and inspired their dreams. She probes the global impact of American writers’ innovative art and also examines the distinctive contributions to American culture by American writers who wrote in languages other than English, including Yiddish, Chinese, and Spanish. Only a scholar with as wide-ranging interests as Shelley Fisher Fishkin would dare to bring together in one book writers as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa, Nicholas Black Elk, David Bradley, Abraham Cahan, S. Alice Callahan, Raymond Chandler, Frank Chin, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Countee Cullen, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jessie Fauset, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg, Jovita González, Rolando Hinojosa, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Lawson Fusao Inada, James Weldon Johnson, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Irena Klepfisz, Nella Larsen, Emma Lazarus, Sinclair Lewis, Genny Lim, Claude McKay, Herman Melville, N. Scott Momaday, William Northup, John Okada, Miné Okubo, Simon Ortiz, Américo Paredes, John P. Parker, Ann Petry, Tomás Rivera, Wendy Rose, Morris Rosenfeld, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Yoshiko Uchida, Tino Villanueva, Nathanael West, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, Hisaye Yamamoto, Anzia Yezierska, and Zitkala-Ša. Leading readers on an enticing journey across the borders of physical places and imaginative terrains, the book includes over 60 images, and extended excerpts from a variety of literary works. Each chapter ends with resources for further exploration. Writing America reveals the alchemy though which American writers have transformed the world around them into art, changing their world and ours in the process.
Download or read book A Life Phase One A Novelette and 28 Short Stories written by Martin Green and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Green is a retiree/free-lance writer living in Roseville, California. In 1991, the year after he retired, he started writing articles for a weekly alternative newspaper in Sacramento, Suttertown News.. In the same year, he began free-lancing for the Neighbors section of the Sacramento Bee, Since 2000, hes been writing for a monthly newspaper, the Sun Senior News, and currently does two monthly features, Observations and Favorite Restaurants. In addition to his journalism, Martin has had over 250 short stories published in online magazines and has self-published three collections of these stories (2006, 2007 and 2008) as well as a longer work, One Year in Retirement (2009), a collection of his Observations (2010) and a book called Potpourri, (2011), containing short stories, a year and a half of Observations, and Last Words, essays On Growing Old, On Writing, On Reading, and On Travel. This book contains a novelette, A Life: Phase One and 28 short stories published online since Potpourri. The novelette follows the adventures of a young man returning from the Army in the 1950s to New York, where he wants to get a job, find a girl and a place of his own to live in. Simple enough goals, but as he finds out, life is not that simple and complications ensue, including leaving New York and going West to San Francisco. Martin has been married to Beverly 47 years, has three sons (David, Michael and Christopher), three grandsons (Mason, Morgan and Logan), one granddaughter (Stephanie) and two cats (Bun-Bun and Shandyman). Martin Greens stories always ring true for me. His characters are real people. Whenever I finish reading one of Martins stories I feel Ive just spent time with an old friend. ---Julie Larson, Editor, Storystar
Download or read book Black Jewish Relations in African American and Jewish American Fiction written by Adam Meyer and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including 410 entries-drawn from over 100 years of novels, short stories, plays, and children's and young adult literature-this bibliography demonstrates both the extent and the richness of the fiction which has been written about Black-Jewish relations in America, thus enhancing our view of American ethnic literature as a whole.
Download or read book Laurence Yep written by Hal Marcovitz and published by Infobase Learning. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Journalism Series University of Missouri written by University of Missouri and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
