by Jason Schmidt (2015)
Jason Schmidt wasn't surprised when he came home one day during his junior year of high school and found his father, Mark, crawling around in a giant pool of blood. Things like that had been happening a lot since Mark had been diagnosed with HIV, three years earlier. Jason's life with Mark was full of secrets--about drugs, crime, and sex. If the straights--people with normal lives--ever found out any of those secrets, the police would come. Jason's home would be torn apart. So the rule, since Jason had been in preschool, was never to tell the straights anything. A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me is a funny, disturbing memoir full of brutal insights and unexpected wit that explores the question: How do you find your moral center in a world that doesn't seem to have one?
Lena Horowitz
High school junior Becca is just a "band geek" until when her friends introduce her to molly, a form of ecstasy, and she finds herself with new friends--even a boyfriend--but soon learns there is a price to her newfound popularity.
Mick Gowar [and others
Collection of biographies, for children that have been previously published separately. They are "wickedly funny proflies of six time-honoured megastars!" and this volume comes with many colour cartoons.
Scott Simon
"When NPR's Scott Simon began tweeting from his mother's hospital room in July 2013, he didn't know that his missives would soon spread well beyond his 1.2 million Twitter followers. Squeezing the magnitude of his final days with her into 140-character updates, Simon's ... meditations spread virally. Over the course of a few days, Simon chronicled his mother's death and reminisced about her life, revealing her humor and strength, and celebrating familial love ... Spending their last days together in a hospital ICU, mother and son reflect on their lifetime's worth of memories, recounting stories laced with humor and exemplifying resilience"--
Alice Anderson
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Alice Anderson assesses the damage to her Mississippi home while dealing with her husband's declining mental health. After a violent attack, she flees with her children and faces an epic battle -- emotional, psychological, spiritual, and legal -- for her children's welfare, for self-preservation, and ultimately, for redemption. -- Adapted from book jacket.