Be sweet

Sample

Michelle Tea

"In this memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts - Boston's ugly, scrappy little sister and a place where time and hope can only keep things from getting any worse.". "Tea's girlhood is shaped by the rough fabric of the neighborhood and by its characters - the soft vulnerability of her sister Madeline and her quietly brutal Polish father; the doddering, sometimes violent nuns of Our Lady of the Assumption; Marisol from the projects by the creek; and the tough-as-nails Italian dance-school teacher who offered a slim chance for escape to every young Chelsea girl in tulle and tap shoes.". "Told in Tea's trademark loose-tongued, lyrical style, this memoir both celebrates and annihilates one girl's tightrope walk out of a working-class slum, and the lessons she carries with her. With wry humor and a hard-fought wisdom, Tea limns the extravagant peril of a dramatic adolescence with the private, catastrophe secret harbored within the walls of her family's home - a secret that threatens to destroy her family forever."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Kate Simon

*Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood* was chosen as one of the twelve best books of the year by *The New York Times* in 1982. Now we have Kate Simon's honest, moving, and beautifully written sequel, *A Wider World*, about growing up in the Depression-ridden but vital New York of the 1930s. With a spirited sense of self-preservation and without a trace of sentimentality, the author explores the wondrous flowering and momentary terrors of her adolescence. In that bittersweet time, the boys never had enough money to take out the girls and the girls often had crushes on each other and their teachers. Sex was strange but fascinating, and eventually led Kate to set up housekeeping with a boy, to her father's horror and the envy of her friends. Birth control was haphazard and abortions were primitive. The need to learn about everything - life, literature, politics, love, the city - was urgent. Kate Simon has remembered it all with great clarity and wry humor. In her remembering, these events might have happened yesterday, were they not so utterly of a time and place. In the immediacy of the emotions that reverberate on every page this memoir is completely contemporary and timeless in its appeal.

Sample

Orhan Pamuk

In the three decades that Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has devoted himself to writing fiction, he has also produced scores of witty, moving, and provocative essays and articles. He engages the work of Nabokov, Kundera, Rushdie, and Vargas Llosa, among others, and he discusses his own books and writing process. We also learn how he lives, as he recounts his successful struggle to quit smoking, describes his relationship with his daughter, and reflects on the controversy he has attracted in recent years. Here is a thoughtful compilation of a brilliant novelist's best nonfiction, offering different perspectives on his lifelong obsessions with loneliness, contentment, and the books and cities that have shaped his experience.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Sample

Rachel Renee Russell

When scholarship student Nikki Maxwell, whose father is the school exterminator, decides to enter the talent show at her expensive private school, her nemesis MacKenzie threatens to reveal Nikki's status to the rest of the school. Book #