Growing up a sullen Baptist and other lies

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Carolyn See

In this bittersweet and beautifully written memoir Carolyn See embarks on nothing less than a reevaluation of the American Dream. "This is a history," she writes, "of how drugs and drink have worked in our family for the last fifty - actually it turned out to be closer to a hundred - years. In varying degrees, it's history seen through a purple haze. It's full of secrets and chaos and distortions, and secretly remembered joys. I'm beginning to think it may be the unwritten history of America.". Although it features a clan in which dysfunction was something of a family tradition, Dreaming is no "victim's story" or temperance tract. With a wry humor and not a trace of self-pity, See writes of fights and breakups and hard times, but also of celebration and optimism in the face of adversity. The story of See's own family speaks for the countless people who reached for the shining American vision, found it eluded their grasp, and then tried to make what they had glitter as best they could. Dreaming is about yearning, imagining, and reinventing oneself, about rolling with the punches and continuing on. In this fiercely funny and deeply empathetic book, See shows us that the wild life, for better and worse, has made us what we are.

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Anne Edwards

A biography of Peggy Mitchell Marsh, who led a life as interesting as those of her characters in her epic, Gone with the Wind.

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Janis P. Stout

"Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day.". "The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T.S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed."--BOOK JACKET.

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Okey Ndibe

"Okey Ndibe's funny, charming, and penetrating memoir tells of his move from Nigeria to America, where he came to edit the influential--but forever teetering on the verge of insolvency--African Commentary magazine. It recounts stories of Ndibe's relationships with Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and other literary figures; examines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; recalls an incident of racial profiling just 13 days after he arrived in the US, in which he was mistaken for a bank robber; considers American stereotypes about Africa (and vice-versa); and juxtaposes African folk tales with Wall Street trickery. All these stories and more come together in a generous, encompassing book about the making of a writer and a new American"--