Migritude

Sample

Willis Barnstone

Focusing on the five years Willis Barnstone spent following his graduation from Bowdoin College, the years of living, thinking, and beginning to write in France, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and England from 1948 to 1953, this fascinating and moving memoir nonetheless expands beyond those years. On one side of that period are the poet and translator's grandparents' immigration to the United States, his parents' stormy relationship and his father's eventual suicide, his childhood growing up in the building where Babe Ruth lived, his first gestures toward a life of poetry in Hawthorne's room at Bowdoin, and his first acquaintance with cultures other than his own while digging privies in remote Indian villages in Mexico during a year off from college. On the other side of that period are Barnstone's continuing life as the gypsy scholar in China, Tibet, Turkey, and Argentina and his continuing friendship with his children and former wife and the finest writers and artists the world over.

Sample

Mary Rose O'Reilley

"At midlife, Mary Rose O'Reilley reflects on her past and her hard-won sense of self. She is determined, now, not to sacrifice or waste her self. She has struggled for years along the paths set by her suburban childhood, her Catholic upbringing, her failed marriage, and the mute duties of daughterhood. Now, she is trying to see the world through the eyes of the deer that stop outside her window and look in at her. As a wildlife rehabilitator, she feels a closer connection to the natural world as experienced by animals. As an apprentice potter, she sees in a Japanese tea bowl the ultimate balance of action and contemplation. As a Quaker, she can both sit still and sing. And as a writer, O'Reilley can speak clearly to readers at midlife who are expected to know it all, but don't."--Jacket.

Sample

"Our Nig"

"A fusion of two literary modes of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Kevin Lewis

Kevin Lewis grew up on a council estate in South London. Beaten and starved by his parents, ignored by the social services and bullied at school, he was offered a chance to escape this nightmare world and was put into care. Despite his best efforts to make things work out, his life spiralled out of control. At the age of 17 he became caught up in the criminal underworld of London, where he was known as 'The Kid'. From the violent anger he suffered at the hands of his mother and father, to the continuous torments at school; from the way in which he coped with rejection from people he trusted, to suffering from bulimia and a wish to take his own life, Kevin succeeded in making a better life for himself. This is his story ..