The Liars' Club

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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.

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Keith Skipper

One of Norfolk's best-known humorists and broadcasters, Keith Skipper provides memories of his post-war childhood in Norfolk, and the country in general in the 1950s. 36 separate pieces are featured, three for each month of the year.

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Pat Cary Peek

"Through a blend of personal experience, historical fiction, and natural history of the Big Creek River area, One Winter in the Wilderness describes the humorous, frustrating, and sometimes dangerous daily adventures of a wildlife biologist and his wife in Idaho's remote back country. During the colors of fall, the cold and dark of winter, and the welcome greening of spring, Pat Cary Peek interweaves her experiences with daily events and activities to give readers a taste of life in the wilderness."--BOOK JACKET. "The author's husband, Dr. James Peek, professor of Wildlife Resources at the University of Idaho, studied the habitat of the large mammals that frequent the Big Creek canyon for several years and Pat had gone with him on summer field trips. When she retired from teaching, the two decided it would be an excellent time to spend a winter writing, observing the animals, and acting as ranch caretakers."--BOOK JACKET.

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Philip Levine

"Philip Levine's The Bread of Time is an amalgam of celebration and quest. It celebrates the poets who were his teachers - particularly John Berryman and Yvor Winters, whose lives and work, Levine believes, have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. As the book progressed to include an account not only of his own childhood and young manhood in Detroit but also of his middle and later years in California and Spain, Levine realized that he was also striving to discover "how I became the particular person and poet I am." The resulting memoir is a double-edged revelation of the way writers grow. Witty, elegantly rendered in a prose as characteristically Levine's as his verse, it is superb - and essential - reading for everyone interested in contemporary poetry and poets."--BOOK JACKET.