Each One Teach One chronicles Ron Casanova’s struggle out of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction. Through his own dramatic awakening, this Black Puerto Rican activist ultimately finds his salvation in helping other people.
Edited by David Schaafsma, Lauren DeJulio Bell and Roxanne Pilat
Contributions by Samira Ahmed, Dhana-Marie Branton, Anne Calcagno, Ana Castillo, Maxine Chernoff, Shelly M. Conner, Stuart Dybek, Saja Elshareif, Emil Ferris, Jessie Ann Foley, Charles Johnson, Rebecca Makkai, Daiva Markelis, James McManus, David Mura, Nnedi Okorafor, Christian Picciolini, Tony Romano, Erika Sánchez, George Saunders and Luis Alberto Urrea
Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea
Growing Up Chicago is a collection of coming-of-age stories written by Chicagoland authors that reflects the diversity of the city and its metropolitan area. Primarily memoir, the book asks, What characterizes a Chicago author?
This remarkable memoir of immigration and assimilation provides a rare view of urban life in Chicago in the late 1800s by a newcomer to the city and the Midwest, and the nation as well. Francis O'Neill left Ireland in 1865. After five years traveling the world as a sailor, he and his family settled in Chicago just shortly before the Great Fire of 1871. His memoir also brings to life the challenges involved in succeeding in a new land, providing for his family, and integrating into a new culture. Francis O’Neill serves as a fine documentarian of the Irish immigrant experience in Chicago.
According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir—an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century.
During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922–1998) evaded bio-graphical questions, never read from his work publicly, and didn’t allow his photograph to appear on his books. Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of renown, he had given up the bohemian world of 1950s Green-wich Village for a series of corporate jobs that both paid the bills and provided an inside view of the encroachment of market val-ues into every corner of American culture.
In Prisoner of Her Past, Howard Reich has written a moving memoir about growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors and finding refuge from silence and fear in the world of jazz. It is only when Sonia’s memories overwhelm her and Howard begins to piece together her story that he comes to understand how his parents’ lives shaped his own. The paperback edition includes an epilogue by the author that relates developments since the publication of the cloth edition.
Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but also a dominant figure in post–World War II British writing as a novelist, poet, critic, and polemicist. Zachary Leader’s definitive, authorized biography conjures in vivid detail the life of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion.
Originally published in 1963, and today considered a landmark in twentieth century Italian literature, Luigi Meneghello’s Deliver Us is the memoir, not of an extraordinary childhood, but of the very ordinary one the author shared with most of his generation, when Italy was a rural country under the twin authorities of Church and Fascism.
In his best-selling book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Eric G. Wilson challenged our culture’s blindly insistent pursuit of happiness at all costs. In his harrowing yet ultimately hopeful memoir, The Mercy of Eternity, the author turns an unsparing eye on his own continuing struggle with bipolar depression and finds, within the very illness that causes so much suffering, the resources for hope, forgiveness, and love.
Sailor, painter, doctor, lawyer, polyglot, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov (1901–75) led a life that might seem far-fetched for a spy novel, yet here the truth is stranger than fiction. The result...
