"When Amanda Oliver began work as a school librarian, fueled by a lifelong love of books and a desire to help, she felt qualified for the job. What she learned was that librarians are expected to serve as mediators and mental-health-crisis support professionals, customer service reps and administrators of overdose treatment, fierce loyalists to institutionalized mythology and enforced silence, and arms of state surveillance. Based on firsthand experiences...

"Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. Her work culminates in a stunning, essential read for our times. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States when she was five years old, Cornejo Villavicencio...

Walt Whitman was a printer, journalist, editor, and schoolteacher. But today, he's recognized as one of America's founding poets, a man who changed American literature forever. Throughout his life, Walt journeyed everywhere, from New York to New Orleans, Washington D.C. to Denver, taking in all that America had to offer.

"HOLLYWOOD PARK is a remarkable memoir of a tumultuous life. Mikel Jollett was born into one of the country's most infamous cults, and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer. We were never young. We were just too afraid of ourselves. No one told us who we were or...

"Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife. . . But as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less. A woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for forty years. A man who bled quietly to death in his living room. A...

"Helen Fremont's bestselling memoir, After Long Silence, published in 1991 and still very much in print, vividly recounts her discovery in adulthood that her parents were not Catholics, as she thought (having herself been raised in that faith), but Jewish Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not even their names were their own. In her frank, moving, and often surprisingly funny new memoir, Fremont delves even deeper into the family dynamic that...

"Despite being hailed as one of the best guitarists of his era, George Harrison, particularly in his early decades, battled feelings of inferiority. He was often the butt of jokes from his bandmates owing to his lower-class background and, typically, was allowed to contribute only one or two songs per Beatles album out of the dozens he wrote. Now, acclaimed Beatles biographer Philip Norman examines Harrison through the lens of his numerous self-contradictions....

"An illuminating, poignant, and savagely funny examination of modern marriage from Ask Polly advice columnist Heather Havrilesky"-- Considering the limited economic advantages to marriage, the deluge of other mate options a swipe away, and the fact that almost half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce anyway, why do so many of us still chain ourselves to one human being for life? Havrilesky illustrates the delights, aggravations,...

Mallory O'Meara uncovers the life and work of Milicent Patrick, one of Disney's first female animators and the only woman in history to create one of Hollywood's classic movie monsters. O'Meara discovered that Patrick's contribution had been claimed by a jealous male colleague, and she soon after had disappeared from film history. O'Meara set out to right the wrong, and in the process discovered the full, fascinating story of an ambitious, artistic...

"This biography gives readers a courtside seat to the achievements of one of basketball's greatest legends as it traces Kobe's life from childhood to his five NBA championships to his successful career outside of the game to his tragic death and lasting legacy."--Provided by publisher.