Aurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota's Iron Lake. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O'Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown,...

Born into the middle of World War II, Gary Paulsen's turbulent childhood provided plenty of subject matter for his bestselling novels, and the librarians in his life gave him the inspiration and support to explore the world through books. As a soldier himself, his storytelling technique developed, and for the first time he shares his own.

Jack and Annie must travel back in time to New Orleans in 1915 to help a teenaged Louis Armstrong fulfill his destiny and become the "King of Jazz."

"In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis shares his enthralling spiritual journey through his early life, chronicling his conversion to the Christian faith. ... Lewis starts with his childhood in Belfast, then describes his boarding school years and his youthful atheism in England, moves to his experience in World War I, and ends in Oxford. Through it all Lewis explores his lifelong search for joy and its role in pointing him toward god."--Book cover.

"Robert Hoge was born with a tumor the size of a tennis ball in the middle of his face and short, twisted legs, but he refused to let what made him different stand in the way of leading a happy, successful life. This is the true story of how he embraced his circumstances and never let his "ugly" stop him from focusing on what truly mattered."--

After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of...

The novelist traces her early years in the small coal mining town of Grundy, Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains, where she first learned to tell stories by listening to the customers at her father's dimestore.

Who's the best friend you could ever have? An irresistible bandit named Rascal.

Describes an incident in the early life of George Washington, which provides a glimpse of his relationship with his mother.

"Willa Cather has long been admired for O Pioneers! (1913), Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), the so-called "prairie novels" that launched her career; but the author's admirers have struggled to explain how a writer growing up in a small town in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century could have transformed what she remembered into literary greatness. A century later, scholars acknowledge Cather's place in the canon of American literature...