Jim Meskimen
1) BACKFIRE
"The events of a single episode of Howard Norman's superb memoir are both on the edge of chaos and gathered superbly into coherent meaning . . . A wise, riskily written, beautiful book." — Michael Ondaatje
Howard Norman's spellbinding memoir begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile, in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother's girlfriend.
"[A] searching and surprisingly witty look at the scientific odds against tomorrow."
—Timothy Ferris
Jonathan Weiner—winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and one of the most distinguished popular science writers in America—examines "the strange science of immortality" in Long for This World. A fast-paced, sure-to-astonish scientific adventure
...*Janet Maslin, New York Times
Simon Inescort is no longer bodily present in his marriage. It’s been several months since he keeled over the rail of a Nova Scotia–bound...
Cardboard Gods is the memoir of Josh Wilker, a brilliant writer who has marked the stages of his life through the baseball cards he collected as a child. It also captures the experience of growing up obsessed with baseball cards and explores what it means to be a fan of the game. Along the way, as we get to know Josh, his family, and his friends, we also get Josh's classic observations about the central artifacts from his life: the baseball
...13) The Big Seven
In The Great Leader, Mark Twain Award–winning author Jim Harrison introduced readers to the hard-drinking, nearly-retired Detective Sunderson. In this darkly comic follow-up, Sunderson takes stock of his past, while his outlaw neighbors...
When Earth ran dry of oil, the age of the automobile came to an end; electricity flickered out. With deprivation came desperation—and desperation drove humanity backward to a state of existence few could have imagined.
In the tiny hamlet...