Akron Public Library

Recounts Mark Twain's life told primarily through his own words. Includes interviews with Hal Holbrook, Arthur Miller, William Styron and many others.

In a memoir of growing up in the Bronx during the Depression, the author recalls her father's death in 1939, her family's financial woes, and her mother's creation of a rooming house, bringing in tenants who would change their lives.

The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. By turns funny and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the remarkable territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family.

An unauthorized portrait of the influential pop-culture author evaluates the life experiences that shaped his literary achievements, from his disadvantaged childhood in rural Maine to his rapid fame as a writer and struggles with substance abuse.

Shares the author's assessment of how a seductive cowboy challenged her feminist beliefs, describing how as an embittered, middle-aged divorcée she began to question her staunch beliefs before being swept off her feet by a very masculine lover.

A collection of short stories and essays. The story, My Dinner at the White House, is an amusing piece on a dinner with President Reagan, The Imaginary Girlfriend is on the arts of writing and wrestling, while the title story is on a pig farmer who is being harassed by boys.

Richard Powers, returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually...

Wherever you look, there's trouble and wonder, pain and beauty, restoration and darkness--sometimes all at once. Yet amid the confusion, if you look carefully, in nature or in the kitchen, in ordinariness or in mystery, beyond the emotion muck we all slog through, you'll find it eventually: a path, some light to see by, moments of insight, courage, or buoyancy. In other words, grace. Lamott knows and lives by this belief, most of the time. In these...

"One Matchless time is an evocation of William Faulkner's life and work. From his birth in 1897 in Mississippi to his death sixty-five years later, Faulkner spent almost his entire life on this one small patch of land, the "significant soil" from which all his fiction grew. Jay Parini paints an intimate picture of Faulkner's Mississippi world and shows how the artist transformed this raw material into Yoknapatawpha County, a place of pure imagination."...