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Descubre un mundo infinito de historias

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Lydia Paar

Lydia Paar joined the American workforce at age fourteen, holding a wide variety of jobs (twenty-seven, at last count) between then and now, across twenty-five different homes in eight states. The essays in this collection explore her attempts to evade or transform the lower-middle class American experience across various cityscapes, towns, deserts, and in-between places. As she moves through these spaces, she seeks peace, connection, and freedom: from the hip streets of Portland to desolate deserts, Army basic training to cross-country bus trips, to eerie St. Louis funeral homes, and more. 

Each essay interrogates the interior emotional work that accompanies such grappling: labors of love and friendship, of learning, of motion, of maintenance, and of finding faith in potential for positive change. Across a range of interior and exterior landscapes, Paar meditates on subcultures, agendas, violences, alliances, and the intersection of the natural world with our human endeavors. Ultimately, she considers how what we try to transform so often transforms us.

University of Georgia Press

Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction

The Exit Is the Entrance: Essays on Escape

Brooke Champagne

Early in Brooke Champagne’s childhood, her Ecuadorian grandmother Lala (half bruja, half santa) strictly circumscribed the girl’s present and future: become beautiful but know precisely when to use it; rationalize in English but love in God’s first language, the superior Spanish; and if you must write, Dios help you, at least make a subject of me. Champagne’s betrayal of these confounding dictates began before they were even spoken, and she soon started both writing and hiding the truth about whom she was becoming. 

The hilarious, heartbreaking essays in this collection trace the evolutions of this girlhood of competing languages, ethnicities, aesthetics, politics, and class constraints against the backdrop of a boozy New Orleans upbringing. In these essays, Champagne and members of her family love poorly and hate well, whip and get whipped, pray and curse in two languages, steal from The Man and give to themselves, kiss where it hurts, poke where it hurts worse, and keep and spill each other’s secrets—first face-to-face, then on the page. They believe and doubt and reckon with the stories they tell about themselves and where they come from, finally becoming most human, most alive, in their connections to one another.

Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy

Sonja Livingston

Tales of female daredevils, warriors, killers, and victims: “Radiant essays inspired by ‘slivers and bits’ of real women's lives…Wise, fresh, captivating.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
 At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight. In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series of essays that highlight lives as varied, troubled, and spirited as America itself.
 
 Livingston breathes life into subjects who led extraordinary lives—as rule-breakers, victims, or those whose differences made them cultural curiosities—bringing together those who slipped through the world largely unseen with those whose images were fleeting or faulty so that they, too, remained relatively obscure. Included are Alice Mitchell, a Memphis society girl who murdered her female lover in 1892; Maria Spelterini, who crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1876; May Fielding, a “white slave girl” buried in a Victorian cemetery; Valaida Snow, a Harlem Renaissance trumpeter; a child exhibited as Darwin’s Missing Link; the sculptors’ model Audrey Munson; a Crow warrior; victims of a 1970s serial killer; the Fox Sisters; and many more.

Ladies Night at the Dreamland

Debra Monroe

A woman reflects on her working-class roots, her unsuitable exes, and her accidental road to happiness in a memoir of “many delights” (Atlanta Journal Constitution).
 
 A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career—if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she’s still blue-collar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as “liberated.”
 
 Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn’t. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began.
 
 “Trying to be a Midwestern housewife in the tradition of her mother and grandmothers, and an early feminist at the same time, makes for comic incongruity.”—Wisconsin State Journal
 
 “Monroe’s candid memoir reads like a country ballad: a down-and-out woman, working gritty jobs, gets entangled with Mr. Completely, Laughably Wrong. But her unexpected story is far from a cliché.” —Kirkus Reviews

My Unsentimental Education: A Memoir

Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction - La serie de libros

Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction - La serie de libros

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