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Autobiographical fiction

  • Author:
    Tolstoy, Leo
    Summary:

    The third and final novel in Tolstoy's Autobiographical Trilogy, following Childhood and Boyhood. In Youth, Leo Tolstoy's protagonist-now a fervent sixteen-year-old-eagerly prepares to strike out on his own. And as he does so, he begins to savor life in all its glory, both grand and miniscule. From his interactions with friends, old and new, to his perceptions of the beauty of nature, the young man has an entirely new world to look forward to. But harsh lessons are waiting to teach him that far-flung expectations are rarely fulfilled to the dreamer's specifications, and that disappointment, anger, and grief are constant foes that must be contended with if one is to truly live. Youth concludes Tolstoy's semiautobiographical trilogy, originally planned as a four-part series of novels tentatively called the "Four Epochs of Growth." The completed works together form a remarkable expression of the great Russian novelist's early voice and vision, which would ultimately make him one of the most renowned and revered authors in literary history. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

  • Author:
    Byler, Linda
    Summary:

    New love and even more questions enter Lizzie Glick's life in When Strawberries Bloom, the second novel in this series written by an Amish writer and based on true life experiences. Lizzie's dream of teaching school has finally come true. She loves the brand-new school building, the sound of the children singing, and the independence she has in the classroom. Even the occasionally unruly boys can't ruin the excitement she feels each morning when she starts the school day. But at home things are in turmoil again. What do Dat's sudden health problems mean for the future of their farm' And what about Lizzie's future' Emma and Mandy are so certain that Joshua and John are their perfect matches, but Lizzie doesn't know what to think about Stephen and how he might fit into her life. What will Lizzie decide' Will she continue to teach school' Or will she give up that dream so that her wish for marriage and a family can come true' Stephen says he loves her, but Lizzie isn't sure he really understands her. Can she hope to find anyone within her Amish community who loves her bright mind, her ever-active imagination, her competitive spirit and her stormy humor' Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction-novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

  • Author:
    Richmond, Sandra, Brooks, Martha
    Summary:

    Sally and Brian are in love. But at the end of a wonderful ski weekend together, a car accident leaves Sally fully paralyzed for life. This powerful, honest book tells of Sally's struggle immediately following the accident as she goes through rehabilitation. Her anger, her flirtation with drugs, and a dangerously angry fellow patient, and her slow, hesitant journey to finding a way to live with her new reality make this one of the strongest portraits of a life-transforming disability ever published for young adults. Yet the story and the author's life offer hope. Far too many young people continue to become paraplegic and quadriplegic in car accidents, diving accidents and other risk-taking behavior. This book lays no blame and makes no promises. But it shows that a way forward can be found.

  • Author:
    Kuitenbrouwer, Kathryn
    Summary:

    From lost siblings to the horrors of war to tales of selkie wives, Wait Softly Brother is filled with questions about memory, reality and the truths hidden in family lore. After twenty years of looping frustrations Kathryn walks out of her marriage and washes up in her childhood home determined to write her way to a new life. There she is put to work by her aging parents sorting generations of memories and mementos as biblical rains fall steadily and the house is slowly cut off from the rest of the world. Lured away from the story she is determined to write - that of her stillborn brother, Wulf - by her mother's gift of crumbling letters, Kathryn instead begins to piece together the strange tale of an earlier ancestor, Russell Boyt, who fought as a substitute soldier in the American Civil War. As the water rises, and more truths come to the surface, the two stories begin to mingle in unexpected and beautiful ways. In this elegantly written novel Kuitenbrouwer deftly unravels the stories we are told to believe by society and shows the reader how to weave new tales of hope and possibility.

  • Author:
    Marcotte, Julie
    Summary:

    Je vous le confie en toute humilité : il ne m'est jamais rien arrivé d'incroyable. J'ai trente ans, je n'ai pas été battue ou séquestrée. Je ne fais pas de télévision. Aucun de mes enfants n'a été enlevé par des extra-terrestres (ou du moins, ils ne m'en ont pas parlé). Je ne suis pas une « octomom » ni une Super Woman. Je n'ai jamais rencontré Brad Pitt (snif !). Je n'ai jamais fait une seule recette de Julia Child. Je n'ai même jamais attrapé les hémorroïdes... Alors de quoi vais-je bien pouvoir parler dans ce livre, vous dites-vous ? De la trentaine. Cette même trentaine qui apporte quelques rides et des cheveux blancs, mais aussi l'audace de se lancer et de faire ce dont on a envie. Dans mon cas, c'était de mettre des mots sur la vie. A travers mes courts récits, je parle de tous ces petits riens qui prennent de l'importance quand votre vie est calme et sans tempête. Du quotidien, des instants de pur bonheur, de ces évidences qu'on ne dit pas... Je m'humilie, aussi, en vous parlant de mes nombreuses maladresses. Après tout, nous sommes humaines et il n'y a rien de plus ennuyant que la perfection... Recueil de chroniques autobiographiques, où l'auteure parle de son enfance, de son métier d'enseignante au primaire, de son histoire d'amour qui dure avec son mari, de ses enfants et de son rapport avec son poids. Le tout dans un style d'écriture simple, rafraîchissant et, surtout, transparent.

  • Author:
    Datta, Christopher
    Summary:

    Touched With Fire, a novel of the Civil War inspired by the true story of Ellen Craft. Ellen Craft is property; in this case, of her half-sister Debra, to whom she was given as a wedding gift. The illegitimate daughter of a Georgia plantation owner and a house slave, she learned to hate her own image, which so closely resembled that of her “father:” the same wiry build, the same blue eyes and the same pale — indeed, lily-white — skin. Ellen lives a solitary life until she falls, unexpectedly, in love with a dark-skinned slave named William Craft, and together they devise a plan to run North. Ellie will pose as a gentleman planter bound for Philadelphia accompanied by his “boy” Will. They make it as far as Baltimore when Will is turned back, and Ellie has no choice but to continue. With no way of knowing if he is dead or alive, she resolves to make a second journey — South again. And so Elijah Craft enlists with the 125th Ohio Volunteers of the Union Army: she will literally fight her way back to her husband. Eli/Ellie’s journey is the story of an extraordinary individual and an abiding love, but also of the corrosive effects of slavery and of a nation at a watershed moment. "I sat down yesterday to read Touched With Fire, and found it so entrancing that I finished it today. A tour de force. What an imaginative approach to take the real story of Ellen and William Craft and turn it into an exciting — and penetrating — Civil War story. You touched all the right bases about slavery and the war. I especially liked the episode of General Grant and Eli Craft bonding over their mutual love of horses. I look forward to the second volume of the trilogy, and beyond that a third, when the time comes." — Prof. James McPherson, Author of Battle Cry of Freedom

  • Author:
    Delderfield, R. F. (Ronald Frederick)
    Summary:

    The story of a WWI veteran, just returned from the front with a severe case of PTSD. The prescribed cure is a stint in an enclosed community focused on work and camaraderie: in this case, an English public school.

  • Author:
    Lewis, Amanda West
    Summary:

    New York City in the 1960s is the humming backdrop for this poignant, gritty story about a girl who sees her parents as flawed human beings for the first time, and finds the courage to make a fresh start. Missy’s mother has gone back to school to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. Missy’s father works in advertising and takes Missy on secret midnight excursions to Harlem and the Village so she can share his love of jazz. The two write poems for each other — poems that gradually become an exchange of apologies as Missy’s father’s alcohol and drug addiction begins to take over their lives. When Missy’s mother finally decides that she and her daughter must make a fresh start, Missy has to leave her old apartment, her school, her best friend and her cats and become a latchkey kid while her mother gets a job. But she won’t give up on trying to save her family, even though this will involve a hard journey from innocence to action, and finally acceptance. Based on the events and people of her own childhood, Amanda Lewis’s gorgeous novel is driven by Missy’s irresistible, optimistic voice, buoyed by the undercurrents of poetry and music.

  • Author:
    Slater, Patrick
    Summary:

    Folktale, memoir, fiction, literary hoax, The Yellow Briar is all of these. Ostensibly the charming remembrance of an Irish orphan who escapes the Great Famine of 1840s Ireland and comes to the New World to seek a fresh start on the streets of Toronto and in the pioneer hinterland of Canada West (Ontario), the book was actually a fictional humbug perpetrated by John Mitchell, a Toronto lawyer, who first published the tale in 1933. Patrick Slater, the protagonist of the "memoir," is said to have died in 1924 but not before setting his saga down on paper. And what an account it is! The Globe and Mail felt that the book "gives a picture of Ontario to be found in no other work of fiction we know and has won for itself a permanent place in Canadian literature." If nothing else, Slater/Mitchell captures perfectly the lilt of the Irish and the wry wisdom of an old soul to paint an affecting portrait of trials and tribulations in a long-ago time.

  • Author:
    Li, Mirok
    Summary:

    As the son of a Korean family of substance the author of this autobiographical sketch grew up, in the early years of the century, among unsettling influences from east and west. Europe, known as "West of the Ocean," supplied modern education to replace the old classics of China and Korea. From the east came Japanese troops to annex the country in a bloodless war. Mirok Li, a perceptive and receptive schoolboy, saw this political scene in terms of his day-to-day experience. The remarkable thing is that he continued to see it with the same clarity, truth and detail when came to write the story many years later in Europe, using a simple German that his translator may perhaps have improved on Mr. Hammlmann's English version, at least, is lucent calm and fully expressive of the closely felt Korean scene that stirs the reader by its blend of intimacy and remoteness.

  • Author:
    Hall, Radclyffe
    Summary:

    Stephen Gordon is an ideal child of aristocratic parents - a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions. A classic that was banned in 1928 in one of the country' s most famous obscenity trials, but went on to become an international bestseller

  • Author:
    Dore, Paul
    Summary:

    The Walking Man begins in the deserts of Jordan and explores a year in the life of the main character - someone very similar to the author - and his attempts to make sense of a tumultuous year. Based on many of the author's experiences, The Walking Man mixes reality and fiction in a tale of heartbreak, friendship, and personal history that uses walking to thread it all together. Whether he is tripping through a blackout in downtown Toronto, stumbling into a massive war re-enactment, or outwitting the law while speed-walking beside his 93-year-old scooter-riding confidant, Mary, the Walking Man eventually makes his way, on foot, all the way from Toronto to Niagara Falls in his quest to find the truth.

  • Author:
    Sharp, Adrienne
    Summary:

    Now 99 years old, Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs, and ponders the life she lived as one of Russia's most talented dancers and the great love of Nikolai Romanov.

  • Author:
    Webstad, Phyllis
    Summary:

    When Phyllis Webstad (nee Jack) turned six, she went to the residential school for the first time. On her first day at school, she wore a shiny orange shirt that her Granny had bought for her, but when she got to the school, it was taken away from her and never returned. This is the true story of Phyllis and her orange shirt. It is also the story of Orange Shirt Day, an important day of remembrance for all Canadians.

  • Author:
    Kang, Younghill
    Summary:

    Autobiographical novel of a scholar’s son’s coming of age in small village during the Japanese occupation, though that is felt with some distance. Kang focuses on classical education in that era, traditions for holidays and ceremonies, schooling, friends, family dynamic, a detailed account of Sam-Il, and finally emigration to America as young man.

  • Author:
    Mainprize, Scott
    Summary:

    The First Few Feet in a World of Wolves chronicles the fictionalization of the year the author spent teaching in Aupaluk (a remote Inuit community on the Ungava Coast of Nunavik). The second outlines, and explores, the history of oppression experienced by the more than five hundred Indigenous nations across northern Turtle Island at the hands of the Canadian government since the Royal Proclamation. Told through the voice of Nomad, who finds himself very much at odds with the land itself. Nomad slowly learns how to reconnect with his fractured history as he embraces and is embraced by the Elders and his own students.

  • Author:
    Cummings, E. E.
    Summary:

    Drawing on E. E. Cummings's experiences in France as a volunteer ambulance driver, this novel takes us through a series of mishaps that led to the poet's being arrested for treason and imprisoned. Out of this trauma Cummings produced a work like no other- a story of oppression and injustice told with his characteristic linguistic energy and unflappable exuberance, which celebrates the spirit of the individual and offers a brave and brilliant opposition in the face of the inhumanity of war. Illustrated with drawings Cummings made while imprisoned in France and featuring an illuminating new introduction by Susan Cheever, this reissued edition offers a unique and multifaceted lens onto the inner life of the poet in his youth and demands recognition by a twenty-first-century readership.

  • Author:
    Tuck, Lily
    Summary:

    Lily Tuck has had a wonderful and accomplished career as a National Book Award winning novelist, story writer, essayist and biographer. She is one of our most distinguished contributors to American literature. With The Double Life of Liliane, Tuck writes what may well be her crowning achievement to date, and, significantly too, her most autobiographical work. '' As the child of a German movie producer father who lives in Italy and a beautiful, artistically talented mother who resides in New York, Liliane's life is divided between those two very different worlds. A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane uncovers the stories of family members as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Mary Queen of Scots and an early Mexican adventurer, and pieces together their vivid histories, through both World Wars and across continents. What unfolds is an astonishing and riveting metanarrative: an exploration of self, humanity, and family in the manner of W.G. Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Told with Tuck's inimitable elegance and peppered with documents, photos, and a rich and varied array of characters, The Double Life of Liliane is an intimate and poignant coming of age portrait of the writer as a young woman.

  • Author:
    Ramqvist, Karolina
    Summary:

    Feminist autofiction from one of Sweden's blazing talents. Blending autofiction and essay, The Bear Woman is a journey of feminism and literary detective work spanning centuries and continents. In the 1540s, a young French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque, was abandoned on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with her maidservant and her lover. In present-day Stockholm, an author and mother becomes captivated by the image of Marguerite sheltered in a dark cave after her companions have died. This image soon becomes an obsession. She must find out the real story of the woman she calls the Bear Woman. But so much in this history is written so as to gloss over male violence. And the maps and other sources she consults are at times undecipherable. Karolina Ramqvist explores what it means to write history—and to live it.

  • Author:
    Robertson, Lisa
    Summary:

    A debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she has written the works of Baudelaire. One morning, the poet Hazel Brown wakes up in a strange hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. Surprising as this may be, it's no more surprising to Brown than the impossible journey she's taken to become the writer that she is. Animated by the spirit of the poète maudit, she shuttles between London, Vancouver, Paris, and the French countryside, moving fluidly between the early 1980s and the present, from rented room to rented room, all the while considering such Baudelairian obsessions as modernity, poverty, and the perfect jacket. Part memoir, part magical realism, part hilarious trash-talking take on contemporary art and the poet's life, The Baudelaire Fractal is the long-awaited debut novel by the inimitable Lisa Robertson.

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