Norris reveals the contradictions of small town life on the Great Plains, where gracious hospitality blends with provincial wariness, local history is valued by writers, and truth and myth collide.

Sanora Babb experienced pioneer life in a one-room dugout, eye-level with the land that supported, tormented and beguiled her; where her family fought for their lives against drought, crop-failure, starvation, and almost unfathomless loneliness. Learning to read from newspapers that lined the dugout’s dirt walls, she grew up to be a journalist, then a writer of unforgettable books about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most notably Whose...

They had been there often as tourists. They had cherished the dream of someday living all year under the Provencal sun. And suddenly it happened. Here is the month-by month account of the charms and frustrations that Peter Mayle and his wife -- and their two large dogs -- experience their first year in the remote country of the Luberon restoring a two-centuries-old stone farmhouse that they bought on sight. From coping in January with the first mistral,...

Returning to the struggling town of Buffalo Valley, North Dakota, Lindsay Snyder seeks to discover family secrets while reevaluating her life, an effort that provides unexpected hope to the town of her childhood vacations.

This memoir traces Maya Angelou's childhood in a small, rural community during the 1930s. Filled with images and recollections that point to the dignity and courage of black men and women, Angelou paints a sometimes disquieting, but always affecting picture of the people-and the times-that touched her life.

"Millions of Americans struggle with severe clutter and hoarding. New York writer and bohemian Barry Yourgrau is one of them. Behind the door of his Queens apartment, Yourgrau's life is, quite literally, chaos. Confronted by his exasperated girlfriend, a globe-trotting food critic, he embarks on a heartfelt, wide-ranging, and too often uproarious project--part Larry David, part Janet Malcolm--to take control of his crammed, disorderly apartment...

In the early 1920's, cowboy and farmer, Ralph Moody finds himself with mountainous debts through the collapse of the livestock market and the dealings of a crooked partner. Ralph never surrenders, but finds a way to turn tragedy into opportunity.

"The making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world. In the summer of 1925, Earnest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his...

There arent many books more beloved than The Tale of Peter Rabbit and even fewer authors as iconic as Beatrix Potter. More than 150 million copies of her books have sold worldwide and interest in her work and life remains high. And her characters-Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, and all the rest-exist in a charmed world filled with flowers and gardens. Beatrix Potters Gardening Life is the first book to explore the origins of Beatrix Potters love...

"Bird Cloud" is the name the author gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four hundred foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. She also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy,...