A “wickedly funny” (Newsweek) collection of ten short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). “Each of her collections demonstrates such linguistic skill, delicacy of vision, and . . . moral strength and clarity.”—Chicago Tribune A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past—and instead discovering unsetting truths about a total stranger. The miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only astonish and delight, but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. The mastery—the almost numinous ability to say the unsayable—makes Friend of My Youth a genuine literary event.

The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation. Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men who replace them -- are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death. The Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an immensely gifted and influential writer and its essays remain surprising, original, and affecting today. "A luminous, funny, heartbreaking book of essays about life and its defining moments." --Harper's Bazaar

An intensely personal novel about childhood, memory, and history by one of today's most celebrated authors, now available in the US for the first time. Friend of My Youth begins with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri returning to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, to give a reading. Ramu, the friend of his youth, with whom he likes to get together when he comes back, is not there: after years of disabling drug addiction, Ramu has signed up for an intensive rehab program. But Amit Chaudhuri has errands to run in Bombay for his mother and wife, which take him back to the Taj Mahal Hotel, the site, not that long before, of a brutal terrorist attack. Amit Chaudhuri writes novels the way an extraordinary instrumentalist makes music, stating and restating his themes, trying them out in different keys and to various effect, developing and dropping them, only to pick them up again and turn them completely around. He engages both our minds and our hearts. He makes us marvel. Friend of My Youth, his deceptively casual and continually observant and inventive new novel, makes us see and feel the great city of Bombay while bringing us into the quizzical, tender, rueful, and reflective sensibility of its central character, Amit Chaudhuri, not to be confused, we are told, with the novelist who wrote this book. Friend of My Youth reflects on the nature of identity, the passage of time, the experience of friendship, the indignities of youth and middle age, the lives of parents and children, and, for all the humor that seasons its pages, terror, the terror that can strike from nowhere, the terror that is a fact of daily life. Friend of My Youth is fearfully and wonderfully made.

The stories of the Michigan childhood of a girl of both Anishinaabeg and English descent

Th is book describes the authors childhood growing up on a farm, living with four generations of family including his sister, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. The author describes many varied experiences, from helping his 90 year-old great grandmother churn butter the old-fashioned way to helping his grandfather feed the pigs and other animals on the farm. He writes about his interactions with many of the other people who lived in the same community, and some of the naughty things he and his friends did such as raiding apple orchards. This book gives the reader a clear idea of how life was on a farm in rural Quebec in the 1950s.

"By fearlessly revealing the horrors of her upbringing-- alcoholism, madness, sexual abuse, and that's just for starters-- this supremely gifted actress and filmmaker delivers a story of emotional survival that is raw, wild and shocking, yet also dazzlingly funny."--Amazon.com

Bold, heartfelt ruminations from celebrated poet F.S. Yousaf on religion, faith, and coming of age in the shadow of them both, Prayers of My Youth is a must-read for lovers of poetry and honest takes on the human experience. Prayers of My Youth is bestselling poet F.S. Yousaf at his most transparent and autobiographical. In this collection on spirituality, youth, and finding oneself in the midst of life, Yousaf intertwines his history with those who've come before him as he works toward acceptance of his experience growing up in the Islamic faith. This revised and expanded edition includes 20 never-before-released poems that take readers deeper into his journey, with hopes that they will see small moments of themselves reflected in the pages. Vulnerable and honest, Prayers of My Youth is F.S. Yousaf at his best.

A story of the early history of life and manners in "the middle ages of the middle West."

Daisaku Ikeda's well-known passion for reading leaps from the pages of The Books of My Youth. This tour of world-class literature he read as a young man—books, he says, that helped form his life's “spiritual framework”—will delight and inspire.Here we meet heroes and heroines, revolutionaries and villains. We hear poets singing their praises of the human spirit. We engage with philosophers who challenge the status quo as they illuminate a new way forward.Come, thrill to the discovery of how great literature can inform and bolster our Buddhist practice to bring peace and justice to the world today.