Category: Excerpts

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Off the Shelf: The Crimes of Paris by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

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Hoobler cover image Read "Theft" from The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler:

"It was a Monday and the Louvre was closed. As was standard practice at the museum on that day of the week, only maintenance workers, cleaning staff, curators, and a few other employees roamed the cavernous halls of the building that was once the home of France’s kings but since the revolution had been devoted to housing the nation’s art treasures.

Acquired through conquest, wealth, good taste, and plunder, those holdings were splendid and vast—so much so that the Louvre could lay claim to being the greatest repository of art in the world. With some fifty acres of gallery space, the collection was too immense for visitors to view in a day or even, some thought, in a lifetime.1 Most guidebooks, therefore, advised tourists not to miss the Salon Carré (Square room). In that single room could be seen two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, three by Titian, two by raphael, two by Correggio, one by Giorgione, three by Veronese, one by Tintoretto, and—representing non-Italians—one each by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez.

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Off the Shelf: The Nebraska Dispatches by Christopher Cartmill

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Nebraska Dispatches cover image Read "Dispatch: A Story of My Parents" from The Nebraska Dispatches by Christopher Cartmill:

"I remember when I was a kid thinking that the house we lived in was on top of an enormous hill. At the time we lived in a part of Kansas where there are no hills. That’s what memory does.

While other kids’ houses smelled of beef barley soup, our house glowed with the scent of whiskey and Miss Dior. My father was a handsome self-made man from the southern great plains who had been something of a ne’er-do-well in school—caring more for golf than education. That is, until he married my mother. She was a part-time model and self-made woman of great energy and beauty and education. Her passions were for the theater, for teaching, and for my father.

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Off the Shelf: In Search of Powder by Jeremy Evans

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Evans Read the beginning of the Introduction from In Search of Powder: A Story of America's Disappearing Ski Bum by Jeremy Evans, Foreword by Glen Plake:

"The idea for this book entered my mind on a rainy November day along Interstate 5 in Portland, Oregon. I was stuck in traffic. I was rarely stuck in traffic in Lake Tahoe, where I lived for three years before moving to the Pacific Northwest. Now instead of counting how many days I went snowboarding, I kept track of my daily commutes. Some afternoons it took me almost two hours to drive the 8.2 miles from my downtown apartment to work. I was on a similar pace on that rainy November day when something occurred to me.

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Off the Shelf: Unlearning to Fly by Jennifer Brice

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Unlearning to Fly cover image Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "At the Airport: A Romance" from Unlearning to Fly by Jennifer Brice:

"My father proposed to my mother in an airport. I like that sentence so much, I can hardly bear to revise it. But I must. The second time my father proposed to my mother, it was in an airport. The first time was in a car. They’d met three weeks earlier, when my father’s brother, Sam, asked my mother to be my father’s blind date for his own birthday party. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty-five. Back then, Al Brice was holding down three jobs: a mechanic for Pan Am, an afterhours fueler for a jet fuel-supply company, and a logger for his family’s fledgling land-clearing concern. Carol Heeks was a public health nurse who’d arrived in Fairbanks in July of 1961 at the wheel of a blue Plymouth Valiant. A New Yorker by birth and temperament, she was unwilling to spend the rest of her life in a frontier outpost so unprepossessing that a person could drive the length and breadth of it—as she once had—without ever realizing she’d arrived.

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Off the Shelf: Swallowing the Soap by William Kloefkorn

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Read the poem, "Eating Mulberries for Breakfast" from Swallowing the Soap: New and Selected Poems by William Kloefkorn, edited and with an introduction by Ted Genoways:   Eating Mulberries for Breakfast   Mostly purple, purple becoming snowdriftas sugar falls from the small mouthof the dispenser,   purple you gathered from the tree justyesterday, your little brotherabove you lost almost   in branches of purple, purple risingin the bowl as the thick milkrises, and with a silver spoon   you begin to eat what you knowyour buddy Gene will laugh atwhen you tell him, if you   tell him, snowdrift sugar … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Swallowing the Soap by William Kloefkorn

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Off the Shelf: The John Lardner Reader edited and with an introduction by John Schulian

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John Lardner Reader cover image Read the beginning of the Introduction from The John Lardner Reader: A Press Box Legend's Classic Sportswriting, edited and with an introduction by John Schulian:

"Since TV and talk radio started throwing crazy money at them, more and more otherwise admirable sportswriters have been only too happy to install whoopee cushions where their regard for the language used to be. It’s a natural reaction, I suppose, like realizing that the only way to be heard in a noisy bar is to shout louder than everybody else. But sly humor and high style have taken a drubbing everywhere sports are written. Worse yet, John Lardner has been forgotten. That’s as wrong as wearing white socks at a funeral.

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Off the Shelf: The Hard Way Home by Steve Kahn

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Hard Way Home cover image Read the beginning of "One Last Cast" from The Hard Way Home: Alaska Stories of Adventure, Friendship, and the Hunt by Steve Kahn:

"I remember gazing into a mountain stream near Turnagain Pass. Minute air bubbles formed along the backs of polished granite boulders hunched at the bottom, then rose in a swirl of motion to the surface. My little hands held tight their first fishing pole: a willow branch rigged with a piece of string from the glove box, a safety pin, and a half-ripe cranberry. I was four years old, maybe five. My folks tell me I was more interested in fishing than a potty stop.

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Off the Shelf: Cover Me by Sonya Huber

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Cover Me cover image Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Waiting for the Placebo Effect" from Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir by Sonya Huber:

"My sinuses throbbed and pressed against the bones of my face like overcooked bratwurst. I pulled open the glass door of the community co-op in Columbus, Ohio. I wanted to fill my skull with brightly colored vitamin cocaine and blot out the suicide gray midwestern sky.

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Off the Shelf: Breaking into the Backcountry by Steve Edwards

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Breaking into the Backcountry cover image Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Getting There" from Breaking into the Backcountry by Steve Edwards:

"By midafternoon we’ve crossed Iowa on I-80 and started north to South Dakota on I-29. It’s the same route we took on a family vacation to the Badlands when I was fourteen, only on that trip we stopped and spent a night in Mitchell, home of the Corn Palace. Today we hit Mitchell and keep on rolling. All afternoon and into the evening the scenery is the same: the highway’s broken white center line, semitrailers streaming west in plumes of exhaust, the flatness of the plains. Checking our mileage, I’m amazed by how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. Riddle, Oregon, where my father and I will meet the homestead’s owners at a gas station and follow them into the homestead, is 2,316 miles from my little hometown in Indiana. I can no more fathom this distance than I can fathom the distance from Earth to the moon. And though I have poured over the manual Bradley sent me and spent the last few months reading everything I can get my hands on about the Pacific Northwest, I still don’t totally know what to expect. The moon might actually be more familiar a place to me than the Rogue River canyon.

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Off the Shelf: Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant by Susan Supernaw

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Muscogee Daughter cover image Read from Chapter 3, "Bozo" from Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant by Susan Supernaw:

"On Saturday nights we often visited Jonesy, an old family friend who had a color TV. One night Mom saw the Lennon Sisters perform on The Lawrence Welk Show. That convinced her to make us into a family act. Mom sang soprano in the church choir and understood basic harmony and vocal arrangements. She taught Louise and Judy to sing first and second soprano parts, while Kathy and I, with lower voices, sang the alto parts. A song called “Whispering Hope” was supposed to be our big debut. Instead it was my biggest disaster. We wore blue dresses with a small lace yoke in the front. Another member of the congregation owned a beauty salon and volunteered to give matching haircuts and perms to the Supernaw Sisters. When it came time to perform, my sisters all looked great, with their matching hairstyles and dresses. Although my dress matched the others, however, my hair did not. My baby-fine, thin hair couldn’t handle the chemicals, so the same perm that looked great on them burned my hair, breaking it off and frizzing what remained, turning it a funny orangey color. Hiding my hair under a red baseball cap in embarrassment, I was aghast when Mom said, “You must take off that awful hat. We’re going to sing, you can’t wear it. You must remove it. It doesn’t matter how you look, it’s how you sing.”

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