Read from Dream of Reason byRosa Chacel, translated by Carol Maier:

"In the spring of 1932 about two years had passed since I returned from Europe. My absence had lasted almost as long as my entire life—when I left Buenos Aires I was only a few months old. Even so, even though that period was not clear in my mind, the idea that I had been here was always with me. The idea? Why not the memory? A memory is passed on, inherited, adopted. Yes, I always remembered having been here and always felt certain I would return. I knew I’d return to the city and the house where I’d been born, knew what the furniture was like in that house, and everything I did when I was very young—the trips and studies—was something I started so as to have it done with before I returned. Then once I was here, it was a question of recovering things, not of becoming acquainted with them.

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Read from the first chapter, "A Leap into the Prairie Sea" from Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains by Patrick Dobson:

"In the spring of 1994, it came time to swim.

For weeks, the smell of redemption floated through windows on sweet western winds. Without my noticing it, every breeze became laced with fragrances of mown hay, cow dung, and dew on willows; perfumes of grass and rain and plowed ground. The ocean-like expanses of prairie promised baptism—a transformed life. When I slept, thunder rumbled through dreams the color of maturing wheat. I only needed a push, however slight, to jump into the grassy sea. 

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Read from the first chapter, "Something Stirring on the Prairie" in Frantic Francis: How One Coach's Madness Changed Football byBrett Perkins:

"Because Francis Schmidt operated somewhere between oddness and madness, it has always been difficult to determine which stories about him are true and which are myths. Everything he did had a manic quality, making even the outlandish tales hard to dismiss. But the truth is fascinating enough. He worked eighteen hours a day, devoting most of his waking thought to football, and even a few hours of sleep failed to interrupt his passion. He kept a pad and pencil hanging from his bedpost so he could jot down ideas that came to him in the night. Besides coaching his own team during the football season, Schmidt attended as many football games as possible, whether they were at a university, a teachers’college, or an all-black high school. He filled notebooks with endless notes on what he saw, always looking for variations of plays or formations that might be new to him. There weren’t many. The diagramming—or creating—of football plays was his most famous obsession. Schmidt worked at creating plays the way a chain smokerworks a cigarette. Using Xs and Os to represent players and arrows and dashes to represent movement, Schmidt was a mad scientist seeking a cure for touchdown deficiency. His mind seemed unable to disengage from this pursuit, and he frustrated all who knew him by mentally disappearing during conversations, parties, and bridge games.There had to be a million possible plays, and Schmidt seemed determined to discover and document every one in a notebook, on a napkin, or on random scraps of paper. This prodigious output was always his blessing as well as his curse.

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Read from "The Bells of the Mountains" in Swords from the West by Harold Lamb, edited by Howard Andrew Jones:

"Rorik the Yngling tried to catch up with the bell. It was the only thing he could hear moving around him, but he couldn’t find it.

He had taken the wrong path; he was lost, and unless he worked his legs fast he was going to be late for the battle.

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Read from the new introduction to More Than Winning by Tom Osborne with John E. Roberts: "Following the 1983 football season I was approached by a publisher to write a book. I was asked to write about my life experiences, starting with my formative years on through coaching the Nebraska Cornhusker football team. Special emphasis was placed on my years as head coach at the university from 1973-83. Jack Roberts, who at that time was working with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in Kansas City, Missouri, agreed to help write the book. Jack and I had a series of interviews, … Continue reading Off the Shelf: More Than Winning by Tom Osborne

Read from "Helen and Frida" in Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection by Anne Finger:

"I’m lying on the couch downstairs in the tv room in the house where I grew up, a farmhouse with sloping floors in upstate New York. I’m nine years old. I’ve had surgery, and I’m home, my leg in a plaster cast. Everyone else is off at work or school. My mother re-covered this couch by hemming a piece of fabric that she bought from a bin at the Woolworth’s in Utica (“Bargains! Bargains! Bargains! Remnants Priced as Marked”) and laying it over the torn upholstery. Autumn leaves—carrot, jaundice, brick—drift sluggishly across a liver-brown background. I’m watching the Million Dollar Movie on our black-and-white television: today it’s Singin’ in the Rain. These movies always make me think of the world that my mother lived in before I was born, a world where women wore hats and gloves and had cinched-waist suits with padded shoulders as if they were in the army. My mother told me that in The Little Colonel Shirley Temple had pointed her finger and said, “As red as those roses over there,” and then the roses had turned red and everything in the movie was in color after that. I thought that was how it had been when I was born, everything in the world becoming both more vivid and more ordinary, and the black-and-white world, the world of magic and shadows, disappearing forever in my wake.

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Read from the first chapter of Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel by Sherrie Flick:

"Vivette knew nothing about Des Moines except for the lovely ease of the letters—the way its name sounded out like a yoga chant, exotic and foreign. Des Moines, with those silent s’s beckoning with a sexy finger, a promise. It whispered to her as she lay in her tousled New Hampshire bedsheets. The wooden shutters on her windows escorting cross-stitched moonlight across the dusty floor. The tugboats, with their deep-throated howls, stretched at their moors, the buoys offering cowbell clangs. Des Moines. Des Moines. Her friends thought she was crazy.

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Read from "Being Peter" in Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life by Nancy Lord:

"In John McPhee’s 1977 classic, Coming Into the Country, he describes a typical Alaskan yard full of tarps, tires, oil drums, and dismantled snow machines, and comments that “when you drive along an old back road in the Lower Forty-Eight and come across a yard full of manufactured debris. . . you have come upon a fragment of Alaska. The people inside are Alaskans who have not yet left for the north.” He’s not mean-spirited in this; he makes an honest and reasonably accurate observation about what it takes to live in the north.

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Read from "Going to Cuba" in the forthcoming book, In Rooms of Memory: Essays by Hilary Masters:

" “Where is the Isle of Pines?” It is August of 1951, and the basement dive of Louis’s on Sheridan Square is a frosty enclave within the steamed province of Greenwich Village. Rosemary Clooney is singing “C’mon to My House,” and the woman who has just sat down at my table has jumped up to dance to the quasi-Arabic melody, swaying in her summer dress to the blast of the jukebox. No one takes any notice of her; she moves within a cell of her own, a figurine turning within a bell jar.

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Read from Ted Kooser's forthcoming book, Lights on a Ground of Darkness:

"Summer, 1949. Above the Mississippi, the noon sun bleaches the blue from a cloudless midsummer sky. So high in their flight that they might be no more than tiny motes afloat on the surface of the eye, a few cliff swallows dive and roll. At the base of the shadowy bluffs a highway weaves through the valley, its surface shimmering like a field of wheat; to the south, a semi loaded with squealing hogs shifts down for the slow crawl up out of the bottoms and into the bright, flat cornfields of eastern Iowa. The bitter odor of exhaust clings like spider webs to the long grass lining the shoulders of the road. Toward the top of the grade the sound of the engine levels out into a brash and steady saxophone note that rattles back through the cut, and then, with a fading whine, the truck is gone, leaving the hot road shining empty down the length of the valley.

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