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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Read from "Coming, Aphrodite!" in the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of Youth and the Bright Medusa:

"Don hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him. He occupied one big room with no outside exposure excepton the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window, was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog’s bed, and often a bone or two for his comfort.

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Read from Chapter 1, "Science Nabs Sorority Sneak", from The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession by Ken Alder:

"The case had all the signs of an inside job. One of the ninety young women in College Hall was a sneak thief. For several months, someone had been filching personal possessions from the rooms of her dorm sisters: silk underthings, registered letters, fancy jewelry, cash. It was the springtime of the Jazz Age in 1921, and young women were returning to the boardinghouse on the campus at Berkeley to find their evening gowns spread out on their beds, as if someone had been sizing them up. A sophomore from Bakersfield had been robbed of $45 she had hidden inside a textbook; a freshman from Lodi lost money and jewelry valued at $100; and Margaret Taylor, a freshman from San Diego, could not find her diamond ring worth $400—though she wondered whether she had simply misplaced it.

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Read from the introduction of Mexicans in Revolution, 1910-1946: An Introduction by William H. Beezley and Colin M. MacLachlan:

"For Mexicans in general, but especially those in the capital city, the late summer of 1910 brought the inauguration of new buildings, monuments, and institutions (including an insane asylum) to commemorate independence. The grand national celebration was held on September 16, with parades and speeches that drew official and unofficial visitors from Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Asia, particularly Japan. The centennial parades highlighted the story of Mexico’s past, through the stages of ancient Aztec glories, colonial civilizing efforts, and the Porfirian creation of a cosmopolitan nation. Through it all, the elderly president remained remote; the patriarchal patriot had seemingly become detached from daily activities, serving only as the national symbol. As the Díaz regime basked in the afterglow of the centennial celebrations, on November 20 insurrectionary battles erupted in distant Chihuahua and the revolution sputtered to life.

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Read from the Preface of The Age of the Ship of the Line: The British and French Navies, 1650-1815 by Jonathan R. Dull: "Between 1689 and 1815 the British (or initially the English allied with the Scots) fought seven wars against France. Their navies played an important, sometimes critical, role. The power of the rival navies was based chiefly on their ships of the line, great wooden warships carrying two or three tiers of iron or brass cannon. The age of the ship of the line is largely the story of the navies of Britain and France, the two powers … Continue reading Off the Shelf: The Age of the Ship of the Line by Jonathan R. Dull

Read from the Introduction of Alexander Cartwright: The Life behind the Baseball Legend by Monica Nucciarone: "Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr. was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938 in Cooperstown, New York. In Honolulu, Hawaii, a street as well as a park are named for him, and each year his gravesite is visited by hundreds of baseball fans, both locals and tourists. They leave baseball mementos and notes thanking him for the sport. Since at least the 1930s, his reputation as the primary founder of modern baseball has seemed solid and accepted, and his accomplishments are of … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Alexander Cartwright by Monica Nucciarone

Read from the Introduction of The Dandy Dons: Bill Russell, K. C. Jones, Phil Woolpert, and One of College Basketball's Greatest and Most Innovative Teams by James W. Johnson:

"I was twelve years old when my father took me to see my first college basketball game—the University of San Francisco against whom I can’t remember. But I do remember that it was during the 1949–50 season, the year after the Dons won the NIT, then the biggest college tournament in the country. Don Lofgran, Rene Herrerias, Ross Guidice. What a night.

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