Read the beginning of "Chiromancer" from From the Hilltop by Toni Jensen:

"The redhead in the poodle skirt grabbed me up from where I hid between two giant palm fronds, dragged me to the stage, told me I was the rockabilly Indian, here to save them all. I told her I wasn’t him, was just myself. That there would be no saving, that the band wasn’t that bad, anyway.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: From the Hilltop by Toni Jensen”

Read from Lamb Bright Saviors by Robert Vivian:

"When you come to a small town for the first time, far away from any other place, you have to be careful to keep the joy in till you find somewhere safe where you can let it out in secret, like maybe in a diner with an old man sitting alone and staring out the window. Every diner has one old man sitting at a booth next to the window, with what happened to him long ago buried so deep inside him it ends up in the lines of his wrinkled face.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Lamb Bright Saviors by Robert Vivian”

Read an excerpt from "Changing My Name" from Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity by Fleda Brown:

"It is the beginning of the year at Leverett School. I know my name is next in the roll call because the teacher hesitates. I am tense, embarrassed, my name exactly matching my awkward self. I am not a Marianna or a Jane, no matter how hard I try. “Fled (as in ‘escaped’)-uh?” the teacher’s voice rises to a question mark. She has assumed a vowel between two consonants is generally short. Or she says “Frieda,” seeing not the actual letters but what she expects to see. In the sixth grade I decide to use Sue, my middle name. All of us are transmogrified that year, growing new bodies, trying the same thing with our names. When I am thirteen, I go by Sue all summer at the lake, the same summer I go without my glasses to win the love of a boy named Lee with large, soft lips, who spends the summer with his parents at KenThelm, a resort down the lake. I feel my way through a fuzz of trees all through July and August. I paddle down the lake, trusting my instincts to get me around the point, past the shallows. The last day, before we leave, the reason for my deprivation tells me he is in love with Judy Carr, whose family owns the cottage next to ours, because she is such “a sharp dresser.” Indeed, she is. I cannot argue.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Driving with Dvorak by Fleda Brown”

Read the beginning of "The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things" from Quotidiana by Patrick Madden:

"A few years ago, a curmudgeonly professor, a guy who was always giving me a hard time about my genre, asked, “What
will you do when you run out of experiences to write about?” He wanted me to admit that I’d have to turn to fiction or suffer the ignominy of rewriting the same handful of exciting experiences I’d had in my life.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Quotidiana by Patrick Madden”

Read from the Introduction of Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Kushner Resnick:

"Bearcreek, Montana, used to be wild. In the 1920s, when it was still new, there were eleven saloons. Eleven saloons and not one church. It was a town of brothels and fistfights and rollicking parties to celebrate brides brought over from the old country. The miners worked and drank and worked some more, surviving on the miles of coal spread under the mountains. Some called it a coal camp, but it was different from the others. Montana Coal and Iron, the firm that owned the area’s largest mine, didn’t rule the community—there was no company store that the miners were forced to patronize, no company-owned houses they had to live in. The residents of Bearcreek were free to shop and sleep where they wanted. There were two hotels, rows of profitable businesses, a hospital, and a bank. People said it was a little slice of utopia, this village that sprouted up in the middle of vast natural beauty.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Kushner Resnick”

Here's another feature from our holiday sale. Read from the Introduction of Nebraska's Cowboy Trail: A User's Guide by Keith Terry:

"The Cowboy Trail stretches 321 miles across the northern part of Nebraska. It begins in Norfolk, in the northeast area of the state, and extends to Chadron in the northwest. The trail follows the route of the old Cowboy Line, which was used by the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley and later the Chicago & North Western railroads between about 1870 and 1992.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Nebraska’s Cowboy Trail by Keith Terry”

Read from the introduction of American Hoops: U.S. Men's Olympic Basketball from Berlin to Beijing by Carson Cunningham:

"Over the past eighty years, basketball’s sweeping international growth has come about because of the creativity and acumen of individuals on and off the court. The history of the U.S. men’s basketball team at the Olympic Games shows this in striking fashion.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: American Hoops by Carson Cunningham”