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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Here's another excerpt from our featured gift book ideas. Read from Breathing in the Fullness of Time by William Kloefkorn. Visit our holiday sale page for a special discount code.

"Desire. Without it, you might as well pack up and go home. Fran Welch, Coach Welch, had said this when the season began, then repeated it at frequent but irregular intervals as the season moved along. By now, I had decided I no longer wanted to play college football. So I turned in my gear and went home, but not before Coach Welch gave me an asschewing I'll not live long enough to forget. Before the chewing began, though, he wanted to know why in the name of Christ I was quitting.

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Here's an excerpt from a featured gift book idea, Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time by Ted Kooser. If you'd like to purchase Lights on a Ground of Darkness, check out our holiday sale for a special discount code.

"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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Today we're highlighting one of the books featured in our cooking sale. Read from "As the Corkscrew Turns" in Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country byRobert V. Camuto:

"It was a perfect day to lose faith in wine. By midmorning on June 21, 2005, the heat and humidity were conspiring to make it another in a series of stifling hot days in Bordeaux. I’d set out from Saint-Émilion in my tiny Citroën rental car—windows rolled down to make up for the lack of air conditioning—en route to Vinexpo, the world’s largest wine convention held once every two years in the sprawling convention site north of the city.

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