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.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Dream of Reason by Rosa Chacel”

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. 

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Seldom Seen by Patrick Dobson”

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.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Frantic Francis by Brett Perkins”