Born into the middle of World War II, Gary Paulsen's turbulent childhood provided plenty of subject matter for his bestselling novels, and the librarians in his life gave him the inspiration and support to explore the world through books. As a soldier himself, his storytelling technique developed, and for the first time he shares his own.

Growing up in rural Wyoming, Mark Spragg learned early to read the stars. At 11 he was instructed to quit dreaming, and he went to work for his father on the land. The ranch is a sprawling place where winter brings months of solitude and summer brings tourists from the real world--city types who want a taste of the outdoors and stare at the author and his family as if they were members of some exotic tribe. By the age of 14, he and his younger brother...

Memoir of a Cherokee boyhood in the 1930s, by the man who later went on to write the Josey Wales novels. The Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great Depression.

In 1969, Natalie Kusz and her family abandoned the city, packed up the car, and headed to Alaska. They ended up a hundred miles from Fairbanks in a dilapidated house surrounded by 258 acres of spruce, birch, and willow, and no road. When the first winter came, with Mr. Kusz working in Prudhoe Bay, money running out, and temperatures 60 below, the Kusz family was living so close to disaster that the question was not when it would strike but whom.

From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller, known to friends and family as Bobo, grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerrilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself into their African life and its rugged farmwork with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything. She taught...

A full-blooded Santee Sioux Indian describes his childhood experiences and training as a warrior in the 1870's and 1880's until he was taken to live in the white man's world at age fifteen.

"Drama, family secrets, and a KGB spy in his own kitchen! How will Yevgeny ever fulfill his parents' dream that he become a national hero when he doesn't even have his own room? He's not a star athlete or a legendary ballet dancer. In the tiny apartment he shares with his Baryshnikov-obsessed mother, poetry-loving father, continually outraged grandmother, and safely talented brother, all Yevgeny has is his little pencil, the underside of a massive...

"Amos Oz takes us on a journey through his childhood and adolescence, a quixotic child's-eye view along Jerusalem's wartorn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. And at the tragic heart of the story is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half...

Includes stories that detail Alphabet series heroine Kinsey MIllhone's origins, as well as true tales of the author's past. In 1982, Sue Grafton introduced us to Kinsey Millhone. To mark this anniversary year, Sue has given us stories that reveal just how much of Kinsey is grounded in her own past. The nine stories that open the book are each gems of detection. So much has happened in the decades since Kinsey made her debut that it's easy to forget...

In her first work of nonfiction, winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize Dina Nayeri--an author whose "exploration of the exile's predicament is tender and urgent" (The New Yorker)--examines what it means to be a refugee through her own story of childhood escape from Iran, and through the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers. What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought to, and...