Helen Plum Library

"H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means-now-to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the...

The author's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming

From the New York times best-selling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage--an exploration of motherhood, art and new love

"When aspiring author Charlotte Kingsley finally gets published, she thinks all her dreams have come true. But the trouble begins when her publicity firm reinvents her quirky online presence into a perfectly curated dream life. Gone are the days of sweatpant posts and ice cream binges with her best friend, Anders, replaced instead with beautiful clothes, orchestrated selfies, and no boyfriend. Only, that carefully curated fairy tale life is ruining...

An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigorous interrogation and beautiful style. Joan Didion was a writer's writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life's telling details. Her insights continue to influence...

A collection of works, both fictional and non-fictional, gathered together here for the first time --

"Peggy Rowe is at it again--this time giving a hilarious inside look at her writing career."--Provided by publisher Rowe has been writing all of her adult life- even through years of constant rejection from publishing houses. Between her tenacity and the encouragement of her family, her breakthrough finally came-- at the age of eighty! Here she shares her journey of attending myriad writers' conferences and honing her ability to see humor in everyday...

James chronicles her joyful year in one of the most beautiful cities in the world--Paris--all the while inviting her reader into the life of her most enchanting family

"A heart stopping memoir of a wrenching Appalachian girlhood and a multilayered portrait of a misrepresented people, from Rona Jaffe Writer's Award winner Shawna Kay Rodenberg. When Shawna Kay Rodenberg was four, her father, fresh from a ruinous tour in Vietnam, spirited her family from their home in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to Minnesota, renouncing all of their earthly possessions to live in the Body, an off-the-grid End Times religious community....

"A fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body." -- When Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, the illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Here she explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in...