In his essay on Tennessee Williams, the author reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, he examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever's journals he makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. Educating an intellectual woman, Cheever remarked, is like letting...

"Chained to the Desk both counsels and consoles. It provides a step-by-step guide to help readers spot work addiction, understand the damage it causes, and how to recover from it"--

"Calvin Sidey is a cowboy of the old-school, no-guff sort: steely, hardened, with his own personal code. It's the 1960s, and he's living off the grid in a stifling trailer on the prairie when his adult son, Bill, seeks his help. A mostly absentee father, and a virtual no-show as a grandfather, Calvin nevertheless reluctantly agrees to stay with his grandchildren for a week. He decamps for his son's dark and musty basement, to the small town where...

When a car accident leaves forty-year-old Burke Crenshaw in need of temporary full-time care, he finds himself back in the Vermont home where he grew up as be begins the long recuperation. A burgeoning relationship with the twenty-year-old son of Burke's high school best friend draws him out of himself and into the community he left behind. Exploring local history, he discovers an intriguing series of letters from a Civil War soldier to his fiance....

"In All Our Families, disability studies scholar Jennifer Natalya Fink argues that our fear of disability and conception of it as trauma originates in our families. When we cut a disabled member out of the family narrative, they do not disappear. Instead, they are marginalized, silenced, erased from the story the family tells about itself. Weaving together stories of her own disability lineage with historical analysis, Fink illustrates how the eradication...

Chronicles the emotional war between Irene America, a beautiful, introspective woman of Native American ancestry, struggling to finish her dissertation while raising three children, and her husband Gil, a painter whose reputation is built on a series of now iconic portraits of Irene.

The inspiring story of a son and his dying mother, who form a "book club" that brings them together as her life comes to a close.

Using extensive interviews with people ages 25 to 70, editor Isay shows that we're far from alone in our struggles to make this adult relationship work. Isay charts a course through the confusing and often painful interactions parents and children can face, offering up groundbreaking insights and moving stories that will inspire those in even the toughest situations. You'll learn why silence really is golden, and how sometimes the smallest gesture...