Author Gary Paulsen relates tales from his youth in a small town in northwestern Minnesota in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as skiing behind a souped-up car and imitating daredevil Evel Knievel.

Traces the parallel lives of two youths with the same name in the same community, describing how the author grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar and promising business leader while his counterpart suffered a life of violence and imprisonment.

A fictionalized biography of the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who grew up a painfully shy child, ridiculed by his overbearing father, but who became one of the most widely-read poets in the world. Includes author's note about the poet.

“Startling and astringently poetic.” —The New York Times
A literary discovery: an extraordinary account, in the tradition of The House on Mango Street and Angela’s Ashes, of a Colombian woman’s harrowing childhood
This astonishing memoir was hailed as an instant classic when first published in Colombia in 2012, nearly a decade after the death of its author, who was encouraged in...

Wait Till Next Year is the story of a young girl growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s. When owning a single-family home on a tree-lined street, meant the realization of dreams. When everyone knew everyone else on the block and the children gathered in the streets to play from sunup to sundown. The neighborhood was equally divided among Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. The corner stores were the scenes of fierce and affectionate rivalries....

When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the island but ended up as a delightful account of Durrell's family's experiences, from the many eccentric hangers-on to the ceaseless procession of puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes,...

Boy (CD 1): Dahl's childhood was one of excitement, wonder, terror and sadness. From his fascination with the local sweetshop to the Great Mouse Plot, the horrors of boarding school, the obnoxious Boazers and his time as a chocolate taster for Cadbury's, we hear of the extraordinary events that shaped him and inspired his bestselling books. Going Solo (CD 2 & 3): Setting sail for Africa on the SS Montola, aged 22, Dahl is plunged into an unfamiliar...

A new, brash, and unexpected view of the president we thought we knew, from the bestselling author of Astoria. Two decades before he led America to independence, George Washington was a flailing young soldier serving the British Empire in the vast wilderness of the Ohio Valley. Naive and self-absorbed, the twenty-two-year-old officer accidentally ignited the French and Indian War--a conflict that opened colonists to the possibility of an American...

Michael Keith chronicles the experiences he and his alcoholic father had while they hitchhiked around the country when the author was a boy.