National Network for Equitable Library Service

Read the critically acclaimed New York Times best-seller with more than one million copies in print. Same Kind of Different as Me was a major motion picture release by Paramount in fall 2017.

Gritty with pain and betrayal and brutality, this true story also shines with an unexpected, life-changing love.

Meet Denver, raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana until he escaped the “Man” – in the 1960’s – by hopping a train. Non-trusting, uneducated, and violent, he spent another 18 years on the streets of Dallas and Fort Worth.

"I Am I Am I Am is a gripping and glorious investigation of death that leaves the reader feeling breathless, grateful, and fully alive. Maggie O'Farrell is a miracle in every sense. I will never forget this book." -Ann Patchett. An extraordinary memoir-told entirely in near-death experiences-from one of Britain's best-selling novelists, for fans of Wild, When Breath Becomes Air, and The Year of Magical Thinking. We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death.

"The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not-could not-live in that tale." Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder.

Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn't seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now.

In this intimate memoir of survival, a former captive of the Islamic State tells her harrowing and ultimately inspiring story. Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon. On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just twenty-one years old, this life ended.

A heart-wrenching, yet hopeful, memoir of a young marriage that is redefined by mental illness and affirms the power of love. Mark and Giulia's life together began as a storybook romance. They fell in love at eighteen, married at twenty-four, and were living their dream life in San Francisco. When Giulia was twenty-seven, she suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break that landed her in the psych ward for nearly a month. One day she was vibrant and well-adjusted; the next she was delusional and suicidal, convinced that her loved ones were not safe.

More adventures from one of Canada's premier editors and storytellers. Canada is a country rich in stories, and few take as much joy as Douglas Gibson in discovering them. As one of the country's leading editors and publishers for 40 years, he coaxed modern classics out of some of Canada's finest minds, and then took to telling his own stories in his first memoir, Stories About Storytellers. Gibson turned his memoir into a one-man stage show that eventually played almost 100 times, in all ten provinces, from coast to coast.

If you live life without a net, what happens when you fall? Kathleen Cremonesi knew early on she wanted to be different. Determined to avoid following in her mother's footsteps to an ill-fated marriage, Kathleen left Oregon in her early 20s to travel across Europe. On a whim, this former administrative assistant with wanderlust took a job as a dancer in an Italian circus and, working her way up, became an ostrich-riding, shark-taming showgirl. Kathleen bonds with the exotic animals that could strike and kill at any moment, but instead bring her a peace she has never known.

Before James Oseland was a judge on Top Chef Masters, he was a teenage rebel growing up in the California suburbs. Diving headfirst into the churning mayhem of punk, he renamed himself Jimmy Neurosis and journeyed into a vibrant underground world of visionary musicians and artists. With humor and verve, Oseland brings to life the effervescent cocktail of music, art, drugs, and sexual adventure that characterized the end of the seventies. Through his account of how creativity saved his life, he tells a thrilling and uniquely American coming-of-age story.

Reema Zaman tells the story of her unwavering fight to protect and free her voice from those who have sought to silence her. From Bangladesh, to Thailand, to New York, to Oregon, through gorgeous prose as beautiful as it is biting, poetic as it is political, and healing as it is haunting, Zaman explores the many difficulties, dangers, and, ultimately, the necessity for all women--all people--to own and use their voices.