Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

The best-selling author and Emmy Award-winning writer and producer hilariously destroys the cultural myths and impossible expectations of modern-day motherhood and explores the humiliations, poignancies, and possibilities of midlife.

Contents: In her comic, scathing essay, "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. This updated edition with two new essays of this national bestseller book features that...

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of thoughts—always adroit, often acerbic—on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation.
Ursula K. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: "If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub."
On cultural perceptions of fantasy: "The direction of escape is toward freedom. So...

"A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy is a new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by touching pieces from the beloved author's many friends. A Lowcountry Heart collects some of Conroy's most charming pieces of short nonfiction, many of them addressed directly to his readers with his habitual greeting, "Hey, Out There." Ranging across diverse...

Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents' lives--or so he was told. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. Fitzgerald's memoir-in-essays...

We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there's nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes...