Southern Appalachia. He was born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Damon braves the perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes...

Relates how an enterprising teenager in Malawi builds a windmill from scraps he finds around his village and brings electricity, and a future, to his family.

When Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, thought about writing an appreciation of his mother and a memoir of his life, he hesitated. How would mama feel about seeing her life in print? When he asked her, she told him, "Write it," especially since she had remained quiet about her life for 50 years. All Over but the Shoutin' tells the story of a woman who endures years of hardship and deprivation to raise her three sons. It is not a simple...

Tess of the dUrbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies...

An opportunistic Southern lawyer compromises his ideals and exploits people to gain fame, only to be destroyed when he goes one step too far, becoming involved in bank fraud. The story of a man's descent from idealistic beginnings into a world of dishonesty and greed--and of the two women who love him. Robb MacDaniel, a schoolteacher with noble intentions, comes into a little money, enabling him to go to law school. Upon graduation, he goes to work...

The former president offers an account of growing up on a Georgia farm during the Depression and provides profiles of the people who shaped his life.

"The Unsettling of America" is Wendell Berry's personal, dramatic inquiry into the way in which we use the land that sustains us. For the roots of our attitudes toward farming, Berry goes back to the industrial revolution, which promised freedom from physical toil, and to the "conquistador" mentality that ruled the settlement of North America, treating land, resources, and ultimately people as infinitely expendable. Out of this history comes a disturbing,...

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. Small things like these is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy. -- Adapted from...