Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

"Long Live the Red Terror!"

Fan Shen

Moving Water, Tucson

Peggy Shumaker

Winter 1997

Laurie Alberts

The Weight of Spoons

Charles Barber

Hard Luck Suit

John Skoyles

Fortuna

Brenda Serotte

The Boys of Summer

Marvin V. Arnett

Excerpt from "Winter"

Ted Kooser

Son of Mr. Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers

Dinty W. Moore

Good, Alright, Fine

Eli Hastings

Acting

Dinah Lenney

And There Fell a Great Star

Natalia Rachel Singer

Not Coming Out

Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz

Excerpt from Phantom Limb

Janet Sternburg

Alternatives, 1979

Mary Felstiner

Excerpt from "The Second Trimester"

Jonathan Johnson

A Measure of Acceptance

Floyd Skloot

The New Kitchen

Mimi Schwartz

One I Love, Two I Love

Lee Martin

Excerpt from "The Promise of Power"

Sonya Huber

Source Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

Promotional Information

Collection of excerpts from the American Lives series

About the Author

Alicia Christensen is the Bison Books editor at the University of Nebraska Press. Tobias Wolff is the author of numerous books, including the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War; the novel Old School; and, most recently, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. Contributors: Laurie Alberts, Marvin V. Arnett, Charles Barber, Mary Felstiner, Eli Hastings, Sonya Huber, Jonathan Johnson, Ted Kooser, Dinah Lenney, Aaron Raz Link, Lee Martin, Dinty W. Moore, Hilda Raz, Mimi Schwartz, Brenda Serotte, Fan Shen, Peggy Shumaker, Natalia Rachel Singer, Floyd Skloot, John Skoyles, and Janet Sternburg.

Reviews

"You will see [the] quality of recognizable humanity glittering throughout the memoirs from which this book was drawn... These writers are intensely interested in what lies beyond them---how the world at large acts, and acts on them, and, finally, hesitantly, how they themselves have acted upon the world. This is, after all, history---history from the inside out." from Tobias Wolff's introduction