{"title":"The Sue William Silverman Prize For Creative Nonfiction","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"ghostbread-book-sonja-livingston-9780820336879","title":"Ghostbread","description":"“When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through.” Ghostbread makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that shape the life of a girl growing up in poverty during the 1970s.  One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. From an old farming town to an Indian reservation to a dead-end urban neighborhood, Livingston and her siblings follow their nonconformist mother from one ramshackle house to another on the perpetual search for something better.  Along the way, the young Sonja observes the harsh realities her family encounters, as well as small moments of transcendent beauty that somehow keep them going. While struggling to make sense of her world, Livingston perceives the stresses and patterns that keep children—girls in particular—trapped in the cycle of poverty.  Larger cultural experiences such as her love for Wonder Woman and Nancy Drew and her experiences with the Girl Scouts and Roman Catholicism inform this lyrical memoir. Livingston firmly eschews sentimentality, offering instead a meditation on what it means to hunger and showing that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49556245348625,"sku":"GOR013101414","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49917065396497,"sku":"CIN0820336874G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50311910031633,"sku":"CIN0820336874VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008404554001,"sku":"NIN9780820336879","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52105646539025,"sku":"CIN0820336874A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52428364087569,"sku":"NLS9780820336879","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820336874.jpg?v=1751106806"},{"product_id":"dough-book-mort-zachter-9780820329345","title":"Dough","description":"Mort Zachter's childhood revolved around a small shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side known in the neighbourhood as the day-old bread store. It was a bakery owned by his two eccentric uncles. In Dough, he chronicles the life-altering discovery that he was heir to several million dollars his uncles had secretly amassed in stocks and bonds.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49688058233105,"sku":"CIN0820329347G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363062026513,"sku":"CIN0820329347A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50523969978641,"sku":"CIN0820329347VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820329347.jpg?v=1751264873"},{"product_id":"companion-to-an-untold-story-book-marcia-aldrich-9780820343372","title":"Companion to an Untold Story","description":"When Marcia Aldrich’s friend took his own life at the age of forty-six, they had known each other many years. As part of his preparations for death, he gave her many of his possessions, concealing his purposes in doing so, and when he committed his long-contemplated act, he was alone in a bare apartment.  In Companion to an Untold Story, Aldrich struggles with her own failure to act on her suspicions about her friend’s intentions. She pieces together the rough outline of his plan to die and the details of its execution. Yet she acknowledges that she cannot provide a complete narrative of why he killed himself. The story remains private to her friend, and out of that difficulty is born another story— the aftershocks of his suicide and the author’s responses to what it set in motion.  This book, modeled on the type of reference book called a “companion,” attempts to find a form adequate to the way these two stories criss-cross, tangle, knot, and break. Organized alphabetically, the entries introduce, document, and reflect upon how suicide is so resistant to acceptance that it swallows up other aspects of a person’s life. Aldrich finds an indirect approach to her friend’s death, assembling letters, objects, and memories to archive an ungrievable loss and create a memorial to a life that does not easily make a claim on public attention. Intimate and austere, clear eyed and tender, this innovative work creates a new form in which to experience grief, remembrance, and reconciliation.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49802185244945,"sku":"CIN0820343374G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820343374.jpg?v=1750947268"},{"product_id":"longer-we-were-there-book-steven-moore-9780820355665","title":"The Longer We Were There","description":"The war in Afghanistan creates an urgency for telling stories—between soldiers, as they hand off missions to each other, and between soldiers and civilians, trying to explain what is going on—while also denying a lot of the context that is important for the telling of that story. The landscape is so mountainous and isolating that one incident or anecdote might not fit into a bigger picture beyond itself. A patrol may have no effect on the one that comes next. The war has ground itself into such a stasis that it is hard to see movement or plot. Yet we’re there. We have to say something. We have to be accountable, even though the circumstances complicate the ability to talk about it while simultaneously creating a constant yearning to do so.  The Longer We Were There follows a part-time soldier’s experience over seven years in the Iowa Army National Guard. He enlists at seventeen into the infantry, then bounces between college classes, army training, disaster relief, civilian jobs, a deployment in Afghanistan—first on the Afghan-Pakistani border, then into a remote valley in the Hindu Kush Mountains—and finally comes home. His stories are about having one foot on each side of the civilian-military divide, the difficulty of describing one side to those on the other, and how, as a consequence of this difficulty, that divide gets replicated within the self.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008276660497,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008279609617,"sku":"NIN9780820355665","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52113952637201,"sku":"CIN0820355666VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820355666.jpg?v=1750745845"},{"product_id":"study-in-perfect-book-sarah-gorham-9780820351438","title":"Study in Perfect","description":"Study in Perfect is an exploration of perfection. In “Moving Horizontal” a Victorian house loses its charm over time, especially when compared to a modernist contemporary filled with light. Family life is dense with pleasure, as in the perfect vacation described in “Marking Time in Door County,” and in “Neriage, or What Is the Secret of a Long Marriage,” where an ancient Japanese ceramic technique has much in common with shaping a close relationship. There is such a thing as a perfect cup of tea, depending on who is preparing and drinking it (“Perfect Tea”). And schmaltzy show tunes flowing from a black-lacquered piano in a Chinese restaurant can be genuinely moving (“Sentimental à la Carte”).  Naturally, Gorham must embrace imperfection. The poisonous mushrooms in “Darling Amanita” lead to a consideration of our darker impulses, like obsessive love, even murder. And there is pain: “The Shape of Fear” relates the story of a child stricken with a deadly staph infection, as it considers the function and form of fear. And alcoholism, the family disease no one wants to talk about, is poised against The Cat in the Hat, a story everyone has read and enjoyed.  Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection’s exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008294650129,"sku":"NIN9780820351438","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52433058922769,"sku":"NLS9780820351438","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820351431.jpg?v=1750818744"},{"product_id":"life-of-miracles-along-the-yangtze-and-mississippi-book-wang-ping-9780820353920","title":"Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi","description":"There are only two ways to live our life, according to Albert Einstein: one is as if nothing is a miracle; the other, as if everything is a miracle.  Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi is a book about how the impossible became possible—about things that happened in China and America to the people Wang Ping grew up with, met, and befriended along her journeys between these two distant rivers. This is also a story about water, alive with spirits and energy, giving birth to all sentient beings. We are water. The river runs through us. Those who live in harmony with water can ride the current of the universe—the secret of Tao, reaching all the way to the sea of miracles, one story, one droplet, and one wave at a time.  A miracle is a state of mind, a way of living: how we face hardship, pain, and tragedies, how we transform them into fuels for our journey and transcend them into joy and hope. This is a book about how ordinary people perform miracles every day; how we are touched, touching, all the time, across oceans and continents, across time and space, through our stories.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008312836369,"sku":"NIN9780820353920","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820353922.jpg?v=1766139193"},{"product_id":"vanished-gardens-book-sharon-white-9780820337821","title":"Vanished Gardens","description":"New to living and gardening in Philadelphia, Sharon White begins a journey through the landscape of the city, past and present, in Vanished Gardens. In prose now as precise and considered as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, White explores Philadelphia's gardens as a part of the city's ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home.  In one section of the book, White tours the gardens of colonial botanist John Bartram; his wife, Ann; and their son, writer and naturalist William. Other chapters focus on Deborah Logan, who kept a record of her life on a large farm in the late eighteenth century, and Mary Gibson Henry, twentieth-century botanist, plant collector, and namesake of the lily Hymenocallis henryae. Throughout White weaves passages from diaries, letters, and memoirs from significant Philadephia gardeners into her own striking prose, transforming each place she examines into a palimpsest of the underlying earth and the human landscapes layered over it.  White gives a surprising portrait of the resilience and richness of the natural world in Philadelphia and of the ways that gardening can connect nature to urban space. She shows that although gardens may vanish forever, the meaning and solace inherent in the act of gardening are always waiting to be discovered anew.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008353960209,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008357662993,"sku":"NIN9780820337821","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52146509218065,"sku":"NLS9780820337821","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/082033782X.jpg?v=1750787052"},{"product_id":"other-girls-to-burn-book-caroline-crew-9780820360430","title":"Other Girls to Burn","description":"Other Girls to Burn is a collection of essays that explores the relationship between women and violence within such contexts as the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, early Christian virgin martyrs (discussed in relation with modern true crime stories), mixed martial arts, and rape culture. Formally inventive and lyric leaning, these essays shift between cultural criticism and personal essay and cohere around a central motif of female mystics. With them, Caroline Crew asks, What does it mean for women to be complicit in the violence of the patriarchy? How do women navigate risk as well as revel in thrill? What does it mean to both fear and perpetuate violence?   The essays explore disparate cultural touch points, such as contemporary feminism, race, hagiography, the Salem witch trials, dementia, fairy tales, Eurydice, indie music, gender performance, Anne Boleyn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, family dysfunction, and vaginismus, to name a few. Together, this collection is in conversation with contemporary nonfiction writers such as Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, and Anne Boyer.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008399278353,"sku":"NIN9780820360430","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820360430.jpg?v=1766140110"},{"product_id":"moses-unchained-book-marilyn-f-moriarty-9780820339962","title":"Moses Unchained","description":"Moses Unchained is the moving true story of a modern outlaw’s struggle with faith, betrayal, and the accidental nature of life. Zack Rosen was a simple man, but one with many contrasts. An urban Jew from New Jersey who moved south and converted to fundamentalist Christianity, he was not a philosopher or theologian but a man’s man, a tattooed truck driver who built a classic Harley-Davidson from spare parts. Zack met and married Shelley, another converted Jew, but their happiness was brief. Secrets from Shelley’s past came back to haunt them, and her sudden death from pneumon\/ia revealed that she had AIDS and she had given the virus to Zack.  Suddenly faced with the loss of his family, his job, his income, and eventually, his own life, Zack became an itinerant evangelist. He introduced himself to author Marilyn F. Moriarty in 1993 with the words, “I got an honorable testimony.” She listened to this story and became his friend and caregiver. At his request, she has told his story here.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008401572113,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008404979985,"sku":"NIN9780820339962","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52588242796817,"sku":"NLS9780820339962","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820339962.jpg?v=1751076235"},{"product_id":"companion-to-an-untold-story-book-marcia-aldrich-9780820349800","title":"Companion to an Untold Story","description":"When Marcia Aldrich’s friend took his own life at the age of forty-six, they had known each other many years. As part of his preparations for death, he gave her many of his possessions, concealing his purposes in doing so, and when he committed his long-contemplated act, he was alone in a bare apartment.  In Companion to an Untold Story, Aldrich struggles with her own failure to act on her suspicions about her friend’s intentions. She pieces together the rough outline of his plan to die and the details of its execution. Yet she acknowledges that she cannot provide a complete narrative of why he killed himself. The story remains private to her friend, and out of that difficulty is born another story— the aftershocks of his suicide and the author’s responses to what it set in motion.  This book, modeled on the type of reference book called a “companion,” attempts to find a form adequate to the way these two stories criss-cross, tangle, knot, and break. Organized alphabetically, the entries introduce, document, and reflect upon how suicide is so resistant to acceptance that it swallows up other aspects of a person’s life. Aldrich finds an indirect approach to her friend’s death, assembling letters, objects, and memories to archive an ungrievable loss and create a memorial to a life that does not easily make a claim on public attention. Intimate and austere, clear eyed and tender, this innovative work creates a new form in which to experience grief, remembrance, and reconciliation.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008414384401,"sku":"NIN9780820349800","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820349801.jpg?v=1751139351"},{"product_id":"unmothered-untongued-book-lee-horikoshi-roripaugh-9780820374413","title":"unMothered, unTongued","description":"unMothered, unTongued is a collection of lyric essays written from the liminal space of the in-between. These essays thread themselves around questions of language, landscape, and identity, weaving together intersectionalities and intertextualities. Author Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, a biracial LGBTQIA+ Nisei who was born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming, to a non-native-English-speaking Issei mother, considers not only the tensions in the rifts between intersectional identities (biracial Nisei, LGBTQIA+) but also the tensions between marginalized identities and the landscapes and cultures of the American West; the tensions between nonnative, second, erased, and\/or forgotten languages; and the tensions between those who abuse and those who survive. These rifts, intersections, and fractures, while frequently a source of violence and immense grief, are also a source of illumination and clarity. The essays in this collection are written almost entirely in hybrid\/lyric forms—oftentimes braided, oftentimes patchworked, oftentimes segmented—reflecting some of the fractured complexities and intersections of Horikoshi Roripaugh’s own hybrid identities.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52507105460497,"sku":"NIN9780820374413","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52630516400401,"sku":"NGR9780820374413","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820374413.jpg?v=1765448639"},{"product_id":"themes-for-english-b-book-j-d-scrimgeour-9780820375557","title":"Themes for English B","description":"In Themes for English B a teacher ponders the nature of meaningful learning, both in and beyond the classroom. J. D. Scrimgeour contrasts his Ivy League education to the experiences of his students at a small public college in a faded, gritty New England city. What little Scrimgeour knows of the burdens his students bring to class—family crises, dead-end jobs, overdue bills—leaves him humbled. Fighting disenchantment with the ideals of higher education, Scrimgeour writes, \"How much I owe these students, how much I have learned. They know the score; they know they are losing by a lot before the game even begins, and they shrug, as if to say, 'What am I supposed to do, cry?'\"  Scrimgeour's obligations to his students and his hopes for them glance off each other and sometimes collide with the realities of the classroom: the unread assignments and the empty desks. Is there too great a student-teacher divide? Can Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, or any other writer Scrimgeour teaches have something to say to a single mother with a full course load, two jobs, a sick kid, and a broken car? Yes, it turns out, and it is magic when it happens.  The pupil inside the teacher emerges when Scrimgeour finds unexpected occasions for his own ongoing education. Pickup basketball games at a local park become exercises in improvisation, in finding new strengths to compensate for age and injury. His collaboration on a word-and-movement performance piece with a colleague, a dancer mourning the death of a beloved niece, leads him into unfamiliar creative terrain.  A routine catch on a baseball field long ago, a challenged student in a grade school writing workshop, a yellowed statue of education pioneer Horace Mann: each memory, each encounter, forces revisions to a life's lesson plan. Scrimgeour's achingly honest, intimate essays offer clear-eyed yet compassionate accounts of the trials of learning.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52619741233425,"sku":"NLS9780820375557","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740339237137,"sku":"NIN9780820375557","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820375557.jpg?v=1761536717"},{"product_id":"riots-book-danielle-cadena-deulen-9780820344386","title":"The Riots","description":"Constantly surprising, these personal essays explore the attractions and dangers of intimacy and the violence that often arises in close relationships. Deulen's artful storytelling and dialogue also draw the reader into complicated questions about class, race, and gender.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740314562833,"sku":"NIN9780820344386","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820344386.jpg?v=1763482461"},{"product_id":"increase-book-lia-purpura-9780820348407","title":"Increase","description":"This is Lia Purpura's chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. She recounts her journey with the heightened awareness of a mother-to-be and through the eyes of a poet.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740349821201,"sku":"NIN9780820348407","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820348407.jpg?v=1763482660"},{"product_id":"mountain-blood-book-will-baker-9780820347622","title":"Mountain Blood","description":"The recollections and yarns, historical meditations and reportage brought together in Mountain Blood display a sensibility formed by the harsh, outlandishly beautiful terrain of the American West. Will Baker s tales range from Nebraska to Peru and tell of a boy s first trout, a bar brawl over a woman, and the vise-like grip of gold over all of the Americas. They spring from an imagination shaped by wild, circuitous mealtime stories of prospectors and from the bitter history of a place where suburban ranch houses dot the vast sweep of land once hunted by the Lakotah.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53490210472209,"sku":"NIN9780820347622","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820347622.jpg?v=1777732121"},{"product_id":"executrix-book-brittany-perham-9780820377780","title":"Executrix","description":"Executrix begins with a mystery: Why would the author’s father, from whom she had been estranged for more than a decade, change his will in the weeks before his death to make her the executor of his estate? Executrix charts the process of sorting out the business of this indebted estate using the language of real estate foreclosure, income tax audits, and medical records. The executor transforms the disjointed details of a life into a tidy financial narrative that meets the demands of claimants; the writer transforms the disjointed details of a life into a story that meets the demands of memory. Through this twin accounting, Perham asks the big questions: What are the implications of being the child of an alcoholic? How do we reconcile memories that are fragmented, elided, or nonexistent? And what does it mean to write true “nonfiction”? With surprising humor, real tenderness, and, above all, a daring formal inventiveness, Executrix launches a critical investigation into family stories and secrets, and the genre of memoir itself.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53500814360849,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53500814754065,"sku":"NGR9780820377780","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820377780.jpg?v=1778024047"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/the-sue-william-silverman-prize-for-creative-nonfiction-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}