Nonfiction
by Justine Payton.
“Just five months ago, you hiked to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, whitewater rafted down the Nile, climbed volcanoes in Rwanda. Now, from the neck down, your body is unresponsive.”
by Laura LeMoon.
“The things I’ve had to do to survive were part of the price I paid to be seen…Freedom in one moment became bondage in the next. Chains exploded into power. No one thing is any one thing.”
by William Walker.
“My son is a rule follower and rules generate endless questions, the answers to which often reflect the crushing reality that I cannot guarantee his safety, that there is an unsettling element of chance in a city of over eight million people.”
by Elizabeth Crowell.
“Dr. H’s earnestness was more apparent the second time we met with him, when we weren’t hearing the bad news for the first time. In a full-lit room not dimmed for ultrasounds, he was a handsome, dark-haired man, a decade younger than Cheryl and I.”
by Katherine Lien Chariott.
“I know who you are. You are the girl of twenty, in that black and white photograph I held onto for years, that girl so beautiful she filled me with shame, just as she filled me with pride.”
by Lindsay Starck.
“If this scene—these baskets of bread, this mediocre rice, that parking lot awash with light—is familiar to me from all the other funerals we’ve attended here, how much more familiar is it to him? He drags his fork across his plate and the room seems to collapse.”
by Toni Mirosevich.
“You float down the river and soon learn this isn’t a joy ride, you’re not free yet, of duty, of care, of what binds you to the earth; there’s one more job to do. It’s your task to turf the unessential cargo.”
by William McGrath.
“Thato is a small sad boy who has come to stay at the safe home in Lesotho, up in the cloudvoid in the eastern mountains of Mokhotlong district. His mother is dead and his father is off working somewhere…”
by Nicki Porter.
“At home, you unload each item with a quiet smile and feel a pinching like a tiny crab below your belly. You imagine a poppy seed nestling in, burrowing, seeking shelter within you, preparing to stay.”