Tears In The Grass

Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction — Shortlisted For Elinor Greystone, the only way forward is back into the past. At ninety years of age, Elinor, a Saskatchewan Cree artist, inveterate roll-your-own smoker, and talker to rivers and stuffed bison, sets out to find something that was stolen almost a lifetime ago. With what little time she has left, she is determined to find the child taken from her after she, only a child herself, was raped at a residential school. It is 1968, and a harsh winter and harsher attitudes await Elinor, her daughter, and her granddaughter as they set out on an odyssey to right past wrongs, enduring a present that tests their spirit and chips away at their aboriginal heritage. Confronting a history of trauma, racism, love, and cultural survival, Tears in the Grass is the story of an unflagging woman searching for the courage to open her heart to a world that tried to tear it out.

The Byrne family is strong, but are being tested everyday as life becomes more and more desperate in 19th century rural Ireland, forcing the family to leave their homeland.

Yolanda sets out with family and friends to help her grandmother and discovers long-buried secrets about a family curse and the healing power of the magic surrounding her.

"Meissner has the storyteller's gift for creative living characters, living speech, living emotions, living drama. He knows his small town baseball, but beyond that, he knows the human spirit." --Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried "In Spirits in the Grass, Meissner explores the hidden heart of America's Midwest--scratching hard at his character's dreams to release their nightmares, their truths. His words are supple as grass, his language a graceful dance that is a pure joy to read." --Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer "This novel is a rare achievement, an extraordinary story of a man's desire to resurrect his past, to redeem and restore the world he knew as a boy, while he confronts the crimes around him. Juxtaposing baseball, Native American history and religion, and small town life, Meissner has created a genuine original." --Jonis Agee, University of Nebraska, author of South of Resurrection and The River Wife "Bill Meissner's Spirits in the Grass is nothing short of stunning, his mastery of the prose is evident in virtually every sentence as it intensifies and heightens the intrigue of the wonderful story being told. This is a vibrant and original novel, a triumph, and Meissner's linguistic veracity places him among the finest prose stylists writing today." --Jack Driscoll, author of How Like an Angel In Spirits in the Grass we meet Luke Tanner, a thirty-something baseball player helping to build a new baseball field in his beloved hometown of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Luke looks forward to trying out for the local amateur team as soon as possible. His chance discovery of a small bone fragment on the field sets in motion a series of events and discoveries that will involve his neighbors, local politicians, and the nearby Native American reservation. Luke's life, most of all, will be transformed. His growing obsession with the ball field and what's beneath it threatens his still fragile relationship with his partner, Louise, and challenges Luke's assumptions about everyone, especially himself.

Appeared on best of the year lists from The New York Times, The Guardian, and more! Winner of The Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic of the Year! Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War—a disputed chapter in twentieth-century Asian history. Beginning in Lee’s childhood, Grass shows the lead-up to the war from a child’s vulnerable perspective, detailing how one person experienced the Japanese occupation and the widespread suffering it entailed for ordinary Koreans. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim emphasizes Lee’s strength in overcoming the many forms of adversity she experienced. Grass is painted in a black ink that flows with lavish details of the beautiful fields and farmland of Korea and uses heavy brushwork on the somber interiors of Lee’s memories. The cartoonist Gendry-Kim’s interviews with Lee become an integral part of Grass, forming the heart and architecture of this powerful nonfiction graphic novel and offering a holistic view of how Lee’s wartime suffering changed her. Grass is a landmark graphic novel that makes personal the desperate cost of war and the importance of peace.

Strong, sassy women and hard-luck, hard-headed men, all searching for the middle ground between Native American tradition and the modern world, perform an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance in this magical, rollicking tale by award-winning author Thomas King. Alberta, Eli, Lionel and others are coming to the Blackfoot reservation for the Sun Dance. There they will encounter four Indian elders and their companion, the trickster Coyote—and nothing in the small town of Blossom will be the same again. . . .

The “marvelously funny” and much-loved humorist explores the perils of suburban living in this New York Times bestseller (Vogue). For years, the Bombecks have heard rumors of a magical land called Suburbia where the air is clean, the grass is trimmed, and children don’t risk getting mugged on their walk to school. After watching their friends flee the city for subdivided utopias like Bonaparte’s Retreat and Mortgage Mañana, Erma and her family load up their belongings and cry, “Station wagons . . . ho!” But life on the suburban frontier is not as perfect as they had hoped. The trees are stunted, the house is cramped, and there’s no grass at all. But the Bombecks will make do, for they are suburbanites now—the last true pioneers! This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erma Bombeck including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.