Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his reader to a ground-level perspective, resreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath my soles," his worn tennies smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock breathing the defeat of basesall." The child's world is made up of small things--small, very important things.

Fiction. Latin American Studies. "If you read one book of stories this year, make it this one. LIVE FROM FRESNO Y LOS kicks out the jams, and takes no prisoners. Enjoy, and tell a friend"--Virgil Suarez. "Stunning. Really, a lovely and loving collection of stories, nicely balanced between the vernacular and the literarily eloquent"--Lamar Herrin. "There is an ineradicable sweetness to these stories, accompanied by the crisp and happy bemusement of a genuine voice--the sound of one person speaking directly to another, and not from the head, but from that most mysterious of mouths, the human heart"--Jim Krusoe.

An astonishing memoir that "demonstrates the true meaning of family" from the author of The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark, detailing the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s and (Chicago Tribune). As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years -- a book the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liar's Club. McLain's beautiful writing and limber voice capture the intense loneliness, sadness, and determination of a young girl both on her own and responsible, with her siblings, for staying together as a family.

In a prose that is so beautiful it is poetry, we see the world of growing up and going somewhere through the dust and heat of Fresno's industrial side and beyond: It is a boy's coming of age in the barrio, parochial school, attending church, public summer school, and trying to fall out of love so he can join in a Little League baseball team. His is a clarity that rings constantly through the warmth and wry reality of these sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, always human remembrances.

The exuberant personalities of 22 landmark buildings in downtown Fresno are captured in watercolor portraits and brief explanations of each structure's significance in this architectural survey. Covering well-known properties in all stages of repair, this collection includes images of the Hotel Californian, the Liberty Theater, the Meux Home, the Pacific Southwest Building, the Southern Pacific Railroad Depot, and Warnors Theater. Including a glossary of architectural terms and a bibliography, this nostalgic look at the historic past and current rebirth of central Fresno pays stirring homage to the area's unique architectural heritage.