George Pereny is the child of Holocaust survivors; he and his family escaped from Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Pereny taught in the inner cities of Jersey City, Passaic, Paterson and the Bronx for thirty-five years..

My mother's family, my godfather, and my confirmation sponsor, were all from a small Hungarian town called Gyongyos in Heves(mountainous) County an hour north of Budapest at the feet of the Matra Mountains on the northern end of the Great Hungarian Plain. In 1944, there were 22,000 people living in Gyongyos, including about 2500 Jews, most of whom, like my mother's family, perished. A handful, including my mother, survived. This is their story.

THE BUS FOR AMERICA George Pereny's great new book is a mixture of memory, history and poetry, telling the story of a remarkable life that started under the repression of Soviet rule in his native Hungary. His family made a brave and dangerous escape from Hungary when Pereny was a boy, crossing the ocean and coming to the United States after a momentous decision to take the bus for America rather than the bus for Canada. Pereny had an adventurous education in America, coming to love rock music and words, eventually deciding on a teaching career that took him to inner-city neighborhoods and kids in desperate need of his poetry and vision. Along the way he discovered an aptitude and passion for the martial arts and had a spiritual rebirth in Christ. George's story is also a quest for love that brings him to many women until he finds the right one. Like many great books, THE BUS FOR AMERICA ends with a wedding and a new chance for a happy life in Pereny's adopted America.

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

The true story of a young black man's quest: to canoe the length of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans.

“William Zinsser turns his zest, warmth and curiosity—his sharp but forgiving eye—on his own story. The result is lively, funny and moving, especially for anyone who cares about art and the business of writing well.” —Evan Thomas, Newsweek In Writing Places, William Zinsser—the author of On Writing Well, the bestseller that has inspired two generations of writers, journalists, and students—recalls the many colorful and instructive places where he has worked and taught. Gay Talese, author of A Writer’s Life, calls Writing Places, “Wonderful,” while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette praises this unique memoir for possessing “all the qualities that Zinsser believes matter most in good writing—clarity, brevity, simplicity and humanity.”