Saturday Night Dirt

In a small town in northern Minnesota, the much-anticipated Saturday night dirt-track race at the old-fashioned, barely viable Headwaters Speedway becomes, in many ways, an important life-changing event for all the participants on and off the track.

Trace Bonham is living large as the teen driver for a pro Super Stock racing team. He's on billboards and on the road instead of stuck in school. And he's blowing away the competition wherever he races. But Trace is worried that those who think his crew is illegally "juicing" his engine may be right. It's up to him to discover what is going on--and what he's going to do about it.

After a couple of seasons of small-town racing, things are shifting into high gear for a young dirt-track driver with the skills to make it big. Trace Bonham has landed a corporate sponsor and a custom-built dream ride. But this means Trace can no longer pilot his dad's Street Stock Chevy, and must let a new kid get behind the wheel. It also means having to turn his back on his hometown speedway, which his team leaders think is a hayseed operation not worth their time, even though it's run by a girl who matters to Trace in a big way. Filled with authentic race-car action and detail, Will Weaver's fast-paced novel is the story of a boy struggling with the speed and demands of his own success.

Before the "new journalism" of Wolfe, Talese, and Kubrick, before the Brave Gonzo World of Hunter S. Thompson, there was legendary cult writer Terry Southern. This widely recognized underground classic is a collection of Southern's short pieces--two dozen hilarious, well-observed sketches which expose the hypocrisy of American social mores.

A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt unearths the joys and ordeals of growing up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, the author bears witness to a family and community that still cling to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

Ash is still falling from the sky two years after a series of globally devastating volcanic eruptions. Sunlight is as scarce as food, and cities are becoming increasingly violent as people loot and kill in order to maintain their existence. Sixteen-year-old Miles Newell knows that the only chance his family has of surviving is to escape from their Minneapolis suburban home to their cabin in the woods, As the Newells travel the highways on Miles' supreme invention, the Ali Princess, they have high hopes for safety and peace. But as they venture deeper into the wilderness, they begin to realize that it's not only city folk who have changed for the worse.

Set in 1981, "The Officers' Club" captures the passions and confusion of the times, the reckoning due after a decade of indulgence--and the commitment of those who stayed in uniform through the bad years.

“You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street Journal What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen. With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.

In a small town in northern Minnesota, the much-anticipated Saturday night dirt-track race at the old-fashioned, barely viable, Headwaters Speedway becomes, in many ways, an important life-changing event for all the participants on and off the track.