As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously...

Me Talk Pretty One Day contains far more than just the funniest collection of autobiographical essays - it quite well registers as a manifesto about language itself. Wherever there's a straight line, you can be sure that Sedaris lurks beneath the text, making it jagged with laughter; and just where the fault lines fall, he sits mischievously perched at the epicenter of it all.

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of five boisterous sons. The ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. As the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known, Violeta's family loses all and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. She...

"The untold history of the people who helped spark America's most important social movements from the Revolutionary War to today: teenage girls. Nine months before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on asegregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1912, women's rights activists organized a massive march in support of women's suffrage, led up Fifth Ave in Manhattan, not by Susan B. Anthony, but by a...

"Carolyn is in a wheelchair, but she doesn't let that stop her! She can do almost everything the other kids can, even if sometimes she has to do it a little differently"--

In essays written over the course of more than a decade, Harrison has created a beautifully detailed and rigorously honest family album. She writes for the first time in almost two decades about her affair with her father, and how she has reckoned with the girl she once was. Harrison writes about the birth of her youngest daughter, and how she finally came to understand her own mother's attitudes toward parenting. And she reflects on the loss of her...

"As Jenny Lawson's hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken (in the best possible way), she explores her experimental treatment of transcranial magnetic stimulation with brutal honesty. But also with brutal humor: "People do different things to distract themselves during each treatment. I embroider. It feels fitting. I'm being magnetically stabbed in the head thousands of times as I'm stabbing the embroidery myself....

"Violeta viene al mundo un tormentoso día de 1920, siendo la primera niña de una familia de cinco bulliciosos hermanos. Desde el principio su vida estará marcada por acontecimientos extraordinarios, pues todavía se sienten las ondas expansivas de la Gran Guerra cuando la gripe española llega a las orillas de su país sudamericano natal, casi en el momento exacto de su nacimiento. Gracias a la clarividencia del padre, la familia saldrá indemne...

"Welsit is a 12 year old girl like almost any other you might know except she is a member of an important yet relatively small historically important group of people in America. Welsit shares an exciting Saturday with the readers by telling them about the activities she looks forward to at the anxiously anticipated annual Lenape Pow Wow. Welsit's mother is a vendor at the yearly event and she takes great pride in helping her mother to present her...

"Keena Roberts split her adolescence between the wilds of an island camp in Botswana and the even more treacherous halls of an elite Philadelphia private school. In Africa, she slept in a tent, cooked over a campfire, and lived each day alongside the baboon colony her parents were studying. She could wield a spear as easily as a pencil, and it wasn't unusual to be chased by lions or elephants on any given day. But for the months of the year when her...