Stanley Crawford’s memoir of garlic farming in New Mexico, A Garlic Testament

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel of an English family and their servants before World War II, The Light Years, the first book in her Cazalet Chronicle

Milton Mayer’s post-war examination of ten small-town German men who joined the Nazis, They Thought They Were Free

Barry Hines’s coming-of-age story of a boy training a wild kestrel in a town in England’s industrial north, A Kestrel for a Knave

Alma Guillermoprieto’s account of dance schools in Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival celebrations, Samba

Padgett Powell’s coming-of-age story of a boy in Lowcountry South Carolina, Edisto

Lillian Ross’s eyewitness account of the making of John Huston’s Civil War film, The Red Badge of Courage, Picture

Hervé Guibert’s autobiographical novel set in the early years of the AIDS crisis, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

Anne Moody’s memoir of her childhood and her years in the Civil Rights Movement, Coming of Age in Mississippi

An anthology of fabulist stories spanning fifty years of Carol Emshwiller’s career, Moon Songs

Nicholson Baker’s idiosyncratic investigation of his relationship with John Updike, his “favorite living writer,” U and I

Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s novel of an unconventional marriage in small-town America, The Home-Maker

Hilary Peach’s memoir of her career as a welder in the Boilermakers Union, Thick Skin

Theodore Weesner’s novel of a teen boy on the wrong side of the law in ‘50s Michigan, The Car Thief

Phyllis Rose’s profiles of the marriages of five Victorian writers, Parallel Lives