Pulitizer Prize winner Gail Caldwell pens a memoir on how seemingly faint winds can blow us wildly off course; on how spending time with a beloved animal can benefit our basic humanity; and on what it means to overcome, at middle age, a multitude of blows.

The author of the national bestseller Love is a Mix Tape returns, with a different-but equally personal and equally universal- pin on music as memory."No rock critic-living or dead, American or otherwise-has ever written about pop music with the evocative, hyperpoetic perfectitude of Rob Sheffield."So said Chuck Klosterman about Love is a Mix Tape, Sheffield's paean to a lost love via its soundtrack. Now, in Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, Sheffield...

In this memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. Beginning in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle, she grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, and took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. What she found there, from renegade women to men who...