{"product_id":"9780547724775","title":"I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place: A Memoir","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Some books celebrate the human condition; others commiserate with us. This memoir does both.” —Helen Oyeyemi, NPR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This spellbinding memoir by the National Book Award–nominated author of \u003ci\u003eThe Bird Artist\u003c\/i\u003e begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a midwestern boy’s summer working in a bookmobile, under the shadow of his grifter father and the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. Howard Norman’s life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales—including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is “I hate to leave this beautiful place”—and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Years later, Norman and his wife lend their Washington, DC, home to a poet and her young son, and a subsequent murder-suicide in the house has a profound effect on them. In this “unexpectedly arresting” memoir, life’s unpredictable strangeness is fashioned into a creative and redemptive story (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e).\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Norman uses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling periods of his life, each separated by time and subtle shifts in his narrative voice. . . . The originality of his telling here is as surprising as ever.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “These stories almost seem like tall tales themselves, but Norman renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these bizarre experiences, he finds solace through the places he’s lived and their quirky inhabitants, human and avian.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Houghton Mifflin Harcourt","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47120453140720,"sku":"9780547724775","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780547724775_p0.jpg?v=1769896741","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780547724775","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}