The Effects of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy
Recollections and Short Essays
Gary Soto

Set mostly in Soto’s hometown, Fresno, and the San Francisco Bay area, the forty-eight pieces in this volume include the much lauded recollections “The Jacket” and “Like Mexicans,” as well as new, never-before-collected essays, among them “Childhood Worries, or Why I Became a Writer” and the title piece in which Soto fashions himself to be Fresno's own Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer of the 1920s who lived on nothing more than his five senses, who walked around his town observing the ordinary with amazement. 

Gary Soto is the award-winning author of novels, poems, and essays, most notably Buried Onions, Nickel and Dime, Living Up the Street, Crazy Weekend, and the young adult biography Jessie De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker. He teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Paperback / $15.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-254-2 / 206 pages / Nonfiction