Author Memoirs

A #1 New York Times bestseller and the eagerly anticipated sequel to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angela’s Ashes, this masterpiece from Frank McCourt tells of his American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank McCourt’s glorious childhood memoir...

2024 Grammy Award Winner #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER In an inspiring follow-up to her acclaimed memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today’s highly uncertain world. ...

Judge, senator, and activist. Father, grandfather, and friend. This is Murray Sinclair’s story—and the story of a nation—in his own words, an oral history that forgoes the trappings of the traditionally written memoir to center Indigenous ways of knowledge and storytelling. As Canada moves...

What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?

JAMES BEARD AWARD NOMINEE NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the great culinary stories of our time.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks...

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.

With seven unpublished novels wasting away on his hard drive, Tony Vanderwarker is astonished when John Grisham offers to take him under his wing and teach him the secrets of thriller writing. The beginning and the end are easy,” Grisham tells him. It’s the three hundred pages in the middle that’s the hard part.” To ensure his plot doesn’t run out of gas, Grisham puts Tony though his outline process. Tony does one, and then Grisham asks for another and another and another.

#1 New York Times Bestseller and #1 International Bestseller Now a Peacock Original Series starring Harvey Keitel and Melanie Lynskey This beautiful, illuminating tale of hope and courage is based on interviews that were conducted with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist...

Thoreau's classic account of the solitary life, describing his attempts to simplify his life and sort out his priorities by living alone in a cabin beside Walden Pond for nearly two years, is one of the most influential books ever written. The bible of the environmental movement, Walden vividly portrays Thoreau's reverence for nature, and his understanding of the idea that nature is made up of crucially interrelated parts.

This is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some thirty years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and, at the same time, leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time—together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the “scandalous girl” she once was but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing.

When the legendary Frankish king and emperor Charlemagne died in 814 he left behind a dominion and a legacy unlike anything seen in Western Europe since the fall of Rome. Johannes Fried paints a compelling portrait of a devout ruler, a violent time, and a unified kingdom that deepens our understanding of the man often called the father of Europe.

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NPR Best Book of the Year Time Best Book of the Year Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year “A bittersweet study in both grief and joy.” ­—Time “A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book “Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.” —The New York Times Book Review “An incredibly moving memoir about what it means to be a doctor.” —Ellen Pompeo As seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with...

INSTANT BESTSELLER! Funny, conversational, and relatable, Try Hard is for anyone looking to make sense of their own creative pursuit or bring more creativity into their life, offering a framework for how to do it and where to begin. Let’s say you see a familiar musician from a globe-trotting...

Julia and her adopted brother, David, are 16 years old. Julia is White. David is Black. It is the mid-1980s and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all-encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children and a violent father.

At a time when Vancouver Island was still an extremely remote and sparsely populated backwater, a young widow packed her five children into a 25-foot boat dubbed The Caprice and set off on an adventure. Summer after summer the brave young mother, who became known as "Capi," would set sail and explore the rugged coastline for months with her young crew. Although the hazards the family faced were numerous-tides, fog, storms, rapids, cougars, and even grizzlies-Capi brought them through it all.

Alone with her new husband on a tiny Pacific atoll, a young woman, combing the beach, finds an odd aluminum container washed up out of the lagoon, and beside it on the sand something glitters: a gold tooth in a scorched human skull. The investigation that follows uncovers an extraordinarily complex and puzzling true-crime story. Only Vincent Bugliosi, who recounted his successful prosecution of mass murderer Charles Manson in the best seller Helter Skelter, was able to draw together the hundreds of conflicting details of the mystery and reconstruct what really happened....

Ramona Koval has been praised as a master of the interview genre, renowned for engaging writers in conversations that are incisive, provocative, and often funny.In this new collection, Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, she shares the most fascinating interviews from her 2005 book Tasting Life Twice, along with brand-new ones with some of the most important writers of our times.

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the principal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband.