Author Memoirs

How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered - an icon and idol - alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.

Mark Twain's complete, uncensored Autobiography was an instant best seller when the first volume was published in 2010, on the centennial of the author's death, as he requested. Published to rave reviews, the Autobiography was hailed as the capstone of Twain's career. It captures his authentic and unsuppressed voice, speaking clearly from the grave and brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions. The eagerly awaited second volume delves deeper into Twain's life, uncovering the many roles he played in his private and public worlds.

This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag’s evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world-renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966.

Scotland's beloved storyteller, George MacDonald, 19th-century Scottish novelist and poet, was reintroduced to 20th century Christians by C. S. Lewis, whose reading of MacDonald's Phantastes triggered his own spiritual awakening and conversion. Other renowned writers have voiced similar acknowledgements. G. K. Chesterton said of MacDonald, "If we test the matter of originality of attitude, George MacDonald was one of the three or four greatest men of the 19th century."

Remembering Satan is a lucid, measured, yet absolutely riveting inquest into a case that destroyed a family, engulfed a small town, and captivated an America obsessed by rumors of a satanic underground. It follows the increasingly bizarre accusations and confessions, as well as the claims and counterclaims of police, FBI investigators, and mental-health professionals.

A searing memoir of love and grief centered around the loss of Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster. Ghost Stories is an intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written after the death of Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster. The book includes personal, never-before-seen...

A nominee for the National Book Award, Ivan Doig's brilliant memoir shares the experiences and culture that shaped his early years and made him fall in love with the West. From his childhood in a family of homesteaders through the death of his mother and his move to Montana to herd sheep, Doig shows his intimate connection with the American West.

¿Cómo Juan Carlos I, un rey con una fuerza icónica única en Europa, con un país a sus pies, con ciertos políticos cómplices, con dinero y con las mujeres más guapas del mundo, pudo jugárselo todo? En su carrera hacia el abismo fue dejando atrás familia, amigos, prestigio, honorabilidad… ¿Fue por una mujer? ¿Por amor al dinero? ¿Por inconsciencia o por arrogancia?

Patricia Highsmith, author of classics such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, was a lesbian and a writer who defied simple categorization. Marijane Meaker is the author of more than 40 books. Meaker and Highsmith met in New York City, became lovers, and embarked on a romance amidst the bohemian set of Greenwich Village and the literary crowd of Fire Island. Written with wit and brassy candor, this is a revealing look at a controversial icon of popular American fiction.

"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond.

The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California's limitless bounty and appalled by the country's refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice - paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy.

A flicker of light almost appears at the end of the tunnel for prisoner FF8282, as he is transferred to North Sea Camp near Boston, Lincolnshire, a D-category prison. Under a less strict regime, the prisoners can enjoy a more relaxed set of rules, while slowly preparing to someday rejoin the world outside the walls. However, a minor breach of conditions gets him sent off to the notorious HMP Lincoln facility for twenty-two days, where more traumatic experiences await. "Heaven" is the third book in Jeffrey Archer’s bestselling series The Prison Diaries.

The real Jim Morrison, fiery leader of the iconic Doors, is revealed in this hard-hitting, once-in-a-lifetime audiobook revelation. Perfect for the hardcore fan and casual music lover alike.

The Unquiet Englishman braids the narratives of Greene's extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions; it tells the story of a restless traveler and unfailing advocate for human rights exploring troubled places around the world, a man who struggled to believe in God and found himself described as a great Catholic writer; it reveals a private life in which love almost always ended in ruin, alongside a larger story of politicians, battlefields, and spies.

Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work. With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another - how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising.

Lorilyn Roberts' hopes of motherhood came to a devastating end when her husband left her for his pregnant girlfriend. Eight years later, Children of Dreams reveals God's restoration of her dreams through the international adoption of her two daughters. Written as creative nonfiction, an analogy is drawn between the physical adoption of children and God's spiritual adoption as recounted in the Bible.

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Jane Austen at her witty, observant, intelligent, and sympathetic best, in this collection of her letters written to family and friends. Compiled by her niece Fanny Knight’s son Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen (the first Baron Brabourne), and edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, this collection includes a preface written by the editor and notes from Lord Brabourne. It was originally published in 1892.

In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.

Amanda Barrie, the iconic Cleo in Carry on Cleo and much-loved Alma in Coronation Street, was born in 1935, above her grandfather’s tailor’s shop in Ashton Under Lyne, during a ferocious thunderstorm. And ever since her journey through life has been a stormy one. This book will tell the whole story for the first time, from her expulsion from two schools and running away from home aged 13 to be a Soho showgirl, to rising from the chorus to star in the West End, to Carry On Cabby and Carry On Cleo, to Corrie, Bad Girls and more.

The Oxford Inklings tells the story of the friendships, mutual influence, and common purpose of the Inklings - the literary circle which congregated around C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Meeting in pubs or Lewis' college rooms, they included an influential array of literary figures. They were, claimed poet and novelist John Wain, bent on 'the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life'. Tolkien and Lewis expert Colin Duriez unpacks the Inklings' origins, relationships, and the nature of their collaboration.