Author Memoirs

Following one woman's journey from a troubled girlhood in working-class Copenhagen through her struggle to live on her own terms, The Copenhagen Trilogy is a searingly honest, utterly immersive portrayal of love, friendship, art, ambition and the terrible lure of addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated 20th-century writers.

Un testimonio extraordinario que enseña la lección más valiosa: cómo dar sentido a nuestra vida. Considerado por The Washington Post como el libro de memorias más vendido de la historia, Martes con mi viejo profesor narra la experiencia vivida por Mitch Albom con Morrie Schwartz, uno de sus profesores de la universidad, al que vuelve a ver por casualidad muchos años después en una entrevista en televisión, en la que se entera de que su viejo profesor sufre ELA, una enfermedad degenerativa. Albom entra de nuevo en contacto con él y le propone verse todos los martes.

Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in San Francisco, one of seven siblings raised by Yemeni immigrants in a tiny apartment. At age 24, unable to pay for college, he works as a doorman. Until: a statue of an Arab raising a cup of coffee awakens something in him. He sets out to learn the rich history of coffee in Yemen and the complex art of tasting and identifying varietals. He travels to Yemen, collects samples of beans, eager to bring improved cultivation methods to the farmers. And he is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs Yemen in 2015 and he is trapped in Sana'a.

The world J.R.R. Tolkien created is one of the most beloved in all of literature, and continues to capture hearts and imaginations around the world. From Oxford to ComiCon, the Middle Earth is analyzed and interpreted through a multitude of perspectives. But one essential facet of Tolkien and his Middle Earth has been overlooked: science.

A searing confessional infused with the darkest humor, Permanent Midnight chronicles the opiated abyss of a Hollywood screenwriter and his formidable climb into sobriety. Made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, Permanent Midnight is revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted fans as one of the most compelling contemporary memoirs.

1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain.

A Company of Tanks, first published in 1920, is the final part of WHL Watson's memoirs of World War One. Watson, a young History graduate from Oxford University, enlisted as a corporal in the Royal Engineers on the outbreak of the war and was sent over to France as a motorcycle despatch rider.

Beautiful and hilarious, tearful and rambunctious, very real, ironic, and magic-filled, Martín Prechtel’s book The Mare and the Mouse is a series of lyrical sagas in tribute to each of the native New Mexican horses that carried him through his youth on the Reservation and then again during the difficult times following his return home after over a decade in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala.

Sitting down to write a book about his hero D. H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer finds himself compelled to write about anything else. He is in fact compelled to do more or less anything else instead of write. In Sicily he is too preoccupied by his hatred of seafood to follow the great writer's footsteps; in Mexico he cannot get beyond a drug-induced erotic fantasy on a nudist beach...and yet, incredibly, this attempt to write a 'sober academic study' reveals the hold Lawrence and his work still exert on us today.

Steinbeck and Capa's account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune.

English novelist Barbara Pym’s career was defined, in many senses, by rejection. Her first novel Some Tame Gazelle was turned down by every publisher she sent it out in 1935, finally published only 15 years later. Though she picked up a publisher from there and received modest praise, the publishing industry grew restless and her sales spiralled downwards. By her seventh novel, she had been dropped. This brilliant biography, brimming with Pym’s private diaries and intimate letters, offers a first full insight into Barbara Pym’s life and how it informed her writing.

When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of 60 after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted listeners who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon.

Inheritance is an audiobook about secrets - secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than 50 years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history.

" Je rêvais d'être ma propre cause et ma propre fin ; je pensais à présent que la littérature me permettrait de réaliser ce vœu. Elle m'assurerait une immortalité qui compenserait l'éternité perdue ; il n'y avait plus de Dieu pour m'aimer, mais je brûlerais dans des millions de cœurs. En écrivant une œuvre nourrie de mon histoire, je me créerais moi-même à neuf et je justifierais mon existence. En même temps, je servirais l'humanité : quel plus beau cadeau lui faire que des livres? Je m'intéressais à la fois à moi et aux autres"

As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.

This is a biography of James Baldwin, author, one-time preacher, and civil rights activist. He chose David Leeming, a close friend and colleague, to write his biography and granted him access to his correspondence. Leeming traces his life from his birth in Harlem in 1924 to his self-imposed exile in Europe, his later years as political activist, and his public funeral in 1987.

Dark, deviant, and deliriously funny, Jude Angelini writes in the colloquial vein of Charles Bukowski, using his unique, natural voice to tell stories from his life. He writes about his sexual encounters - both strange and intimate - alongside stories from his childhood and his tell-all experiences with "science drugs". Throughout it all, Jude is critical of himself and his actions, proving himself to be vulnerable, lonely, and extremely relatable. A stellar follow-up to Hyena.

In the second memoir of her Crosswicks Journals, Madeleine L'Engle chronicles a season of extremes. Four generations of family have gathered at Crosswicks, her Connecticut farmhouse, to care for L'Engle's ninety-year-old mother. As summer days fade to sleepless nights, her mother's health rapidly declines and her once astute mind slips into senility. With poignant honesty, L'Engle describes the gifts and graces, as well as the painful emotional cost, of caring for the one who once cared for you.

In this biography of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, A. N. Wilson narrates the complex drama of the writer's life: his childhood of aristocratic privilege but emotional deprivation, his discovery of his literary genius after aimless years of gambling and womanizing, and his increasingly disastrous marriage. Wilson sweeps away the long-held belief that Tolstoy's works were the exact mirror of his life and instead traces the roots of Tolstoy's art to his relationship with God, with women, and with Russia.