Author Memoirs

In 1992, nine-year-old Katie Beers was kidnapped by a family friend and locked in an underground box for 17 days. Katie has now come forward to tell the story that created a national media storm as reporters uncovered the truth about her prekidnapping life of neglect and sexual abuse and the details of her rescue. She shares how this experience and the recent death of her kidnapper, John Esposito, has affected her life.

How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture's beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections. Patti Smith first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession - a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story.

As someone who studied under Edward Said and remained a friend until his death in 2003, Timothy Brennan had unprecedented access to his thesis adviser's ideas and legacy. In this authoritative work, Said, the pioneer of postcolonial studies, a tireless champion for his native Palestine, and an erudite literary critic, emerges as a self-doubting, tender, eloquent advocate of literature's dramatic effects on politics and civic life.

When Abigail Thomas’s husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his brain shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institution. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR 2025 - AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS A shocking true story of heartbreak and survival by Sarah Corbett Lynch, daughter of Jason Corbett - an Irish Times Number 1 bestseller and the subject of NETFLIX documentary A DEADLY AMERICAN MARRIAGE. 'Honest and compelling' Sunday...

"We are all travelers in the 'wilderness of the world' - travelers with a donkey." So Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend on completing this enchanting account of a journey in rural France in 1878. Alone with his pack-donkey Modestine, and showing total disregard for discomfort, Stevenson relishes to the full his walking tour of the Cevennes.

This letter is the closest that Kafka came to setting down his autobiography. He was driven to write it by his father's opposition to his engagement with Julie Wohryzek. The marriage did not take place; the letter was not delivered.

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress, but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to fiction. Her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize - she went on to write 14 more, of which the best-loved were the five volumes of The Cazalet Chronicle.

Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells her persistent suitor that "we have all a better guide in ourselves . . . than any other person can be." Sometimes, however, we crave external guidance: and when this happens we could do worse than seek it in Jane Austen's own subtle novels. Written to coincide with Austen's 250th birthday, this approachable and intimate work shows why and how—for over half a century—Austen has inspired and challenged its author through different phases of her life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord.

Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong.

After he died in the backseat of a Cadillac at the age of 29, Hank Williams - a frail, flawed man who had become country music's first real star - instantly morphed into its first tragic martyr. Having hit the heights with simple songs of despair, depression, and tainted love, he would, with that outlaw swagger, become in death a template for the rock generation to follow.

Born in Boston, Stephen Bodio wandered into Magdalena, New Mexico, in the 1970s while on his way to Montana and never left. He was accompanied by Betsy Huntington, who was twenty years his senior; the couple had been inseparable from the day they met. After stumbling upon a vintage home along the highway, they settled into a country life; it was the perfect way for the two of them to make their lives together in an out-of-the-way place.

In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan reveals herself in a way she never has before, delving into her childhood, adolescence, family history, beginnings as a writer and professional life to explore the answers to questions of...

Native American author Trudy Silverheels (née Linda Yazzie) fully embraced the adventurous, bisexual, and polyamorous lifestyle she often wrote about in novels and short stories. In this memoir (compiling selections from three separate out-of-print autobiographical works), Trudy Silverheels recalls her extraordinary childhood, recounts her most-delightful escapades, and defends and justifies her unconventional and often outrageous conduct.

Farley Mowat's youth was charmed and hilarious, and unbelievably free in its access to unspoiled nature through bird-banding expeditions and overnight outings in the dead of winter. The author writes of sleeping in haystacks for survival, and other adventures, with equal shares of Booth Tarkington and Jack London. He also brings back Mutt, the famous hero-dog of his classic The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, and his pet owl Wol, hero of Owls in the Family. The tale of an outrageous and clever boy, Born Naked takes its place as the foundation of the Farley Mowat canon.

"Cold Crematorium is an indispensable work of literature, and a historical document of unsurpassed importance. It should be required reading." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated The first English language edition of a lost memoir by a Holocaust survivor, offering a...

I’ll admit I’m a romantic and heroic. But to be honest, it’s not my fault: it’s the fault of all the horses I’ve ever known. In my romantic struggle for beauty in an unromantic mechanical age, my horses, simply by how they were, and how we looked, and how we were together, although no more than a tiny broadside against the ghost ship of mediocrity of this crazy age, were some kind of victory just by the fact that we still existed. Horses inspire courage against hopeless odds just by their courage and beauty.

A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980s, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.

In the spring of 1972, Joyce Maynard, a freshman at Yale, published a cover story in The New York Times Magazine about life in the sixties. Among the many letters of praise, offers for writing assignments, and request for interviews was a one-page letter from the famously reclusive author, J.D. Salinger. At Home in the World is the story of a girl who loved and lived with J.D. Salinger, and the woman she became. A crucial turning point in Joyce Maynard's life occurred when her own daughter turned eighteen--the age Maynard was when Salinger first approached her.