Comedy Essays

Part memoir, part testimonial, and part life guide, Stand by Your Truth mixes Rickey Smiley’s down-home humor with the values he learned from being raised by three generations of elders, steeped in the Baptist church, and mentored by some of the most celebrated comics in the entertainment...

The star of the hit show Glee shares her experiences and insider tips on beauty, fashion, inner strength, and more in an illustrated book that’s part memoir, part how-to, and part style guide. Lea Michele is one of the hardest working performers in show business. Whether she’s starring...

From acclaimed author, actor, and singer-songwriter David Duchovny, a deeply personal, existential, and insightful debut poetry collection DAVID DUCHOVNY’S SEVENTH PUBLISHED―AND FIRST POETIC―WORK covers a range of intimate themes and topics, including love, the loss of love, parenting...

We are all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done “Margulies tells the stories of people who have done monstrous things but are not monsters, are not forever defined by their worst acts. He writes beautifully of pain and loss, but also of redemption and transformation….A wonderfully...

Every novelist dreams of it--writing the book that rockets to the top of the bestseller lists. Now, they can see how it's done, up close, in an audiobook by an agent who has sold manuscripts that turned into hits. Here Albert Zuckerman covers the essential elements of the blockbuster novel and...

Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.

Now including a foreward by Bill Buford and photographs of Gellhorn with Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Gary Cooper, and others, this new edition rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman and brings back into print an irresistibly entertaining classic. "Martha Gellhorn...

“If Tina Fey and David Sedaris had a daughter, she would be Maeve Higgins.” —Glamour A startlingly hilarious essay collection about one woman’s messy path to finding her footing in New York City, from breakout comedy star and podcaster Maeve Higgins Maeve Higgins was a bestselling...

A brilliant biography of one of India’s greatest poets Mirza Mohammad Asadullah Khan Ghalib began writing poetry in Persian at the age of nine and the pre-eminent poet of the time, Mir, predicted a great future for the precocious genius when he was shown his verse. But success and material...

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 A revealing...

A no-holds-barred look into the remarkable life and career of the prolific musician, songwriter, and producer behind Eurythmics and dozens of pop hits. Dave Stewart’s life has been a wild ride—one filled with music, constant reinvention, and the never-ending drive to create. Growing up in...

The New York Times bestselling memoir-now available as an enhanced paperback edition with a new Introduction and never-before- seen photos! In this New York Times bestseller, international superstar Ricky Martin, who has sold more than 60 million albums worldwide, opens up for the first time...

Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, has come to the end of a very long and unusual journey, and for the second time in his life he has the time to think about all the things that have and have not come to pass. The truth is, a lot of remarkable things have happened in...

From a legendary journalist with four decades of unprecedented access and untold stories, an insider’s behind-the-scenes look at the major personalities of rock and roll. Lisa Robinson has interviewed everyone from John Lennon to Bono to Patti Smith, Eminem to Lady Gaga to Jay-Z and Kanye...

Comedy writer and middle daughter of Al Gore, Kristin Gore has written a funny and moving debut novel about life on Capitol Hill as seen through the eyes of Samantha Joyce, a twenty-six year old health care analyst to Ohio Junior Senator Robert Gary. Hard working, idealistic, extremely competent...

Big Cats opens with "Charlotte," in which a young girl with a broken pelvis spies on her voluptuous neighbor during a long, hot summer night, setting the tone of irrepressible curiosity and yearning that is evident throughout the collection. In "Get Away from Me, David," a bank manager tries to...

From comedian and journalist Faith Salie, of NPR's Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me! and CBS News Sunday Morning, a collection of daring, funny essays chronicling the author's adventures during her lifelong quest for approval Faith Salie has done it all in the name of validation. Whether she’s...

Emmy-Award winning writer and comedian Josh Gondelman’s collection of personal stories of best intentions and mixed results. Josh Gondelman knows a thing or two about trying—and failing. The Emmy Award-winning stand-up comic—dubbed a “pathological sweetheart” by the New York...

For almost a decade, beloved storyteller E. Lynn Harris has welcomed you into his family with his passionate, warm and trail-blazing novels. Now, he invites you into the most intimate world ever--his own. Since his first book Invisible Life was published in the early 1990s, New York Times...

A charmingly exuberant comic debut from an exciting new literary voice, and a “quirky, hilarious, elegantly written farce” (The Daily Telegraph), The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe is the globetrotting story of a trickster from rural India and his...