Diary Biography

Born at Steventon in 1775, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children. She lived a quiet life, moving to Bath, Southampton, Chawton and eventually to Winchester where she died unmarried in 1817 at the age of 42. It is to her elder sister Cassandra that most of her surviving letters are written, and through them, we discover the intimate world of the English gentry.

Leslie Joy flew in World War II for the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a Lancaster Bomber Pilot. In November 2011, at the age of 88, he recorded this audiobook at his home in North Yorkshire, England. Hear Les tell his very own gripping story about life during and after World War II. Listen to Les recall how he was trained by the RAF as a pilot in Canada, experienced New York City and Chicago as a young man and then how he returned to England to become one of Britain's World War II heroes.

The funniest, most popular kid in school, Charles Aubrey Rogers suffered from depression and later addiction, then ultimately died by suicide. Diary of a Broken Mind focuses on the relatable story of what led to his suicide at age 20 and answers the why behind his addiction and this cause of death, revealed through a mother's story and years of Charles' published and unpublished song lyrics. The closing sections focus on hope and healing - and how the author found her purpose and forgave herself.

In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for 40 years. At a moment of "absolute respect for differences", London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Here is a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.

President Barack Obama received ten thousand letters a day from his constituents. This is the story of the private and profound relationship with letter writers that shaped his presidency. Their voices combine to reveal a diary of a nation. Every evening for eight years, at his request...

When I was eight, there were already seven of us children, and my mother was sick, all the work fell on my shoulders, cooking, washing, milking cows, looking after the children, mending clothes, and also working in the fields. Seeing how poor mother, although sick, was eager to work with all her remaining strength, although at the slightest bending a terrible cough choked her and blood rushed to her throat, I was overcome with despair when I thought that she might die. I begged her in everything not to do anything anymore, that I would replace her in everything.

In the spring of 2007, a brilliant computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence. The case takes a twist when Nina’s former lover, and Hans’s former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of. At the time of Sturgeon’s confession, Stephen Elliot is paralyzed by writer’s block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over the state of his romantic life. But he is fascinated by Sturgeon, whose path he has often crossed....

A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a...

For readers and viewers of The Perfect Storm, opening this long-awaited new work by Sebastian Junger will be like stepping off the deck of the Andrea Gail and into the inferno of a fire burning out of control in the steep canyons of Idaho. Here is the same meticulous prose brought to bear on the...

Known for her sharp, witty and surreal view on everyday life, Lucy shares the unpredictable craziness of being a mum in this brilliant and laugh-out-loud 'mumoir'. Mums everywhere will recognise the madness of it all. Like when Lucy was hospitalised during her third trimester with chest pains but it turned out to be a burrito. Or when she was so tired at the park she forgot her own child's name.

In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. "I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened," she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice.

Mountain Notes: A Nature Diary is a captivating, poetic journal that celebrates the rugged beauty of the Dromara Hills in County Down, Northern Ireland where the author returned home to live on her family farm in 2020. Maggie Doyle grew up on this small dairy farm and feels a deep, emotional connection to this landscape and the rhythms of the natural world. Following a thirty-year career in radio production at BBC Northern Ireland, she took early retirement in 2019.

My name is Joseph A. Peragine, and I am a paranoid schizophrenic. On October 22, 2000, I tried to kill myself in a severely hallucinogenic state due to undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. I was suffering from this illness for many years leading up to that day. Every October since I started my recovery in 2000, I reflect on my life and am extremely thankful that I was fortunate enough to have been given a second chance. Every October, I especially make it a priority to tell my family and loved ones how much I love them.

Considered one of the greatest—and most influential—writers of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust was also one of its most fascinating figures. A strange, reclusive genius who often lay in bed for days at a time obsessively rewriting his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, Proust was...

With the nation badly divided and the two major parties on a bitter collision course, what can we learn from America’s last great president? A lot, says New York Times bestselling author and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. In What Would Reagan Do?, Christie takes a fresh look at...

Vermont, 1850s. Bell's Star is a brown Morgan colt with a white star and two white stockings. He was bred for hard work, yet he longs to run free with his human friend, Katie, on his back. But when Star helps rescue a runaway slave girl, his ideas about freedom may change forever. Here is Star's story . . . in his own words.

Diary of a Dog Patcher is a raw and unflinching memoir of trauma, survival, and transformation — told with heartbreaking honesty, unexpected humor, and a fierce love that refuses to let silence win. Born into a lineage of addiction, abandonment, suicide, and shame, Casey Carpenter was adopted at age five by her maternal grandparents. Raised in a modest neighborhood known as “Dog Patch,” where grief was inherited and hard things weren’t spoken aloud, she learned early how to patch together what others left broken.

On June 6, 2015, David and Jackie Siegel received the call that no parent should ever get. Their beautiful, vibrant, 18-year-old daughter Victoria had died of a drug overdose. The Siegels vowed to do whatever it takes to prevent this from happening to other parents.

Becketts Tagebuchaufzeichnungen über seine Deutschlandreise während des Aufstiegs des Nationalsozialismus, gelesen von Sabin Tambrea. Samuel Beckett hat nur einmal in seinem Leben über längere Zeit Tagebuch geführt, nämlich auf seiner großen Deutschlandreise von September 1936 bis April 1937, die ihn u. a. nach Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden und München führte. Die German Diaries sind die letzten bedeutenden Texte von Samuel Beckett, die noch unveröffentlicht sind. Sie geben Aufschluss über die Entwicklung von Becketts Ästhetik in dessen Auseinandersetzung mit Literatur und mit bildender Kunst.

These letters between the pioneering environmentalist and her beloved friend reveal "a vibrant, caring woman behind the scientist" (Los Angeles Times). This very special collection of letters from Rachel Carson to her Maine summer neighbor Dorothy Freeman offers an intimate, spellbinding look at Carson's private life and thoughts.