Diary Biography

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....

Who Will Tell My Story? presents an ordinary existence interrupted by unfathomably seismic and unjust events. On the ground during the first months of the assault on Gaza following the events of 7 October, the author of this diary - first published in The Guardian - maps out the physical and psychological terrain of a life under siege.

At the age of twenty-four, Dang Thuy Tram volunteered to serve as a doctor in a National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) battlefield hospital in the Quang Ngai Province. Two years later she was killed by American forces not far from where she worked. Written between 1968 and 1970, her diary speaks poignantly of her devotion to family and friends, the horrors of war, her yearning for her high school sweetheart, and her struggle to prove her loyalty to her country.

As the Uber phenomenon takes over London with its minicab booking app, destroying the trade of the world-famous black cab, trampling history under wheel and smashing prices, Charles Brickfield brings us the life of an Uber driver.

Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks posthumously discovered behind Highsmith’s linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta—traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who “[worked] like mad to be something”.

"Le nouveau monde ne sera pas construit par ceux qui restent à l'écart les bras croisés, mais par ceux qui sont dans l'arène, les vêtements réduits en haillons par la tempête et le corps mutilé par les événements." Arrêté en 1962 par le gouvernement d'apartheid d'Afrique du Sud, Nelson Mandela a passé vingt-sept ans en prison - du 7 novembre 1962 au 11 février 1990. Au cours de ces 10 052 jours de détention, il fut un épistolier prolifique, écrivant des centaines de lettres aux autorités inflexibles, à ses compagnons de lutte, aux gouvernements officiels, mais aussi à sa femme Winnie, à ses cinq enfants et, plus tard, à ses petits-enfants.

From his agent's phone call offering him the role of Estragon, Lucian Msamati brings brilliantly to life the experience of co-starring with Ben Whishaw in James Macdonald's celebrated production of Waiting for Godot in London's West End. Through rehearsal room highs and lows, workaday laughs and tears, literal stumbles and grumbles, we journey with Lucian, his fellow actors and creatives, and Beckett's play, sharing in the personal and dramaturgical discoveries they make and the inevitable emotional contours of an experience as intense as this one.

Kurt Vonnegut’s eldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother’s attic when she stumbled upon a dusty, aged box. Inside, she discovered an unexpected treasure: more than 200 love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship.

Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time, she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship—and the truth of her own self.

Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I spans a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip.

1936 was a great year for the movie industry - the financial setbacks of the Great Depression were subsiding, so theater attendance was up. Americans everywhere were watching the stars, and few stars shined as brightly as one of America's most enduring screen favorites, Mary Astor. But Astor's personal story wasn't a happy one. Born poor and widowed at 24, Mary Astor had spent years looking for stability when she met and wed Dr. Franklyn Thorpe.

With two young boys, a new lecturer position, and all the commitments of an active life, Ros Ben-Moshe had no plans for a tumor to take over her life. Yet after the news came on her 43rd birthday, medical appointments turned into hours of surgery, casual conversations disappeared, and even her children started asking questions. In recovery rooms, as the clock slowly ticks, Ros Ben-Moshe starts writing. Through ups and downs, she tells it all, in an honest account of fighting the Big C, or should we say the small c?

We all lived our own pandemics. For writer Rebecca Rosenblum, the pandemic meant watching and considering the city she loves. From milestones such as crying when the parks closed to the little moments with strangers on the street and with loved ones across the six-foot divide, Rebecca wondered, worried, and wrote it down.

On the road with The Joe Perry Project in the big '80s. The untold story is unveiled in amazing detail. Captivating, riotously funny, frighteningly frank, exhilarating, and at times deeply moving. The audiobook includes everything from the original “diary” plus bonus untold stories and a whole new final chapter. With added commentary from radio personality and author, Carter Alan. And surprise visits from Joe Perry Project members Danny Hargrove and Charlie Farren.

Here is Hemingway: the adventurer, the reporter, the man! More intimately than all his fiction, Hemingway the reporter reveals Hemingway the man, driving an ambulance through a bullet-barrage or leading guerrilla forces into Paris, always in the thick of the action. Here are his most sensational dispatches, the behind-the-scenes stories that became For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

The diary of a young Jewish housewife who, together with her husband and five-month-old baby, fled the Warsaw ghetto at the last possible moment, and survived the Holocaust hidden on the "Aryan" side of town in the loft of a run-down tinsmith's shed. Rescued from the Ashes documents the incredible life story of Leokadia Schmidt and her small family and their daily struggle to survive the Warsaw Ghetto.

In December 1917, Vaslav Nijinsky, the most famous male dancer in the Western world, moved into a Swiss villa with his wife and three-year-old daughter and began to go mad. A prodigy from his youth in Russia, Nijinsky came to international fame as a principal dancer in Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. When psychosis struck, he began to imagine himself as married to God. Although he lived another 30 years, he never regained his sanity. This diary is Nijinsky's confession and his prophecy, the only sustained, on-the-spot account we have by a major artist of entering psychosis.

In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from Mill Valley, California, to the North Cascades to spend two months serving as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service. Taking only the Diamond Sutra for reading material, he intended to spend his time in deep contemplation and to achieve enlightenment.

This is the first full-length look at Zapple - The Beatles' label for experimental music and spoken word recordings, and the most ambitious expression of the group's determination to be leading members of the counterculture movement in the late 1960s. Barry Miles, the acclaimed author, was the Zapple label manager and has written an engaging and slightly gossipy you-are-there review of this fascinating period in Beatles history.

On January 25, 2020, after the central government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, acclaimed Chinese writer Fang Fang began publishing an online diary. In the days and weeks that followed, Fang Fang’s nightly postings gave voice to the fears, frustrations, anger, and hope of millions of her fellow citizens, reflecting on the psychological impact of forced isolation, the role of the internet as both community lifeline and source of misinformation, and most tragically, the lives of neighbors and friends taken by the deadly virus.