Memoir Essays

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life—a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be. Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida.

In Drama in the Bahamas, Dave Hannigan tells the occasionally poignant, often troubling, yet always entertaining story behind Ali's last bout. Through interviews with many of those involved, he discovers exactly how and why, a few weeks short of his 40th birthday, a seriously diminished Ali stepped through the ropes one more time to get beaten up by Trevor Berbick.

Three months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, prizefighters Charles "Sonny" Liston and Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. stepped into a boxing ring in Miami to dispute the heavyweight championship of the world. Liston was a mob fighter with a criminal past, and rumors were spreading that Clay was not just a noisy, bright-eyed boy blessed with more than his share of the craziness of youth, but a believer in a shadowy cult: the Nation of Islam. Instead of a hero and a villain, boxing had served up two bad guys.

The eagerly awaited follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestseller Hamilton: The Revolution, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new book gives listeners an extraordinary inside look at In the Heights, his breakout Broadway debut, written with Quiara Alegría Hudes, now a Hollywood blockbuster. “[An]...

An honest, witty, and insightful memoir about what happens when your coming-of-age comes later than expected “Thanks for Waiting is the loving, wise, cuttingly funny older sister we all need in book form.”—Tara Schuster, author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies Doree Shafrir spent much...

After death, Townes Van Zandt found the success that he sabotaged during life. Diagnosed as bipolar, an alcoholic, and perennially unreliable, Van Zandt died of heart failure at the age of 52 on New Year’s Day in 1997. He released 16 albums during life. Since his death, several more albums have been released, both by and in honor of him.

This was Alan Clark’s first volume of diaries and the only one that he recorded. As such it is a unique and historical record and reminder of the man and his work. To hear Alan Clark reading the book in his marvelously rich voice adds immeasurably to the pleasure of these informative and entertaining diaries. The recording covers two Parliaments and constitutes the most outspoken and revealing account of British politics ever written.

A Simon & Schuster audiobook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every listener...

Vir Sanghvi's has been an interesting life - one that took him to Oxford, movie and political journalism, television and magazines - and he depicts it with the silky polish his readers expect of him. In A Rude Life, he turns his dispassionate observer's gaze on himself, and in taut prose tells...

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The...

Amanda ha tenido siempre una mirada aguda e irónica acerca de sí misma y de quienes la rodean: sabe estar sola y acompañada. Sin embargo, en este libro nos revela dos aspectos de su ser menos conocido: su destreza informal para la fabulación: sabe relatar historias breves por medio de un ritmo más seductor que acosador. Y, por otra parte, abandona la guerra cotidiana que libra a cada momento de su vida como artista popular y nos propone a un ser menos glamuroso, pero más humano.

The author, journalist, television commentator, and longtime Washington insider reflects on the spiritual quest that has brought deeper meaning to her life—and kept her grounded within the high-powered political world of Washington, D.C.’s elite—her renowned writing career, her celebrity...

"Okun's narration, lightly poignant and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, enhances her witty writing style...Listeners need not be knitters or crafters to relish Okun's delightful, self-deprecating stories." — AudioFile Magazine BuzzFeed: The 33 Most Exciting New Books of 2018 This program is read...

From the co-author of Three Cups of Tea comes the inspiring story of two very different doctors—one from the United States, the other from Nepal—united in a common mission: to rid the world of preventable blindness. In this transporting book, David Oliver Relin shines a light on the work...

Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter is as unconventional and wide-ranging as Frank Deford's remarkable career, in which he has chronicled the heroes and the characters of just about every sport in nearly every medium. Deford joined Sports Illustrated in 1962, fresh, and fresh out of Princeton. In 1990, he was Editor-in-Chief of The National Sports Daily, one of the most ambitious and ill-fated projects in the history of American print journalism.

Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself — what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly — religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This audiobook is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Slate “Reading this book is a joy . . . much to say about the trans journey and will undoubtedly become a standard for those in need of guidance. ” —The Washington Post...

“You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to read it again.” —theSkimm “Fiercely funny, powerfully smart, and remarkably brave.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild A hilarious and candid essay collection from New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner that explores everything...

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...

Throughouther career, supermodel and actress Carré Otis hasbeen celebrated for her striking physical beauty—but in this brazenly honestmemoir she revisits the ugliest parts of her past to reveal the events thatultimately brought her to strive for, and champion, the kind of beauty that canonly...