Memoir Essays

Aisha Harris has made a name for herself as someone you can turn to for a razor-sharp take on whatever show or movie everyone is talking about. Now, she turns her talents inward, mining the benchmarks of her nineties childhood and beyond to analyze the tropes that are shaping all of us, and our ability to shape them right back.

Like so many American women, Shauna M. Ahern spent decades feeling not good enough about her body, about money, and about her worth in this culture. For a decade, with the help of her husband, she ran a successful food blog, wrote award-winning cookbooks, and raised two children. In the midst of this, at age 48, she suffered a mini-stroke. Tests revealed she would recover fully, but when her doctor impressed upon her that emotional stress can cause physical damage, she dove deep inside herself to understand and let go of a lifetime of damaging patterns of thought.

Learn about these golf legends as they were learning to master the game on their home turf. In Grown at Glen Garden, the early friendship of Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson is shown, from their caddying days at Glen Garden Country Club to their chummy rivalry at the Masters decades later. With a peek at their family backgrounds, the story shows both the hardships and joys of growing up and learning to golf in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1920s.

"The Old Man and the Gun" is the incredible story of a bank robber and prison escape artist who modeled himself after figures like Pretty Boy Floyd and who, even in his 70s, refuses to retire. "True Crime" follows the twisting investigation of a Polish detective who suspects that a novelist planted clues in his fiction to an actual murder. And "The Chameleon" recounts how a French impostor assumes the identity of a missing boy from Texas and infiltrates the boy's family, only to soon wonder whether he is the one being conned.

«Estas conferencias se titulan Confesiones de un joven novelista, y cabría preguntarse por qué, teniendo en cuenta que ya he cumplido más de setenta años. Pero resulta que publiqué mi primera novela, El nombre de la rosa, en 1980, de modo que empecé mi carrera como novelista hace cosa de treinta años. Me considero, por lo tanto, un novelista muy joven y ciertamente prometedor».

Searching for answers everywhere has led you to believe your beloved child might have schizophrenia. You can only find horror stories on the illness, that is when you’re able to understand the lengthy and confusing medical terminology at all.

This program is read by the author If you’re looking for a parenting audiobook, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother. This is an audiobook about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years; a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an...

A seventy-year history of disability is threaded throughout these essays and intertwined with writing that celebrates lesbian love, explores the slapstick moments of life, and shares the obstacles and triumphs of becoming a writer later in life.

Why are gravy stains on your shirt at the dinner table to be admired? Does bacon improve everything? And is gin really the devil's work? In this rollicking collection of his hilarious columns, the award-winning writer and Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner answers these vital questions and many, many more. They are glorious dispatches, seasoned in equal measure with both enthusiasm and bile, from decades at the very frontline of eating.

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them. It was the dawn of the free-love movement - perfect for a magnetic madman who’d also foreshadow its end a few years later in the malignant charisma of Charles Manson. The inspiration for a classic story by Joyce Carol Oates, Schmid, the most bizarre serial killer of any era, was the epitome of a narcissist flattered into believing he could get away with murder.

"This book feels like a real conversation. When we enter Retta's world we are at the best party and in the hands of a gracious, self-perceptive, and deeply hilarious host." — Amy Poehler This program is read by the author. In this hilarious audiobook essay collection, Parks and Recreation star...

Rachel Kushner has established herself as “the most vital and interesting American novelist working today” (The Millions) and as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times—and illuminates the themes and real-life experiences that inform her fiction.

Throughout his 25-year journalistic career, David Carr was noted for his sharp and fearless observations, his uncanny sense of fairness and justice, and his remarkable compassion and wit. His writing was informed both by his own hardships as an addict, and his intense love of the journalist's craft. His range - from media politics to national politics, from rock-n-roll celebrities to the unknown civil servants who make our daily lives function - was broad and often timeless.

In Twenty-One Years Young: Essays, author Amy Dong examines the uncertainty, absurdity, and beauty in growing up. This poignant collection of essays is unabashedly intimate, drawing the listener into Dong’s life as if they were a close friend. She masterfully evokes humor, nostalgia, melancholy, and euphoria to create scenes that are as vivid as they are profound.

From one of our most distinguished literary voices, a defining essay collection blending personal reflection with urgent political writing and wide–ranging cultural criticism. For thirty years Anne Enright―one of our greatest living novelists (Times)―has been paying attention: casting her...

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s.

With In a Flight of Starlings, celebrated physicist Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work, starting with investigating the principles of physics by observing the flight of flocks of birds. Studying the movements of these communities, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds—collections of everything from atoms and planets to other animals, such as ourselves. Along the way, he reflects on the lessons he has taken from a life in pursuit of scientific truth.

Three years before David Bowie died, he shared a list of 100 books that changed his life. His choices span fiction and nonfiction, literary and irreverent, and include timeless classics alongside eyebrow-raising obscurities. In 100 short essays, music journalist John O'Connell studies each book on Bowie's list and contextualizes it in the artist's life and work. Heartfelt, analytical, and totally original, Bowie's Bookshelf is one part epic reading guide and one part biography of a music legend.

'Decline of the English Murder' analyses the kinds of murders depicted in popular media during Orwell's life and why society of the time was obsessed with these grizzly crimes. Tribune published it on 15th February 1946, and Secker and Warburg republished it after his death in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1952.

In this stunning debut collection, award-winning voice actor and cultural critic Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn’t always follow through.