Authors

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation....

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley....

A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.

The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation....

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern American classic....

Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have....

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.

David Sedaris' new collection of essays - including live recordings! - tells a most unconventional life story. It begins with a North Carolina childhood filled with speech-therapy classes...

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience....

She got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world, all alone....

In this inspirational and unflinchingly honest memoir, acclaimed author Reyna Grande describes her childhood torn between the United States and Mexico, and shines a light on the experiences, fears, and hopes of those who choose to make the harrowing journey across the border....

In this book, C.S. Lewis tells of his search for joy, a spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity....

From Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.

“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart....

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works....

At the age of 24, Matt Haig's world caved in. He could see no way to go on living. This is the true story of how he came through crisis, triumphed over an illness that almost destroyed him and learned to live again.

Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived....

Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One explores the critical junctions in his life and career....

Brilliantly compiled and edited, and filled with detail and anecdote, Daily Rituals is irresistible, addictive, magically inspiring....

The Water Is Wide is Pat Conroy’s extraordinary memoir based on his experience as one of two teachers in a two-room schoolhouse, working with children the world had pretty much forgotten....

You may not know it, but you've met Augusten Burroughs. You've seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants...

From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars comes an enthralling literary adventure that introduces listeners to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen—and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves.

Joan Didion is revealed at last in this “vivid, engrossing” (Vogue), and outrageously provocative dual biography “that reads like a propulsive novel” (Oprah Daily) revealing the mutual attractions—and antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.

Over a quarter of a century after its first publication, the great and simple wisdom in this book continues to influence women's lives....

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.”

Born in post-Depression era Detroit to a stable, Catholic, two-parent household, and heir to the family business, Donald Goines was instead drawn to the streets and to the dangerous lure of The Life. No writer would end up capturing it quite like Goines. He knew the hustle intimately: bootlegging, pimping, drugs, prostitutes, gambling, and prison

From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians—a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell’s mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and turned to prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and into the professional world of letters.

DESPRE AUDIOBOOK. Copilăroasă și matură, egoistă și iubitoare, anxioasă și uneori foarte relaxată, cerebrală, irațională, pasionată de literatură și de petreceri cu băutură și droguri – iată un sumar portret al lui Dolly, personajul principal al cărții. O sumă de contradicții. Dar există totuși ceva constant, un fir roșu care străbate, din copilărie până la maturitate, povestea zbuciumată, pe alocuri picantă, tristă sau extrem de amuzantă: prietenia. Fiindcă dacă iubiții vin și pleacă, prietenele din copilărie și din adolescență rămân ancorele ei sufletești pentru totdeauna.

Every day, for the last four years of Whitman’s life, Traubel visited his friend and mentor in his small home in Camden, New Jersey. There, in his seventies, the great poet sat in his rocking chair, partially paralyzed, surrounded by a sea of papers, looking back over his life and accepting his quickly approaching death.

Dickens the Enchanter takes us deep into an imagination whose power and originality struck some contemporaries as godlike while others thought it demonic. If you already love Dickens, it will renew your understanding of him; if you have yet to experience him, it will lure you into his astonishing, alarming, enchanted world.

Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath has also been fueled in part by the tragic nature of her death. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath have appeared over the last fifty-five years that mainly focus on her death or contain projections of an array of points of view about the writer.

Die Autobiographischen Schriften sind der Schlüssel zum Werk von Thomas Bernhard. Sie kehren sein Innerstes nach außen. Keine Texte, die intimer, berührender sind als die fünf zwischen 1975 und 1982 geschriebenen Erzählungen, in denen der Autor seine traumatischen Kindheits- und Jugenderinnerungen beschreibt. Fünf aufwühlende Geschichten, gelesen von fünf der besten deutschsprachigen Schauspieler. Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung, gelesen von Ulrich Matthes. 1943: Dreizehnjährig wird Thomas Bernhard in ein Internat nach Salzburg geschickt.

"Ho tentato di rimettere insieme la storia della famiglia Manzoni; volevo ricostruirla, ricomporla, allinearla ordinatamente nel tempo. Avevo delle lettere e dei libri. Non volevo esprimere commenti, ma limitarmi a una nuda e semplice successione di fatti. Volevo che i fatti parlassero da sé. Volevo che le lettere, accorate o fredde, cerimoniose o schiette, palesemente menzognere o indubitabilmente sincere, parlassero da sé... Il protagonista di questa lunga storia famigliare non volevo fosse Alessandro Manzoni."

The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler's development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena.