In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.

In 1972, Elliot Mintz installed a red light in his bedroom in Laurel Canyon. When it started flashing, it meant that either John Lennon or Yoko Ono—or sometimes both—were calling him. Which they did almost every day for nearly ten years, engaging Mintz in hours-long late-night phone conversations that all but consumed him for the better part of a decade. In We All Shine On, Mintz—a former radio and television host in Los Angeles—recounts the story of how their unlikely friendship began and where it led him over the years.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Capote’s Women comes an astonishing account of the revolutionary artist Andy Warhol and his scandalous relationships with the ten women he deemed his “Superstars”.

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.

In this cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion's influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned.

A memoir by the legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, taking us from his gritty London childhood in the fifties to his serendipitous arrival in New York, where he founded the era-defining establishments the Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, and Nell’s. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about the angst of being a child actor, his lack of insights from traveling overland to Kathmandu at nineteen, the instability of his two marriages and family relationships, his devastating stroke, and his Instagram notoriety.

Monument Eternal offers deep insight into Coltrane’s tremendous musical output and shines a light on her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church organist and bebopper, to sage thought leader Swami Turiyasangitananda. It also reflects the extraordinary fluidity of American religious customs in the mid- and late-twentieth century. Akashic’s long-awaited reissue of Monument Eternal includes a new foreword by Ashley Kahn.

Joan Baez shares poems for or about her contemporaries (such as Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Jimi Hendrix), reflections from her childhood, personal thoughts, and cherished memories of her family, including pieces about her younger sister, singer-songwriter Mimi Fariña. Speaking to the people, places, and moments that have had the greatest impact on her art, this collection is an inspiring personal diary in the form of poetry.

Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes listeners on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada.

Award-winning reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf bring us the definitive and explosive account of how Trump and his advisers overcame a dozen primary challengers, four indictments, two assassination attempts, and his own past mistakes to defeat the Democrats, and pave the way for a second term that would be far more aggressive and ruthless than the first.

Paul Gauguin's legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved.

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?

In 1974, a twenty-year-old Christie Brinkley was “discovered” outside a Paris phone booth, which set off a meteoric modeling career that would land her on the covers of hundreds of magazines and cement her legacy as an All-American icon. Although she’s lived more than fifty years in the public eye, the full story of her roller-coaster life has never been told. Now, for the first time, Christie shares what life has been like, both in front of and behind the cameras

Shining a white-hot spotlight on America’s famous, from Hollywood legends to Broadway stars to media moguls, Notorious is a captivating assortment of columnist Maureen Dowd’s most compelling style features and profiles. Using her signature wit and incisive commentary as a scalpel, Dowd dissects influential cultural elite.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were a Sixties supercharged couple in an era of supercharged couples. As a pairing they were fantasy figures, impossibly desirable. Liz supple and soft, in perfumes and furs - yet with something demonic and lethal about her. Dick, in turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looked as though lit by silver moonlight - poised to turn into a wolf. Roger Lewis uses this glamorous and damaged pair as the starting point to tell the story of an age of excess.

The Beatles shook the world to its core in the 1960’s and, to this day, new generations continue to fall in love with their songs and their story. At the heart of this phenomenon lies the dynamic between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Few other musical partnerships have been rooted in such a deep, intense and complicated personal relationship.

This lyrical biography explores the life and art of Yoko Ono, from her childhood haiku to her avant-garde visual art and experimental music. An outcast throughout most of her life, and misunderstood by every group she was supposed to belong to, Yoko always followed her own unique vision to create art that was ahead of its time and would later be celebrated. Her focus remained on being an artist, even when the rest of world saw her only as the wife of John Lennon. Yoko Ono's moving story will inspire any young adult who has ever felt like an outsider.

In 1972, Elliot Mintz installed a red light in his bedroom in Laurel Canyon. When it started flashing, it meant that either John Lennon or Yoko Ono—or sometimes both—were calling him. Which they did almost every day for nearly ten years, engaging Mintz in hours-long late-night phone conversations that all but consumed him for the better part of a decade. In We All Shine On, Mintz—a former radio and television host in Los Angeles—recounts the story of how their unlikely friendship began and where it led him over the years.

A compelling work of investigative journalism that explores the surprising origins and hidden ramifications of an epic late 1960s hoax, perpetrated by cultural luminaries, including Victor Navasky and E.L. Doctorow. For readers curious about the surprising connections between John F. Kennedy, Oliver Stone, Timothy McVeigh, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump.

David Sheff's story is a first: a teenager's addiction from the parent's point of view, a real-time chronicle of the shocking descent into substance abuse and the gradual emergence into hope.

Before meth, Sheff's son, Nic, was a varsity athlete, honor student, and award-winning journalist. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who stole money from his eight-year-old brother and lived on the streets. With haunting candor, Sheff traces the first warning signs, the attempts at rehabilitation, and, at last, the way past addiction. He shows us that, whatever an addict's fate, the rest of the family must care for one another, too, lest they become addicted to addiction.

All You Need Is Love is a groundbreaking oral history of the one of the most enduring musical acts of all time. The material is comprised of intimate interviews with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, their families, friends and business associates that were conducted by Beatles intimate Peter Brown and author Steven Gaines in 1980-1981 during the preparation of their international bestseller, The Love You Make, which spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list in 1983 and remains the biggest selling biography worldwide about the Beatles

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste its authentic cuisine.

Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit—and became a notorious tabloid story in the process. Though she was exonerated, it’s taken more than a decade for her to reclaim her identity and truly feel free. Free recounts how Knox survived incarceration, the mistakes she made and misadventures she had reintegrating into society, and culminates in the as-yet-untold story of her return to Italy and the extraordinary relationship she went on to build with the man who sent her to prison.

When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle—how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, but he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful—the very people Vanity Fair venerated.

If you’re wondering whether there’s life on the other side of deconversion, or if you’re trying desperately to understand a loved one who is losing their faith—this book is for you. Edited by philosophy of religion scholar, Sarah Bacaller, with a foreword by Bart Campolo (the first humanist chaplain at the University of Southern California), this book offers gripping insights into the deepest aspects of the deconversion journey.

From her earliest memories, Minu felt like an outsider. It wasn't just her peculiar name, but also her light skin and cinnamon-swirl hair—so unlike the dark features of her Mexican family—that drew comments from neighbors and strangers. No one took her questions seriously, leaving her yearning for answers. Meanwhile, she had to endure her father's violence, her mother's negligence, and the poverty and drugs in Cashion, Arizona. Determined to carve out her own destiny, Minu embarked on a journey to uncover the mysteries of her past.

Philip Norman’s biography of the Beatles is the definitive work on the world's most influential band—a beautifully written account of their lives, their music, and their times. Now brought completely up to date, this epic tale charts the rise of four scruffy Liverpool lads from their wild, often comical early days to the astonishing heights of Beatlemania, from the chaos of Apple and the collapse of hippy idealism to the band's acrimonious split.

Priscilla Presley’s divorce from Elvis left his fans incredulous. How could she leave the man every woman wanted? From the outside, life in Elvis’s mansion looked glamorous and enviable, and in many respects, it was. But inside the mansion, her husband was constantly surrounded by a male entourage while at the gates, lines of beautiful women waited hopefully for an audience with the King. From the time she was seventeen years old, that life was all Priscilla had known.

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution.

Rosemary Woodruff Leary has been known only as the wife of Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor-turned-psychedelic high priest, whose jailbreak captivated the counterculture and whose life on the run with Rosemary inflamed the government. But Rosemary was more than a mere accessory. She was a beatnik, a psychonaut, and a true believer who tested the limits of her mind and the expectations for women of her time.