Category
Memoirs
Abandoning a Cat 2026
Originally published in the New Yorker in 2019, and now presented in a full, unabridged form, Abandoning a Cat is a poignant, self-reflective work by Haruki Murakami.
Here he writes about his father, the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him into...
Belonging 2024
Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white—had kept...
Birdie & Harlow 2024
The funny and poignant story of one woman’s wonderfully codependent relationship with her dog – and what he taught her about chosen family and the reward of motherhood. This touching dog memoir, *Birdie & Harlow*, is the story of a baby and a dog. But motherhood is never quite that simple. In...
Building Material 2025
As an academically gifted Latino kid growing up in the Bronx, Stephen Bruno’s family had high aspirations for his future. He attended magnet schools and selective academic programs and was on track to realize his potential. But those dreams were derailed when, much to his Mami’s dismay, he followed...
The Chain 2024
In January 2017, Chimene Suleyman was on her way to an abortion clinic in Queens, New York with her boyfriend, the father of her nascent child. It was the last day they would spend together. In an extraordinary sequence of events, Chimene was to discover the truth of her boyfriend's life: that the...
The Japanese believe that until the age of three children, whether Japanese or not, are gods, each one an okosama, or "lord child." On their third birthday they fall from grace and join the rest of the human race. In Amélie Nothomb's new novel The Character of Rain, we learn that divinity is a...
At age eighty, Penelope Lively wrote this powerful and compelling 'view from old age', reporting back on what she found. There are meditations on what it is like to be old as well as on how memory shapes us. There are intriguing examinations of the key personal as well as historical moments she has...
Dearest Father 2008
In this open letter to his father – a letter which was never sent – Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of...
The Devil Finds Work 2011
Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also an appraisal of American racial politics. Offering a look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin considers such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s...
Cast in a cult film at the age of eighteen, Jenny Evans was on the cusp of something extraordinary; a route out of her hometown, a future of promise. But the new world she was exploring crumbled around her when she was assaulted at a party by a high-profile figure. Jenny reported this crime to the...
Doppelganger 2023
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago,...
The Empathy Diaries 2021
A personal and reflective memoir that traces a psychologist’s early life and intellectual journey, weaving together childhood memories, family relationships, and formative experiences that shaped her understanding of identity and connection.
As she revisits key moments from her past, she explores...
What will we do with our lives, and with whom will we do it? In this story of flying and catching, Nouwen invites us all to let go and fly, even when we are afraid of falling.
During the last five years of his life, best-selling spiritual author Henri J. M. Nouwen became close to The Flying...
Gratitude 2015
A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life.
In January 2015, Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer, and he shared this news in a New York Times essay that inspired readers all over the world: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is...
When it was first published in 1935, The New York Times called Green Hills of Africa, “The best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere,” Hemingway’s evocative account of his safari through East Africa with his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, captures his fascination with big-game hunting. In examining...
Heavy 2019
In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon...
Ingrained 2025
The eldest son of a master woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing lessons in his father’s workshop. In time he became his father’s apprentice, helping to create exquisite bespoke objects. But eventually the need to find his own path—to chase ever...
Juliet's Answer 2017
When Glenn Dixon is spurned by love, he packs his bags for Verona, Italy. Once there, he volunteers to answer the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to Juliet—letters sent from lovelorn people all over the world to Juliet’s hometown; people who long to understand the mysteries of the human...
Knife 2025
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought:...
The Last Supper 2022
When Rachel Cusk decides to travel to Italy for a summer with her husband and two young children, she has no idea of the trials and wonders that lie in store. Their journey, chronicled in The Last Supper, leads them to both the expected and the surprising, all seen through Cusk’s sharp and humane...
Late Admissions 2025
Economist Glenn C. Loury is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of our time: he’s often radically opposed to the political mainstream, and delights in upending what’s expected of a Black public figure. But more so than the arguments themselves—on affirmative action, institutional racism,...
Legends and Soles 2025
The gripping and eye-opening sports memoir from the “Savior of Nike” and the man who discovered Michael Jordan, Sonny Vaccaro. Written in collaboration with six-time New York Times bestselling author Armen Keteyian, *Legends and Soles* provides context and truth to the sensational media stories and...
Legitimate Kid 2024
Aida Rodriguez has, to put it mildly, lived a whirlwind life. Her rags-to-riches story is mind-blowing: she was kidnapped as a child by her mother in the Dominican Republic and brought to the US. She was later kidnapped again by her grandmother and uncle and moved from New York to Florida.
As an...
Levels of Life 2014
Levels of Life is a book about ballooning, photography, love and loss; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded Barnes the 2011 Booker Prize described him as “an unparalleled magus of the heart.” This book confirms that opinion.
Life in the Garden 2019
Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively...
A Living Remedy 2024
In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.
Nicole Chung couldn’t...
For over forty years, generations of readers have thrilled to Herriot's marvelous tales, deep love of life, and extraordinary storytelling abilities. For decades, Herriot roamed the remote, beautiful Yorkshire Dales, treating every patient that came his way from smallest to largest, and observing...
Love, Mom 2024
Unmatched and unwavering, mothers are the embodiment of selfless, pure, and unconditional love. But so often, the sacrifices and triumphs of motherhood go unrecognized. Now, in *Love, Mom*, Fox News medical contributor and mom of three, Dr. Nicole Saphier, shines a light on the power of a mother’s...
Magic Season 2025
As a queer kid in a conservative Ozarks community, Wade Rouse struggled at a young age to garner his father Ted’s approval and find his voice. But Wade and Ted had one thing in common: an undying love for the St. Louis Cardinals.
When his father's health takes a turn for the worse, Wade returns to...
Manifesto 2022
Evaristo’s astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a vibrant and inspirational account of Evaristo’s life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream and fought over several decades to bring her creative work into the world. With her characteristic humor, Evaristo describes her childhood...
Men We Reaped 2014
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the...
The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own.
The Mistress's Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened...
More, Please 2024
An unflinching and deeply reported look at the realities of binge-eating disorder from a rising culture commentator and writer for Vogue. Millions of us use restrictive diets, intermittent fasting, IV therapies, and Ozempic abuse to shrink until we are sample-size acceptable. But for the 30 million...
My Beloved Monster 2025
Caleb Carr lived with cats ever since he was a young boy. He grew up in a turbulent household – where famous Beat poets, artists and addicts came and went – and his steadiest companions were pets. Since then he had many feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human...
My Effin' Life 2025
Geddy Lee is one of rock and roll's most respected bassists. For nearly five decades, his playing and work as co-writer, vocalist, and keyboardist has been an essential part of the success story of Canadian progressive rock trio Rush. Here for the first time is his account of life inside and outside...
Nation of Strangers 2026
Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?
Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a...
In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the...
Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into the Arab Spring; she secured rare access to rebel-held Syria, where foreign journalists were banned, to cover its brutal civil war. When the Taliban claimed Kabul in...
No Ordinary Bird 2025
In the vein of Small Fry or Priestdaddy, No Ordinary Bird is a compelling father-daughter story that reads like true crime, haunted by a question the dashing and mysterious Lamar Chester had always taught his daughter to ask: “How do you tell the good guys from the bad?”
Artis was five when a plane...
A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction. If the fear of...
On a Move 2024
Before police dropped a bomb on a residential neighborhood on May 13, 1985, few people outside Philadelphia were aware that a Black-led civil liberties organization had taken root there. Founded in 1972 by a charismatic ideologue called John Africa, MOVE’s mission was to protect all forms of life...
On My Watch 2025
When Jens Stoltenberg took office as secretary general of NATO in 2014, the world was already changing. What followed was a decade marked by war, diplomatic crises, and decisions that helped shape the West’s shared security.
On My Watch takes readers behind closed doors and offers rare insight into...
Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. Everyday sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the...
Question 7 2025
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not...
Radical 2024
The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have built for yourself. Yet beauty may also appear. In the autumn of 2019, Guo traveled to New York to take up her position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in...
Raising Hare 2025
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and bounded around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, more than two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in...
Saved 2024
When veteran war reporter Benjamin Hall woke up in Kyiv on the morning of March 14, 2022, he had no idea that, within hours, Russian bombs would nearly end his life. As a journalist for Fox News, Hall had worked in dangerous war zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but with three young daughters at...
This is the captivating story behind Schindler’s List, the Booker Prize–winning book and the Academy Award–winning Spielberg film. Keneally tells the tale of the unlikely encounter that propelled him to write about Oskar Schindler and of the impact of his extraordinary account on people around the...
The Shapeless Unease 2021
This genre-defying debut memoir by Betty Trask Prize winner, Samantha Harvey, weaves a tapestry of confessional anguish, flash fiction, cathartic poetry, and feverish observations on politics and psychology in a transcendent search for reality and truth.
In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose...
The Slow Road North 2024
Rosie Schaap had a solid career as a journalist and a life that looked to others like nonstop fun: all drinking and dining and traveling to beautiful places—and getting paid to write about it. But under the surface she was reeling from the loss of her husband and her mother—who died just one year...
Gratitude 2015
A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life.
In January 2015, Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer, and he shared this news in a New York Times essay that inspired readers all over the world: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is...
For more than a decade, thousands of people have sought advice from Dear Sugar—the pseudonym of bestselling author Cheryl Strayed—first through her online column at The Rumpus, later through her hit podcast, Dear Sugars, and now through her popular Substack newsletter.
Tiny Beautiful Things...
The Empathy Diaries 2021
A personal and reflective memoir that traces a psychologist’s early life and intellectual journey, weaving together childhood memories, family relationships, and formative experiences that shaped her understanding of identity and connection.
As she revisits key moments from her past, she explores...
Abandoning a Cat October 20, 2026
Originally published in the New Yorker in 2019, and now presented in a full, unabridged form, Abandoning a Cat is a poignant, self-reflective work by Haruki Murakami.
Here he writes about his father, the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him into...
Nation of Strangers May 19, 2026
Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?
Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a...
Don't Let It Break You, Honey January 20, 2026
Cast in a cult film at the age of eighteen, Jenny Evans was on the cusp of something extraordinary; a route out of her hometown, a future of promise. But the new world she was exploring crumbled around her when she was assaulted at a party by a high-profile figure. Jenny reported this crime to the...
Worthy December 2, 2025
Jada Pinkett Smith was living what many would view as a fairy-tale of Hollywood success. But appearances can be deceiving, and as she felt more and more separated from her sense of self, emotional turmoil took hold.
Sparing no detail, *Worthy* chronicles her life—from a rebellious youth running the...
On My Watch November 11, 2025
When Jens Stoltenberg took office as secretary general of NATO in 2014, the world was already changing. What followed was a decade marked by war, diplomatic crises, and decisions that helped shape the West’s shared security.
On My Watch takes readers behind closed doors and offers rare insight into...
Late Admissions November 11, 2025
Economist Glenn C. Loury is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of our time: he’s often radically opposed to the political mainstream, and delights in upending what’s expected of a Black public figure. But more so than the arguments themselves—on affirmative action, institutional racism,...
Ingrained October 7, 2025
The eldest son of a master woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing lessons in his father’s workshop. In time he became his father’s apprentice, helping to create exquisite bespoke objects. But eventually the need to find his own path—to chase ever...
Magic Season October 7, 2025
As a queer kid in a conservative Ozarks community, Wade Rouse struggled at a young age to garner his father Ted’s approval and find his voice. But Wade and Ted had one thing in common: an undying love for the St. Louis Cardinals.
When his father's health takes a turn for the worse, Wade returns to...
My Effin' Life September 30, 2025
Geddy Lee is one of rock and roll's most respected bassists. For nearly five decades, his playing and work as co-writer, vocalist, and keyboardist has been an essential part of the success story of Canadian progressive rock trio Rush. Here for the first time is his account of life inside and outside...
Building Material September 23, 2025
As an academically gifted Latino kid growing up in the Bronx, Stephen Bruno’s family had high aspirations for his future. He attended magnet schools and selective academic programs and was on track to realize his potential. But those dreams were derailed when, much to his Mami’s dismay, he followed...
No Ordinary Bird September 2, 2025
In the vein of Small Fry or Priestdaddy, No Ordinary Bird is a compelling father-daughter story that reads like true crime, haunted by a question the dashing and mysterious Lamar Chester had always taught his daughter to ask: “How do you tell the good guys from the bad?”
Artis was five when a plane...
Question 7 August 26, 2025
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not...
My Beloved Monster July 3, 2025
Caleb Carr lived with cats ever since he was a young boy. He grew up in a turbulent household – where famous Beat poets, artists and addicts came and went – and his steadiest companions were pets. Since then he had many feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human...
Knife April 8, 2025
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought:...
Raising Hare March 4, 2025
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and bounded around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, more than two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in...
Legends and Soles February 25, 2025
The gripping and eye-opening sports memoir from the “Savior of Nike” and the man who discovered Michael Jordan, Sonny Vaccaro. Written in collaboration with six-time New York Times bestselling author Armen Keteyian, *Legends and Soles* provides context and truth to the sensational media stories and...
Flying, Falling, Catching November 5, 2024
What will we do with our lives, and with whom will we do it? In this story of flying and catching, Nouwen invites us all to let go and fly, even when we are afraid of falling.
During the last five years of his life, best-selling spiritual author Henri J. M. Nouwen became close to The Flying...
Birdie & Harlow October 15, 2024
The funny and poignant story of one woman’s wonderfully codependent relationship with her dog – and what he taught her about chosen family and the reward of motherhood. This touching dog memoir, *Birdie & Harlow*, is the story of a baby and a dog. But motherhood is never quite that simple. In...
Legitimate Kid October 8, 2024
Aida Rodriguez has, to put it mildly, lived a whirlwind life. Her rags-to-riches story is mind-blowing: she was kidnapped as a child by her mother in the Dominican Republic and brought to the US. She was later kidnapped again by her grandmother and uncle and moved from New York to Florida.
As an...
Radical September 24, 2024
The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have built for yourself. Yet beauty may also appear. In the autumn of 2019, Guo traveled to New York to take up her position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in...
The Slow Road North August 20, 2024
Rosie Schaap had a solid career as a journalist and a life that looked to others like nonstop fun: all drinking and dining and traveling to beautiful places—and getting paid to write about it. But under the surface she was reeling from the loss of her husband and her mother—who died just one year...
On a Move August 6, 2024
Before police dropped a bomb on a residential neighborhood on May 13, 1985, few people outside Philadelphia were aware that a Black-led civil liberties organization had taken root there. Founded in 1972 by a charismatic ideologue called John Africa, MOVE’s mission was to protect all forms of life...
No Ordinary Assignment July 16, 2024
Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into the Arab Spring; she secured rare access to rebel-held Syria, where foreign journalists were banned, to cover its brutal civil war. When the Taliban claimed Kabul in...
More, Please July 9, 2024
An unflinching and deeply reported look at the realities of binge-eating disorder from a rising culture commentator and writer for Vogue. Millions of us use restrictive diets, intermittent fasting, IV therapies, and Ozempic abuse to shrink until we are sample-size acceptable. But for the 30 million...
Woman of Interest June 25, 2024
In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea. After contacting a grizzled private investigator,...
Transitional May 21, 2024
Transitioning is an alignment of the invisible and the physical. It is truth rising to the surface. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition—a part of our experience as a conscious being, no matter who we are.
As time goes on, we all develop as people. None of us ever...
A Living Remedy April 30, 2024
In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.
Nicole Chung couldn’t...
The Chain April 30, 2024
In January 2017, Chimene Suleyman was on her way to an abortion clinic in Queens, New York with her boyfriend, the father of her nascent child. It was the last day they would spend together. In an extraordinary sequence of events, Chimene was to discover the truth of her boyfriend's life: that the...
Love, Mom April 16, 2024
Unmatched and unwavering, mothers are the embodiment of selfless, pure, and unconditional love. But so often, the sacrifices and triumphs of motherhood go unrecognized. Now, in *Love, Mom*, Fox News medical contributor and mom of three, Dr. Nicole Saphier, shines a light on the power of a mother’s...
Saved March 12, 2024
When veteran war reporter Benjamin Hall woke up in Kyiv on the morning of March 14, 2022, he had no idea that, within hours, Russian bombs would nearly end his life. As a journalist for Fox News, Hall had worked in dangerous war zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but with three young daughters at...
Belonging March 12, 2024
Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white—had kept...
Unraveling January 23, 2024
In this lively, funny memoir, Peggy Orenstein sets out to make a sweater from scratch—shearing, spinning, dyeing wool—and in the process discovers how we find our deepest selves through craft. Orenstein spins a yarn that will appeal to everyone.
The COVID pandemic propelled many people to change...
Doppelganger September 12, 2023
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago,...
Tiny Beautiful Things November 1, 2022
For more than a decade, thousands of people have sought advice from Dear Sugar—the pseudonym of bestselling author Cheryl Strayed—first through her online column at The Rumpus, later through her hit podcast, Dear Sugars, and now through her popular Substack newsletter.
Tiny Beautiful Things...
Manifesto January 18, 2022
Evaristo’s astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a vibrant and inspirational account of Evaristo’s life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream and fought over several decades to bring her creative work into the world. With her characteristic humor, Evaristo describes her childhood...
The Last Supper January 4, 2022
When Rachel Cusk decides to travel to Italy for a summer with her husband and two young children, she has no idea of the trials and wonders that lie in store. Their journey, chronicled in The Last Supper, leads them to both the expected and the surprising, all seen through Cusk’s sharp and humane...
The Shapeless Unease May 18, 2021
This genre-defying debut memoir by Betty Trask Prize winner, Samantha Harvey, weaves a tapestry of confessional anguish, flash fiction, cathartic poetry, and feverish observations on politics and psychology in a transcendent search for reality and truth.
In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose...
The Empathy Diaries March 2, 2021
A personal and reflective memoir that traces a psychologist’s early life and intellectual journey, weaving together childhood memories, family relationships, and formative experiences that shaped her understanding of identity and connection.
As she revisits key moments from her past, she explores...
One Writer's Beginnings November 3, 2020
Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. Everyday sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the...
Life in the Garden June 11, 2019
Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively...
Heavy March 5, 2019
In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon...
Juliet's Answer February 7, 2017
When Glenn Dixon is spurned by love, he packs his bags for Verona, Italy. Once there, he volunteers to answer the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to Juliet—letters sent from lovelorn people all over the world to Juliet’s hometown; people who long to understand the mysteries of the human...
Green Hills of Africa July 19, 2016
When it was first published in 1935, The New York Times called Green Hills of Africa, “The best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere,” Hemingway’s evocative account of his safari through East Africa with his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, captures his fascination with big-game hunting. In examining...
Gratitude November 24, 2015
A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life.
In January 2015, Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer, and he shared this news in a New York Times essay that inspired readers all over the world: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is...
Dancing Fish and Ammonites June 23, 2015
At age eighty, Penelope Lively wrote this powerful and compelling 'view from old age', reporting back on what she found. There are meditations on what it is like to be old as well as on how memory shapes us. There are intriguing examinations of the key personal as well as historical moments she has...
Men We Reaped September 16, 2014
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the...
Levels of Life July 1, 2014
Levels of Life is a book about ballooning, photography, love and loss; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded Barnes the 2011 Booker Prize described him as “an unparalleled magus of the heart.” This book confirms that opinion.
All Creatures Great and Small May 6, 2014
For over forty years, generations of readers have thrilled to Herriot's marvelous tales, deep love of life, and extraordinary storytelling abilities. For decades, Herriot roamed the remote, beautiful Yorkshire Dales, treating every patient that came his way from smallest to largest, and observing...
Wild March 26, 2013
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only...
The Devil Finds Work September 13, 2011
Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also an appraisal of American racial politics. Offering a look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin considers such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s...