Author Memoirs

As an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, Cory Leadbeater was presented with an opportunity to work for a well-known writer whose identity was kept confidential. Since the tumultuous days of childhood, Cory had sought refuge from the rougher parts of life in the pages of books. Suddenly, he found himself the personal assistant to a titan of literature: Joan Didion. In the nine years that followed, Cory shared Joan’s rarefied world, transformed not only by her blazing intellect but by her generous friendship and mentorship.

For a time, Nelson Algren was America's most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Millions bought his books. Algren's third novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, won the first National Book Award, and Frank Sinatra starred in the movie. But despite Algren's talent, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. The cause of his decline was never clear. Some said he drank his talent away; others cited writer's block. The truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated and tragic.

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary has composed literary and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality.

In The Night of the Gun, David Carr redefines memoir with the revelatory story of his years as an addict and chronicles his journey from crack-house regular to regular columnist for The New York Times. Built on 60 videotaped interviews, legal and medical records, and three years of reporting, The Night of the Gun is a ferocious tale that uses the tools of journalism to fact-check the past.

La diferencia entre La llamada de la tribu y otros títulos como El pez en el agua es que aquí el protagonismo no lo tienen las vivencias del autor, sino las lecturas que moldearon su forma de pensar y de ver el mundo en los últimos cincuenta años. En Nobel peruano ha hecho una cartografía de los pensadores liberales que le ayudaron a desarrollar un nuevo cuerpo de ideas después del gran trauma ideológico que supuso, por un lado, el desencanto con la Revolución Cubana y, por otro, el distanciamiento de las ideas de Jean-Paul Sartre.

Living to Tell the Tale spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. A radiant, powerful, and beguiling memoir, Living to Tell the Tale gives us the formation of Gabriel García Márquez as a writer and as a man.

In this intimate dual memoir, she and her daughter, Ann, offer distinct perspectives as a 50-something and a 20-something, each on a quest to redefine herself and to rediscover each other. Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel throughout Greece and France. Sue, coming to grips with aging, caught in a creative vacuum, longing to reconnect with her grown daughter, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel.

aking George Orwell's famous essay, "Why I Write", as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity, and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory as a young woman and shape it to her need. Things I Don't Want to Know is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succor, from one of our most vital contemporary writers.

Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again, the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak, and eventually from reality.

Mistakes to Run With chronicles the turbulent life of Yasuko Thanh, from early childhood in the closest thing Victoria, BC, has to a slum, to teen years as a sex worker and, finally, to her emergence as an award-winning author. As a child, Thanh embraced evangelical religion, only to rebel against it and her rigid parents, cutting herself, smoking, and shoplifting. At 15, the honour-roll runaway develops a taste for drugs and alcohol. After a stint in jail at 16, feeling utterly abandoned by her family, school, and society, Thanh meets the man who would become her pimp....

An initiation signals a beginning: a door opens and you step through. Traditional Wiccan initiates are usually brought into the craft through a ceremony with a High Priestess. But even though Amanda Yates Garcia's mother, a practicing witch herself, initiated her into the earth-centered practice of witchcraft when she was 13 years old, Amanda's real life as a witch only began when she underwent a series of spontaneous initiations of her own.

A revelatory narrative of the intersecting lives and works of revered authors Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism.

An award-winning historian and author, Paul Hendrickson here turns his attention to one of America’s most cherished literary icons, Ernest Hemingway. Drawing on previously unpublished material, Hendrickson focuses on Hemingway’s life in its twilight, just prior to his suicide, and the seemingly singular constant in the man’s life: his boat, Pilar. On this vessel, Hemingway would entertain and travel, but it would also be the scene of some of his greatest tragedies.

Confined in a cell four meters long, imprisoned on absurd, Kafkaesque charges, novelist Ahmet Altan is one of many writers persecuted by Recep Tayyip Erdogan's oppressive regime. In this extraordinary memoir, written from his prison cell, Altan reflects upon his sentence, on a life whittled down to a courtyard covered by bars, and on the hope and solace a writer's mind can provide, even in the darkest places.

Le premier tome des Souvenirs d’enfance de Marcel Pagnol est un classique indémodable.
Par la grâce de son écriture, l’auteur nous transporte dans les collines provençales et nous fait partager son émerveillement d’enfant.

How did a boy from small-town New York become the world’s most successful writer? How does he do it? He has always wanted to write the kind of novel that would be read and reread so many times that the binding breaks and the book literally falls apart. As he says, “I’m still working on that one.”

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin.

En 2014, Vika regresa a su Ucrania natal para investigar un misterio familiar: cómo murió su tío bisabuelo Nikodim en la década de 1930 y por qué su historia sigue siendo tabú casi un siglo después. Aunque desentrañar viejas incógnitas siempre resulta complicado, no había previsto que la resistencia más fuerte la encontraría en su abuela Valentina, que le prohíbe remover el pasado. No en vano, Ucrania es «tierra de sangre», como sus vecinos Polonia, Bielorrusia, Rusia y los países bálticos.

Mystery and horror. Poe, who remains one of the most iconic of American writers, died under haunting circumstances that reflect the two literary genres he took to new heights. Over the years, there has been a staggering amount of speculation about the cause of death, from rabies and syphilis to suicide, alcoholism, and even murder. But many of these theories are formed on the basis of the caricature we have come to associate with Poe: the gloomy-eyed grandfather of Goth, hunched over a writing desk with a raven perched on one shoulder, drunkenly scribbling his chilling masterpieces.

Sitting down to write a book about his hero D. H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer finds himself compelled to write about anything else. He is in fact compelled to do more or less anything else instead of write. In Sicily he is too preoccupied by his hatred of seafood to follow the great writer's footsteps; in Mexico he cannot get beyond a drug-induced erotic fantasy on a nudist beach...and yet, incredibly, this attempt to write a 'sober academic study' reveals the hold Lawrence and his work still exert on us today.