Author Memoirs

Baby Boy Fisher was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. He ultimately came to live with a foster family, where he endured near-constant verbal and physical abuse. In his midteens he escaped and enlisted in the navy, where he became a man of the world, raised by the family he created for himself. Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born.

Charles Finger’s book efficiently covers Oscar Wilde’s background, his early years and education, and his beginnings as an author, poet, and critic for several magazines. The author then turns to the activities of Wilde that drew the attention of others, culminating in the Marquess of Queensbury calling Wilde out as a homosexual. Wilde sued for slander, but the Marquess was acquitted and materials brought forth during the trial resulted in Wilde being arrested and tried for homosexuality. He was convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor, from which he never really recovered.

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

After 22 years, spent across four continents, with two children - Louis and Marcel - in 1990, Anne and Paul Theroux decided to separate. For that year, Anne - later a professional relationship therapist herself - kept a diary, noting not only her day-to day experiences as a busy freelance journalist and broadcaster but the contrasts in her feelings between despairing grief and hope for a new future.

Autobiography of a Yogi is at once a beautifully written account of an exceptional life and a profound introduction to the ancient science of yoga and its time-honored tradition of meditation.

For six months between 1966 and 1967, Wayne Johnston and his family lived in a wreck of a house across from his grandparents in Goulds, Newfoundland. At seven, Wayne was sickly and skinny, unable to keep food down, plagued with insomnia and a relentless cough that no doctor could diagnose, though they had already removed his tonsils, adenoids and appendix. To the neigh­bours, he was known as “Jennie’s boy,” a back­handed salute to his tiny, ferocious mother, who felt judged for Wayne’s condition at the same time as worried he might never grow up.

Paret lay on the ground, quivering gently, a small froth on his mouth. The house doctor jumped into the ring. He knelt. He pried Paret's eyelid open. He looked at the eyeball staring out. He let the lid snap shut. He reached into his satchel, took out a needle, jabbed Paret with a stimulant. Paret's back rose in a high arch. He writhed in real agony. They were calling him back from death. One wanted to cry out, "Leave the man alone. Let him die."

In this radiant dual biography, Jonathan Bate explores the fascinating parallel lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, writers who worked separately - on different continents, a century apart, in distinct genres - but whose lives uncannily echoed. Using Plutarch’s ancient model of “parallel lives”, Jonathan Bate recasts the inspired lives of two of the greatest and best‑known Romantic writers. Commemorating both the bicentenary of Keats’ death and the centenary of the Roaring Twenties, this is a moving exploration of literary influence.

When Putsata Reang was eleven months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending twenty-three days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. Holding what appeared to be a lifeless baby in her arms, Ma resisted the captain’s orders to throw her bundle overboard. Instead, on landing, Ma rushed her baby into the arms of American military nurses and doctors, who saved the child's life. “I had hope, just a little, you were still alive,” Ma would tell Put in an oft-repeated story that became family legend.

"Depuis des années, je tourne autour de cet événement de ma vie. Lire dans un roman le récit d'un avortement me plonge dans un saisissement sans images ni pensées, comme si les mots se changeaient instantanément en sensation violente. De la même façon entendre par hasard "La javanaise", "J'ai la mémoire qui flanche", n'importe quelle chanson qui m'a accompagnée durant cette période, me bouleverse."

The eldest was a razor-sharp novelist of upper-class manners; the second was loved by John Betjeman; the third was a fascist who married Oswald Mosley; the fourth idolized Hitler and shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany; the fifth was a member of the American Communist Party; the sixth became Duchess of Devonshire. They were the Mitford sisters....

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.

A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.

Depravity, redemption, terror, and spiritual deliverance abound in this physically and psychologically complex memoir from the front man of the pioneer punk band True Sounds of Liberty (TSOL). Spanning the extremes between hard-core punk memoir and handbook for recovery and survival, this narrative documents a youth rebellion that changed the world and offered life lessons rooted in 1980s punk culture.

The fullest, most textural, most accurate - most human - account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life - based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life.

From the voice of a generation: The most highly anticipated autobiography of the year, and the story of a man who...is a Londoner and a Mod...wanted The Who to be called The Hair...loved The Everly Brothers, but not that "drawling dope" Elvis...wanted to be a sculptor, a journalist, a dancer and a graphic designer...became a musician, composer, librettist, fiction writer, literary editor, sailor...smashed his first guitar onstage, in 1964, by accident...heard the voice of God on a vibrating bed in rural Illinois...and much more.

Born into one of the wealthiest families in America - he was the youngest son of Standard Oil scion John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the celebrated patron of modern art Abby Aldrich Rockefeller - David Rockefeller has carried his birthright into a distinguished life of his own.

Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.

Prodigy Akiane Kramarik shares her artwork, poetry, and the fascinating story surrounding her talent. Growing up in a home with an atheistic mother and a non-participating Catholic father did not stop four-year-old Akiane Kramarik from finding God. This girl's dreams began a conversation in the home that has eventually brought them all to Christianity and the world's attention. Akiane: Her Life, Her Art, Her Poetry is a collection of the best of Akiane's full-color paintings and poetry created from ages 4 to 10.

Eve has a problem with clutter. Too much stuff and too easily acquired, it confronts her in every corner and on every surface in her house. When she pledges to tackle the worst offender, her horror of a "hell room", she anticipates finally being able to throw away all of the unnecessary things she can't bring herself to part with: her fifth-grade report card, dried-up art supplies, an old vinyl raincoat. But what Eve discovers isn't just old CDs and outdated clothing, but a fierce desire within herself to hold on to her identity.