Author Memoirs

As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis' death, celebrated Oxford don Dr. Alister McGrath presents us with a compelling and definitive portrait of the life of C. S. Lewis, the author of the well-known Narnia series. For more than half a century, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series has captured the imaginations of millions. In C. S. Lewis - A Life, Dr. Alister McGrath recounts the unlikely path of this Oxford don, who spent his days teaching English literature to the brightest students in the world and his spare time writing.

" Je rêvais d'être ma propre cause et ma propre fin ; je pensais à présent que la littérature me permettrait de réaliser ce vœu. Elle m'assurerait une immortalité qui compenserait l'éternité perdue ; il n'y avait plus de Dieu pour m'aimer, mais je brûlerais dans des millions de cœurs. En écrivant une œuvre nourrie de mon histoire, je me créerais moi-même à neuf et je justifierais mon existence. En même temps, je servirais l'humanité : quel plus beau cadeau lui faire que des livres? Je m'intéressais à la fois à moi et aux autres"

A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.

Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn't abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings and that quickly gained a dedicated following. In So Sad Today, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter.

Published during a literary era marked by the ascendance of Black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alex Haley, this thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown’s childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.

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, el autor que más lo había inspirado en su juventud.

In 1895, a specialist straps five-year-old Katharine Hathaway, then suffering from spinal tuberculosis, to a board with halters and pulleys in a failed attempt to prevent her from becoming a “hunchback” like the “little locksmith” who does odd jobs at her family’s home. Forced to endure her confinement for ten years, Katharine remains immobile until age fifteen, only to find that none of it has prevented her from developing a deformity of her own.

She has become a legend. Brilliant, personable, and passionate, she is arguably the most gifted of all Irish woman writers of Christian literature. Until her death in 1951, she devoted 50 years of her life to rescuing babies and children from dangerous backgrounds in India. As Bingham tried to uncover the heart and conscience of this extraordinarily self-effacing legend, he is on record as saying that it proved to be one of the greatest spiritual experiences of his life, and in this biography, listeners will find spiritual gold.

In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.

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.”

The glamorous extravagances and devastating lows of her time in Hollywood are revealed as never before in this fresh new biography of Dorothy Parker—from leaving New York City to work on numerous classic screenplays such as the 1937 A Star Is Born to the devastation of alcoholism, a miscarriage, and her husband’s suicide. Parker’s involvement with anti-fascist and anti-racist groups, which led to her ultimate blacklisting, and her early work in the civil rights movement that inspired her to leave her entire estate to the NAACP are also explored as never before.

Iowa housewife Tracey Pittman Roberts seemed to have it all: natural beauty, three loving children, and a fairy-tale second marriage to a wealthy, handsome businessman. But beneath the happy façade was a woman who used lies, manipulation, sex, ugly allegations, blackmail - and even murder - to serve her own selfish ends. In 2001, police rushed to Tracey's home after a shooting left her vulnerable young neighbor dead. Tracey claimed it was an act of self-defense. Nine gunshot wounds - and a decades-long trail of extortion and fraud - said otherwise.

In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey through life. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth.

This explosively entertaining memoir abounds in gossip, satire, historical apercus, and trenchant observations. Vidal’s compelling narrative weaves back and forth in time, providing a whole view of the author’s celebrated life, from his birth in 1925 to today, and features a cast of memorable characters - including the Kennedy family, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

This book essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. The story is pretty grim: teen-aged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed.

Laurie Lee was still a young man when he decided to fight for the Republican cause in Spain's civil war. But though he braved icy, storm-swept mountains alone to contact Republican sympathisers, he was immediately suspected of being a Nationalist spy. Imprisoned and almost executed by his own side, he eventually joined the International Brigade. This is the story of his experiences as a Republican soldier, fighting for the losing side in a doomed war.

In the 1930s, Jill Ker's parents bought a sheep farm on the western plains of New South Wales. In 1944, they lost nearly everything when a drought hit. Forced to leave Coorain, 11-year-old Jill and her mother settled in Sydney where Jill struggled to find a place for herself among Sydney's elite. Her story, both a chronicle of life in the Australian outback and the odyssey of a brilliant woman fighting the constraints of her time, offers a loving view of Australia.

Henry Worsley spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the 19th-century polar explorer who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape and life-threatening physical exhaustion. He soon felt compelled to go back. In 2015, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone.

U.S. soldiers who served in overseas conflicts—from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan—share true stories of the actions that earned them some of America’s most distinguished military medals, up to and including the Medal of Honor. They never acted alone, but always in the spirit of camaraderie, patriotism, and for the good of our beloved country. There has never been a better time for all of us to think about duty, sacrifice, and what it means to be an American hero.