Author Memoirs

Beloved by generations of readers, the Chronicles of Narnia are thought, erroneously, by some to be "mere children's stories". In this volume, Joseph Pearce thoroughly debunks the error as he skillfully explains why there is nothing "mere" about such stories. Rather, the Narnia books contain profound insights concerning the human condition. Pearce, however, goes beyond even that and illuminates the deeper riches and profound truths found therein: the highest truths, in fact, those concerning God.

In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author’s name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story.

Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.

In Inadvertent, internationally best-selling author Karl Ove Knausgaard reveals his beginnings as a writer and his literary influences, as well as his creative development and his struggles. But this audiobook is more than a window into the writer's frame of mind. It's also a glimmering meditation on literature and creativity - on its limitations and its freedoms.

Geoffrey Chaucer, who died in 1400, lived a surprisingly eventful life. He served with the Duke of Clarence and with Edward III, and in 1359 was taken prisoner in France and ransomed. Through his wife, Philippa, he gained the patronage of John of Gaunt, which helped him carve out a career at Court. His posts included Controller of Customs at the Port of London, Knight of the Shire for Kent, and King's Forester. He went on numerous adventurous diplomatic missions to France and Italy.

In 1971, Go Ask Alice reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portrayal of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. The supposed diary of a middle-class addict, Go Ask Alice terrified adults and cemented LSD's fearsome reputation, fueling support for the War on Drugs. Five million copies later, Go Ask Alice remains a divisive bestseller, outraging censors and earning new fans, all of them drawn by the book's mythic premise: A Real Diary, by Anonymous.

In Cross of Snow, the result of more than 12 years of research, including access to never-before-examined letters, diaries, journals, and notes, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work - the soul - of the man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, and translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching that his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde.

Listen as Frank tells in his own inimitable voice his story of how at the age of 19 he traveled from Limerick to New York in pursuit of the American dream. Despite the abundance of unsolicited advice he gets to "join the cops" and "stick to his own kind", Frank knows that he should educate himself and somehow rise above his circumstances.

Napoleon Hill was and is an American treasure. He was a confidant of presidents and statesmen. The prominent men of several generations freely revealed their secrets of success to him. But he never forgot his humble origins. He considered it his sacred obligation to share with the world the knowledge about personal achievement that he had accumulated during his rich and varied life.

In this captivating memoir, the man whom Julia Child has called "the best chef in America" tells the story of his rise from a frightened apprentice in an exacting Old World kitchen to an Emmy Award-winning superstar who taught millions of Americans how to cook and shaped the nation's tastes in the bargain. The Apprentice is the poignant and sometimes funny tale of a boy's coming of age. Beyond that, it is the story of America's culinary awakening and the transformation of food from an afterthought to a national preoccupation.

The original authorised biography, and the only one written by an author who actually met J. R. R. Tolkien. In the 25 years since Tolkien’s death in September 1973, millions have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and become fascinated about the very private man behind the books. Born in Bloemfontein in January 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was orphaned in childhood, brought up in near poverty and almost thwarted in adolescent romance....

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone form Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure akin to Sarah Bakewell's book on Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but also to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind for our own age.

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? As Lucy Worsley says, 'She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern'. Her life was 'modern' too: she went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?

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.

From its birth in 1925 to the early days of the Cold War, The New Yorker slowly but surely took hold as the country's most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra paints a portrait of the magazine's cadre of charming, wisecracking, driven, troubled, and brilliant writers and editors. He introduces us to Wolcott Gibbs, theater critic, all-around wit, and author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine.

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.

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.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple best-selling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother. For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence - a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life.

A Writer Prepares, an examination of the first quarter century of one writer's life, is arguably the work of two writers. There's the middle-aged fellow who wrote about half of it at a blistering pace in 1994, and there's the octogenarian who finished the job another quarter century later. The older fellow brought less raw energy to the task, and his memory is a long way from infallible, but one can only hope he's offset these losses with a slight edge in judgment, in perspective, in maturity.