Author Memoirs

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.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print during the last two decades of her life as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. Based on archives and interviews with Jackie's authors, colleagues, and friends, Reading Jackie mines this significant period of her life to reveal both the serious and the mischievous woman underneath the glamorous public image.

For Lewis Carroll, a deacon in the Church of England, faith in Christ and belief in a loving God stood at the core of his being, but little has been written about what the church or faith meant to the celebrated author of the Alice books. With Lewis Carroll: Formed by Faith, Charlie Lovett provides the first in-depth study of the religious life of the famous author, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. By examining Dodgson's religious education and core beliefs, this book shows how a deep Christian faith guided every part of his life and work.

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.

Ein Buch wie eine persönliche Begegnung, ein Hörbuch wie eine private Live-Lesung. Benedict Wells erzählt von der Faszination des Schreibens und gibt einen tiefen Einblick in sein Leben, von seiner Kindheit bis zu seinen ersten Veröffentlichungen. Anhand eigener und anderer Werke zeigt er anschaulich, wie ein Roman entsteht, was fesselnde Geschichten ausmacht und wie man mit Rückschlägen umgeht. Ein berührendes, lebenskluges und humorvolles Buch – für alle, die Literatur lieben oder selbst schreiben wollen.

A 1959 encounter brought reporter Valerie Danby-Smith face-to-face with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was brief, but before it ended something had clicked into place. For the next two years, Valerie was devoted to Hemingway and his wife, traveling with them through Spain and France and finally Cuba. Five years after his death, Valerie became a Hemingway when she married the writer's son Gregory. Now, she tells the story of the years she spent with this talented and doomed family.

Everyone thinks about running away from home sometime. Most people don't venture that when they are 51. Sammi did. When the world got too small and being part of it got too unbearable she ran. Mostly west. On the way she bumped into her past and found some reconcile with her present. Filled with memories common to us all, too familiar demons, the longing, the searching, the betrayal and brokenness—the beauty of it all.

C. S. Lewis had one of the great minds of the 20th century. Many know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. What shaped the mind of this great thinker?

Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam's best seller takes you inside the football genius of Bill Belichick for an insightful profile in leadership. Bill Belichick's thirty-one years in the NFL have been marked by amazing success - most recently with the New England Patriots. In this groundbreaking audiobook, David Halberstam explores the nuances of both the game and the man behind it. He uncovers what makes Bill Belichick tick both on and off the field.

Edited and annotated by H. L. M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books - the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong - but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all.

From the very first book publication in October 1920 to the film release of Death on the Nile in October 2020, this investigation into Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot celebrates a century of probably the world’s favourite fictional detective. This book tells his story decade-by-decade, exploring his appearances not only in the original novels, short stories and plays but also across stage, screen and radio productions.

In his late 30s, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands.

Depuis Les Fourmis : 30 romans, 30 ans, 30 traductions, 30 millions de lecteurs... Bernard Werber, c'est une vie à part et une œuvre mondialement reconnue où se croisent des anges, des dieux, des chats, des templiers, des fourmis et des abeilles..., où la science nous initie au "savoir relatif et absolu" du professeur Wells.

In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.

Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: Her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives.

A Place to Stand is Jimmy Santiago Baca's memoir of childhood on the small farms of New Mexico, his adolescence spent in orphanages and detention centers, his years as a drug dealer in San Diego and Arizona, and his extraordinary personal transformation under the harrowing conditions behind bars. Life in prison was often brutal, and Baca describes the extreme measures he had to take to survive, which endowed him with an indomitable will to resist the dehumanization of prison life. The act of writing offered a powerful means of transcending his surroundings.

Oscar Wilde's life – like his wit – was alive with paradox. He was both an early exponent and a victim of 'celebrity culture': famous for being famous, he was lauded and ridiculed in equal measure. His achievements were frequently downplayed, his successes resented. He had a genius for comedy but strove to write tragedies. Matthew Sturgis draws on a wealth of new material and fresh research, bringing alive the distinctive mood and characters of the fin de siècle in the richest and most compelling portrait of Oscar Wilde to date.

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.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of Mark Twain's Chapters From My Autobiography; 5 pieces of short non-fiction; and 6 pieces of his groundbreaking, wide-ranging travel writing.

Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong.