Author Memoirs

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.

In the World is the second instalment of Maxim Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy. Published in 1916, the book depicts Gorky’s experiences as a young adult, portraying his encounters with an array of characters from different social classes and conveying his observations of society at large. Gorky skilfully depicts the struggles, dreams and complexities of the lower classes, highlighting the social inequalities prevalent in Russia during the later 19th century.

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.

Alle wollen alt werden, niemand will alt sein. Der Widerspruch ist absurd, das Leiden daran real. Wie lernen wir, so gut wie möglich damit zurechtzukommen? Geht das, alt werden und ein erfülltes Leben führen? Mit ihren über 80 Jahren hat sich Elke Heidenreich mit dem Altwerden beschäftigt. Herausgekommen ist dabei ein Buch, wie nur sie es schreiben kann. Persönlich, ehrlich, doch nie gnadenlos, mit einem Wort: lebensklug. Sie denkt über ihr eigenes Leben nach, und das heißt vor allem, über ihre Beziehungen zu anderen Menschen. Im Alter trägt man die Konsequenzen für alles, was man getan hat.

'You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...' Julian Barnes's new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as 'an unparalleled magus of the heart'. This book confirms that opinion.

In Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert on Wickedness, ‘Agathologist’ Dr Mark Aldridge looks at nearly a century of St Mary Mead’s most famous resident and uses his own detective skills to uncover new information about Miss Jane Marple’s appearances on page, stage, screen and beyond. Drawing on a range of material, some of which is newly discovered and previously unpublished, this book explores everything about Miss Marple, from her origins in a series of short stories penned by Christie, to the recent bestselling HarperCollins collection Marple: Twelve New Stories.

As the Roaring Twenties wind down, Jean-Paul Sartre waits in a Paris café for a first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who never shows. Marlene Dietrich slips away from a loveless marriage to cruise the dive bars of Berlin. The fledgling writer Vladimir Nabokov places a freshly netted butterfly at the end of his wife’s bed. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Zelda and Scott, Dalí and Gala, Picasso and his many muses, Henry and June and Anaïs Nin, the entire extended family of Thomas Mann, and a host of other fascinating and famous figures make art and love, write and row, bed and wed and betray.

Philippe Girard shows how Toussaint Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman into revolutionary hero as the mastermind of the bloody slave revolt of 1791. By 1801, Louverture was governor of the colony where he had once been a slave. But his lifelong quest to be accepted as a member of the colonial elite ended in despair: he spent the last year of his life in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless inspired anticolonial and Black nationalist movements well into the 20th century.

In 2017, David got what he thought was a mild touch of the flu. This book is the story of why David would make a lousy doctor. Contrary to the book’s title, David had lymphoma and it was terminal. But A Mild Touch of the Cancer isn’t your standard "how I survived" compendium. It is a hilarious tale, written while battling one of life’s greatest challenges. It’s a book about living with optimism and positivity, by a self-proclaimed Genetically Modified Organism.

A comprehensive biographical and critical reading of the works of American poet and memoirist Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Linda Wagner-Martin covers all six of Angelou's autobiographies, as well as her essay and poetry collections, while also exploring Angelou's life as an African American in the United States, her career as stage and film performer, her thoughtful participation in the Civil Rights actions of the 1960s, and her travels abroad in Egypt, Africa, and Europe.

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?

English novelist Barbara Pym’s career was defined, in many senses, by rejection. Her first novel Some Tame Gazelle was turned down by every publisher she sent it out in 1935, finally published only 15 years later. Though she picked up a publisher from there and received modest praise, the publishing industry grew restless and her sales spiralled downwards. By her seventh novel, she had been dropped. This brilliant biography, brimming with Pym’s private diaries and intimate letters, offers a first full insight into Barbara Pym’s life and how it informed her writing.

In the novel Little Women, Mr. March goes off to war. But in real life, it was Jo March (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. This is Alcott’s memoir but she chose to use the pseudonym “Tribulation Periwinkle” to tell her story. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord, Massachusetts to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany. Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution became celebrated across fascist Europe.

In Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, the author of the bestsellers Traveling Mercies and Plan B delivers a poignant, funny, and bittersweet primer of faith, as we come to discover what it means to be fully alive.

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation's attention to issues of region, race, and labor. In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award-winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters.

John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary and later secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous as "Mark Twain", grew up 50 miles apart on the banks of the Mississippi River in the same rural antebellum stew of race, class, and want. This shared history drew them together in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration never waned in spite of sharp differences.

Avril 2022. En arrivant un soir chez sa mère, Julia Deck trouve celle-ci étendue sur le sol de la salle de bains, victime d’un accident cérébral. Selon les médecins qui la prennent en charge, ses chances de survie sont infimes. Commence alors une longue attente, faite d’angoisse et d’espoir de convalescence, à travers le dédale des établissements de soins, sur fond de crise hospitalière.

Céleste Albaret fut la gouvernante et la seule confidente de Marcel Proust pendant les huit dernières années de son existence, durant lesquelles il acheva l'écriture de son chef-d'œuvre - elle est d'ailleurs une des clefs du personnage de Françoise dans "La Recherche". Jour après jour elle assista dans sa vie, son travail et son long martyre, ce grand malade génial qui se tua volontairement à la tâche.

For Glory Edim, that “friend of my mind” is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, eventually reaching a community of half a million readers. But her own love of books stretches far back. Edim’s father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, marking the beginning of a series of traumatic changes and losses for her family. What became an escape, a safe space, and a second home for her and her brother was their local library.