Author Memoirs

In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from Mill Valley, California, to the North Cascades to spend two months serving as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service. Taking only the Diamond Sutra for reading material, he intended to spend his time in deep contemplation and to achieve enlightenment.

Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller, the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater into a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life—his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller’s role as a public intellectual—this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller’s psychology and his plays.

In 1845, after years of literary and emotional struggle, friend and colleague Ralph Waldo Emerson invited Thoreau to build a cabin on his land near Walden Pond, the location of which became Thoreau's inspiration. Walden records the doctrines of transcendentalism that he lived, supported, and for which he became famous. He focuses on the concept of self-knowledge and encourages all people to find some way to learn more about themselves and the world around them. Thoreau is remembered as a major American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher.

Even if others abandon you, you must never abandon yourself. This simple truth became Terry Helwig’s lifeline as she was forced to grow up too soon. Terry grew up the oldest of six girls in the big-sky country of the American Southwest, where she attended 12 schools in 11 years. Helwig’s stepfather, Davy, a good-hearted and loving man, proudly purchased a mobile home to enable his family to move more easily from one oil town to another, where Davy eked out a living in the oil fields.

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, the sequel to Lemons, follows the lives of Chris, Ana and their daughter, Chloë, as they get to grips with a misanthropic parrot who joins their home, Spanish school life, neighbours in love, their amazement at Chris appearing on the bestseller lists . . and their shock at discovering that their beloved valley is once more under threat of a dam.

Arthur Miller's plays have held the world's stages for almost half a century. Among them are Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and All My Sons, which have been read and performed countless times across the world. His memoir, Timebends, shows that the life of the man is as compelling as his plays. With passion, wit and candour, Miller recalls his childhood in Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1920s and the Depression; his successes and failures in the theatre and in Hollywood; the formation of his political beliefs....

The Unquiet Englishman braids the narratives of Greene's extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions; it tells the story of a restless traveler and unfailing advocate for human rights exploring troubled places around the world, a man who struggled to believe in God and found himself described as a great Catholic writer; it reveals a private life in which love almost always ended in ruin, alongside a larger story of politicians, battlefields, and spies.

Bertrand Russell is, without a doubt, one of the most prominent and influential figures in philosophy in the 20th century. His work was a significant influence on minds such as Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, and Noam Chomsky. With The Problems of Philosophy, he brings a complicated subject into easy reach. Russell uses this work to highlight the main philosophical subjects examined through the course of history.

Spotlighting an extraordinary career, this autobiography reviews the author’s accomplishments working and playing alongside some of Canada’s greatest writers. These humorous chronicles relate the projects he brainstormed for writer Barry Broadfoot, how he convinced eventual Nobel Prize contender Alice Munro to keep writing short stories, his early morning phone call from a former Prime Minister, and his recollection of yanking a manuscript right out of Alistair MacLeod’s own reluctant hands....

Isak Dinesen earned international fame for Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa, and other stories that skillfully combine elements of fable, social conflict, and psychological drama. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Yet the story of her life - her travels, affairs, and friendships - remains the greatest story of all.

Most would not expect a book about a stroke to be entertaining, but this memoir will force you to laugh through a tragedy, then cry, then laugh again. Avrel Seale was fifty, did not smoke or drink, had low blood pressure, and had hiked more than two hundred miles the year a stroke nearly ended his life. In an instant, he was teleported into the body of an old man—unbalanced, shaky, spastic, and half-paralyzed. Overnight, he was plunged into a world of brain surgeons, nurses, insurance case managers, and an abundance of therapists.

When Glenn Dixon is spurned by love, he packs his bags for Verona, Italy. Once there, he volunteers to answer the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to Juliet - letters sent from lovelorn people all over the world to Juliet's hometown, people who long to understand the mysteries of the human heart. Glenn's journey takes him deep into the charming community of Verona, where he becomes involved in unraveling the truth behind Romeo and Juliet.

In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kind of novelistic memoir”, Jay Parini takes us back 50 years, when he fled the United States for Scotland - in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.

Amor por Chile y una gran nostalgia son el origen de este libro: la presencia continuada del pasado, el sentimiento de verse ausente de la patria, la conciencia de haber sido peregrina y forastera... todo ello lo transmite Isabel Allende con inteligencia y humor.

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.

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson’s beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.

Timothy Findley (1930-2002) was one of Canada’s foremost writers - an award-winning novelist, playwright and short-story writer who began his career as an actor in London, England. Findley was instrumental in the development of Canadian literature and publishing in the 1970s and '80s.

Dans les années 1930, Maya vit une enfance de pauvreté et de ségrégation à Stamps, dans l'Arkansas. Élevée avec son frère par leur grand-mère, elle désire retrouver la figure gracieuse de leur mère. Mais les retrouvailles s'entachent d'une nouvelle trahison : Mr. Freeman, son beau-père, viole la fillette. Quand ils l'apprennent, ses oncles assassinent le coupable relâché par la justice, traumatisme sur le traumatisme qui enferme Maya dans un mutisme profond.

American Libraries editor in chief Leonard Kniffel offers a compelling collection of interviews with prominent figures--all of whom have special connections to libraries. From President Barack Obama to actress Julie Andrews; from basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to former First Lady and librarian Laura Bush and many others, stars of literature, politics, entertainment, and the public arena speak with Kniffel about the ways libraries have been critical in their lives.

What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of 55, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief - an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond.