Land Memoir

When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, he called it an “unflinching look at America’s class divide…and a reminder of the dignity of all work.” Later, it was adapted into the hit Netflix series Maid, which was viewed by sixty-seven million households and was Netflix’s fourth most-watched show in 2021, garnering three Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Stephanie’s escape out of poverty and abuse in search of a better life inspired millions.

Julia and her adopted brother, David, are 16 years old. Julia is White. David is Black. It is the mid-1980s and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all-encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children and a violent father.

Since its original publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s.

At twenty-six years old, life looked a certain way for Nikki Vargas. She’d settled in New York City ready to join the ranks of the Carrie Bradshaws of the world, had landed in a promising advertising career, and was newly engaged to her college sweetheart. But between corporate happy hours and wedding dress fittings, she couldn’t shake a deep underlying sense of imposter syndrome, a voice telling her that she was rocketing towards a future that didn’t look like her. And so, she bought a plane ticket: first to Cartagena. Then to Panama. Then to Iguazú.

When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she’d given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself?

A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an Indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence.

A fiercely personal memoir about coming of age in the male-dominated literary world of the 90s, becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire, and Miller's personal and working relationship with David Foster Wallace.

I have always had an obsession with fatherhood, both as a poorly served recipient and a naive purveyor. Fatherhood is the greatest of gifts. Some long for it but are, sadly, never blessed. Some have it thrust upon them and do magnificently.

At turns shockingly fierce and surprisingly tender, Goat is a shattering memoir that graphically portrays the scarred emotional landscape of young men. Brad is driving two strangers home from a party when he realizes they are leading him to the middle of nowhere. Viciously beaten and left in the middle of the road, Brad survives. But as his physical injuries heal, his psychological wounds worsen. Desperate to belong, he pledges his brother's fraternity.

Michael E. Uslan, executive producer of the Batman movie franchise, offers an insider’s look at Hollywood and the process of how movies and television shows go from the drawing board to your screens. Continuing the delightful tale of his adventures begun in The Boy Who Loved Batman, Uslan draws on both his successful and less successful attempts to bring ideas to the screen, offering a helpful, honest, and breezily told guide to producing films.

There's always been that one quiet kid in the back of the class. Perhaps they're a little shy, branded a misfit - maybe they dress a little funny...but they're always watching, always listening. That's me. I'm that kid. I've learned much by playing the role of an avid observer, and feel I must break my silence if only for a spell. Sitcoms have thrived on the silly subject matter of telephone support for decades, exposing the most despicable acts of customers and corporations alike.

In August of 1945, two days after the Japanese surrendered to the allies, Sukarno declared the Republic of Indonesia. However, the Netherlands did not give up without a fight and when they tried to reclaim what they believed was theirs, a bloody war for independence followed. One child in an unfortunate family inadvertently caught up in World War II and the subsequent war for independence called the Bersiap period, it was a five-year-old boy called Frits. This his story.

This interpretation is split into three sections. The first part will discuss the challenges Obama faced as a presidential candidate. The second part will go over the challenges Obama faced after being elected into the presidency. The third part will cover what happened when Obama was president and the methods he used to relieve himself of the pressure he felt in office.