Literary Memoir

The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it's easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. "It's been my experience," as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, "that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him." Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude.

A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new.

In literary circles of the mid-twentieth century, father and son, Ikbal and Idries Shah, spread seductive accounts of a mystical Middle East. Pitching themselves as the authentic voice of the Muslim world, they penned travelogues and exotic potboilers alongside weighty tomes on Islam and politics.

Comic Lorna Landvik gives Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon a feminine perspective with her story about Patty Jane and Harriet Dobbin, two wacky Minnesota sisters. Before she can say "annulment," Patty Jane's husband has gone and a baby is on the way, leaving Patty to rely on sister Harriet and the House of Curl, a beauty shop which evolves into a support group and community workshop over three tumultuous decades.

Setting out to create a collection of J. Frank Dobie’s writing that brings him to life and makes him relevant to current generations, Steven L. Davis has combed through the works of this renowned Texas author, gathering together in one volume Dobie’s most vital writings. Dobie’s stories and essays here are meticulously edited to prune away some of the brushy undergrowth and bring Dobie’s folksy, erudite voice bounding back to life.

New York Times best-selling author Jennifer Chiaverini delights fans by transforming true events into riveting historical fiction. Set during the Civil War, The Spymistress introduces little-known Elizabeth Van Lew, a Virginia woman who used a vast spy network to steal Confederate secrets for the Union. But her next mission would prove the ultimate test of her mettle: infiltrate the infamous Confederate Libby Prison and orchestrate a daring escape.

When reading and writing are the most important things in the world. Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home - but which his mother calls the Ghost Country. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. Just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.

Embra, winter of 1574. Queen Mary has fled Scotland, to raise an army from the French. Her son and heir, Jamie, is held under protection in Stirling Castle. John Knox is dead. The people are unmoored and lurching under the uncertain governance of this riven land. It's a deadly time for young student Will Fowler, short of stature, low of birth but mightily ambitious, to make his name.

Before he won stunning acclaim as one of today's most gifted southern writers, Larry Brown was a firefighter with the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. On Fire, his powerful and unflinching account of this experience, catapults listeners into the daily trauma all firefighters face, from the blistering heat of burning homes to the crunch of broken glass at crash scenes.

Toni Morrison, born Chloe A Wofford, was a towering figure in the world of literature when she entered A.J. Verdelle’s life. Their literary friendship was a young writer’s dream—simultaneously exhilarating, intimidating, fulfilling, and challenging. The relationship crossed generations, spanned several cycles in life, exhibited high and low notes, reached and dipped and found its way. Like many women friends, these two writers imagined and built a relationship that was responsive, inventive, and engaged.

In June of 1961, A. E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade.

When Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, send for a boy orphan to help them out at the farm, they are in no way prepared for the error that will change their lives. The mistake takes the shape of Anne Shirley, a redheaded 11-year-old girl who can talk anyone under the table. Fortunately, her sunny nature and quirky imagination quickly win over her reluctant foster parents. Anne's feisty spirit soon draws many friends - and much trouble - her way.

Mirinda Kossoff took one flight in her father’s Cessna Skyhawk as he piloted and navigated by landmarks that revealed themselves through openings in the trees below. A short three years later, he was dead at age 56. Memory of that ride fueled Kossoff’s desire to understand who her father was and the forces that shaped him. And by extension, how he shaped her life. Her need to know and to understand became a life-long pursuit.

Written by a direct descendant of the union between Nell Gwyn and King Charles II, Nell Gwyn tells the story of one of England's great folk heroines. Born during a tumultuous period in England's past, Nell Gwyn was spotted selling oranges in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Nell's wit and charm brought her to the attention of numerous suitors, including one of the theater's leading actors, Charles Hart. Under his patronage Nell took to the stage where she became one of London's first professional female actresses, and the finest comedienne in London.

From Paris in 1939, a young Mireille follows her artist husband, Abel, when he returns to Germany to care for his mother. Once Hitler begins his invasions across Europe the displaced couple must find a way to survive the war in a country they both consider foreign. Abel finally takes work, but it requires extensive travel through the war zones, and so Mireille is left essentially alone. With France lost to her, and horribly misfit in wartime Germany, suspected by her neighbors of spying for the Allies, Mireille has to define a life for herself, a life that is as quiet as possible in a dangerous world.

Over his decade and a half with the New York Police Department, Edwin Raymond consistently exposed the dark underbelly of modern policing, becoming the highest-ranking whistleblower in the history of the force and one of the country’s leading voices against police injustice. Offering a rare, often shocking view of American policing, An Inconvenient Cop pulls back the curtain on the many flaws woven into the NYPD’s training, data, and practices, which have since been repackaged and repurposed by police departments across the country.

Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany. They are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a best-selling autobiography.

As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville's "quasi-memoir" is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived.

Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country - learning the local language and customs.

When Reyna Grande was nine years old, she walked across the US-Mexico border in search of a home, desperate to be reunited with the parents who had left her behind years before for a better life in the City of Angels. What she found instead was an indifferent mother, an abusive, alcoholic father, and a school system that belittled her heritage. With so few resources at her disposal, Reyna finds refuge in words, and it is her love of reading and writing that propels her to rise above until she achieves the impossible and is accepted to the University of California, Santa Cruz.