Literary Memoir

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.

When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with. Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare.

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.

Ghalib's poetic trajectory begins from Urdu, then moves to composing almost entirely in Persian and finally swings back to Urdu. It is nearly as complex as his poetry. However, his poetic output in Persian is far more than what he wrote in Urdu. More important is that he gave precedence to Persian over Urdu. Ghalib's voice presents us with a double bind, a linguistic paradox. Exploring his life, works and philosophy, this authoritative critical biography of Ghalib opens a window to many shades of India and the subcontinent's cultural and literary tradition.

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.

In Cross of Snow, the result of more than 12 years of research, including access to never-before-examined letters, diaries, journals, and notes, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work - the soul - of the man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, and translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching that his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde.

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.

An absorbing chronicle of a much overlooked chapter in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ life - her 19-year editorial career. History remembers Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the consummate first lady, the nation’s tragic widow, the tycoon’s wife, and the quintessential embodiment of elegance. Her biographers, however, skip over an equally important stage in her life: her nearly 20-year-long career as a book editor. Jackie as Editor, written by one of the authors Jackie edited, is the first book to focus exclusively on this remarkable woman’s editorial career.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka's last instruction: to burn his manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka's writing, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership of Kafka's work: Israel, where he dreamed of living, or Germany, where his three sisters perished in the Holocaust.

When “The Fourth State of Matter”, her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa, was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. Now, with Festival Days, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work.

For well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, and wondering the big whys. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as autistic. Poe published four books about his experiences as a wanderer and his observations of America.

The End of the End of the Earth is a collection of Jonathan Franzen's essays and speeches from the past five years, in which he grapples with the most important and heated ethical subjects of the day: environmentalism, capitalism, wealth inequality, race, technology, and the role of art. He challenges us to ask difficult questions: What is our civic responsibility in the face of climate change, the greatest ever threat to our planet and species? Does technology give us a sense of control or community or is it stripping these from us?

George Bernard Shaw has been called the second greatest playwright in English (after William Shakespeare) and one of the inventors of modern celebrity as the most famous public intellectual of his time. Beginning in the 1880s, as a critic and as a playwright, he transformed British drama, bringing to it intellectual substance, ethical imperatives, and modernity itself, setting the theatrical course for the subsequent century. That his legacy endures 70 years after his death is testament to the prescience of his thinking and his prolific creativity.

In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, "the covers become a part of me".

The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite—she took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal—literary immortality.

Learn how the life of this Lebanese immigrant has positioned him to artistically capture the hearts, minds, and souls of readers for generations, making him one of the world’s best-selling poets. In the collected works of poetry, poet, author, artist, and philosopher, Kahlil Gibran, shares his spiritual and moral views of life, purpose, love, and pain.

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.

A gripping narrative history of Spain’s most brilliant and troubled literary family - a tale about the making of art, myth, and legacy - set against the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War and beyond.