Literary Memoir

This narrative charts Annie Ernaux's teenage awakening and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is 30 years old, a teacher married to an executive, a mother of two infant sons.

Biographer Alexandra Popoff traces the life and creative achievement of Ayn Rand (1905–1982), one of America’s most provocative writers and whose best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have enjoyed impressive longevity. Born into a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Rand (then Alisa Rosenbaum) lived through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, and the onset of Soviet totalitarian dictatorships––experiences that made her profoundly anticommunist.

Before the Soviet invasion of 1980, Enjeela Ahmadi remembers her home - Kabul, Afghanistan - as peaceful, prosperous, and filled with people from all walks of life. But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.

Richard and Victoria Tinyes feared the worst when their thirteen year old daughter Kelly Ann vanished from their quiet suburban community of Valley Stream, New York, on March 3, 1999. But the nightmare to come was worse than they could ever imagine. Only five doors away, in the home of John and Elizabeth Golub, police found Kelly Ann's body stuffed in a plastic garbage bag. She'd been brutally beaten, stabbed, strangled, and mutilated. After weeks of intense investigation, police arrested the Golubs twenty-one-year-old son, Robert - a reclusive young man obsessed with bodybuilding and given to fits of rage. The sensational trial and subsequent conviction of Robert Golub shocked the nation and tore the once peaceful community apart. Neighbors took sides. So did the media. And no one who lived on Horton Road would ever be the same. Note on audio book: Except for the beginning and end of the book, there is no longer any music.

Known to most as Lemony Snicket, the tormented narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler spends his days writing—for children and adults; film and television; and, on occasion, the accordion. Tracing his life in books from his first encounter with Baudelaire at a local library, And Then? And Then? What Else? offers a witty, poignant exploration of reading, writing and why we tell stories.

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.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work.

In a volume he describes as "a series of covert and not-so-covert autobiographical pieces", Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession, in his case, with examples as diverse as western films, comic books, the music of Talking Heads and Pink Floyd, and the New York City subway. Along the way, he shows how each of these "voyages out from himself" have led him home, home to his father's life as a painter, and to the source of his beginnings as a writer.

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 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.

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.

In February 2018, twenty-four members of Gulchehra Hoja's family disappeared overnight. Her crime – and thus that of her family – was her award-winning investigations on the plight of her people, the Uyghurs, whose existence and culture is being systematically destroyed by the Chinese government. A Stone is Most Precious Where it Belongs is Gulchehra’s stunning memoir, taking us into the everyday world of life under Chinese rule in East Turkestan (more formally as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China), from her idyllic childhood to its modern nightmare.

Andy Griffith (1926-2012) is one of North Carolina's most beloved exports, capturing America's heart as Sheriff Andy Taylor. Evan Dalton Smith was born in the North Carolina Piedmont over four decades after Andy, just an hour south of Griffith's hometown of Mount Airy. Both were small-town boys who grew up in similar places, where the counties were dry and the churches plentiful. But for both, there was darkness, crushed hopes, and tragedy, hidden just below the surface.

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.

"Si je vous parle aujourd'hui, c'est qu'il y a une nouveauté. [...] Je ne veux plus voler, je ne veux plus mentir. Je veux mener une vie de morte, ouvertement, sans honte. C'est ce qu'on me demande, je suppose. Je suis une personne 'en plus', mais je suis là. Si j'étais véritablement indésirable, on me l'aurait signifié, je me serais liquéfiée, dissoute. Si je suis encore là, c'est qu'il y a un sens à ce non-être. À moi de le trouver. Voilà mon travail nouveau, voilà ma tâche." (Macha Méril)

A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection.

Morris waxes on the ironies of modern life in all their resonant glories and inevitable stupidities - from her daily exercise (a "statutory thousand paces of brisk walk") to the troubles of Brexit; her enduring yet complicated love for America; and honest reflections on the vagaries and ailments of aging. Both intimate and luminously wise, Thinking Again is a testament to the virtues of embracing life, creativity, and above all, kindness.

The Dark River opens in New York City with a stunning piece of news. Gabriel's father, who has been missing for nearly 20 years, may still be alive and trapped somewhere in Europe. Gabriel and his Harlequin protector, Maya, immediately mobilize to escape New York and find the long-lost Traveler.

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.

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.