Memoir Essays

Emilly Prado retraces her experience coming of age as a prep-turned-chola-turned-punk in this collection that is one-part memoir-in-essays and one-part playlist, zigzagging across genres and decades, much like the rapidly changing and varied tastes of her youth.

In this stunning debut, Laura Lee weaves unforgettable and eye-opening essays on a variety of taboo topics. In “History of Scars” and “Aluminum’s Erosions”, Laura dives head-first into heavier themes revolving around intimacy, sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the passage of time. In “Poetry of the World”, Laura shifts and addresses the grief she feels by being geographically distant from her mother whom, after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, is relocated to a nursing home in Korea.

A "Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis" ( Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To hear her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms.

In Twenty-One Years Young: Essays, author Amy Dong examines the uncertainty, absurdity, and beauty in growing up. This poignant collection of essays is unabashedly intimate, drawing the listener into Dong’s life as if they were a close friend. She masterfully evokes humor, nostalgia, melancholy, and euphoria to create scenes that are as vivid as they are profound.

This is an essay on the unique teaching of J. Krishnamurti. It starts with the question "What is consciousness?" - and carefully proposes a holistic definition, after reviewing the various psychological and spiritual theories that deal with this subject. The author actually goes a step ahead and focuses on a more particular issue, a provocative question asked by K: “How to empty consciousness of its content?”

A powerful meditation on identity and belonging, Sejal Shah explores the tension of being both invisible and hyper-visible in a country that struggles with race. The daughter of immigrants from India and Kenya, Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up in—and returning to—western New York, an area of stark racial and socioeconomic segregation. Her work illuminates how we are all marked by family and place; by the limits of our bodies; by our losses and regrets; by who and what we love; by our ambivalences and our silences.

Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things.

Christian Beamish, a former editor at The Surfer's Journal, envisioned a low-tech, self-reliant exploration for surf along the coast of North America, using primarily clothes and instruments available to his ancestors, and the 18-foot boat he would build by hand in his garage. How the vision met reality - and how the two came to shape each other - places The Voyage of the Cormorant in the great American tradition of tales of life at sea, and what it has to teach us.

Entre biographie et essai, le livre de Jean-Pierre Rioux, salué par la critique et succès d'édition, évoque l'orateur hors pair, le philosophe, l'intellectuel et l'historien, le défenseur des droits de l'homme, l'homme de la paix, l'adversaire du colonialisme. Les questions d'aujourd'hui auxquelles le premier mort de l'été 1914 avait donné sa réponse continuent de nous hanter. Comment ne pas trahir quand on est au pouvoir ? Comment lire une société d'inégalités ? Comment récuser le désordre établi si l'on n'assume pas l'histoire et l'héritage ? Que serait un avenir sans morale et sans religion ?

A powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces - between Black and White, rich and poor, thin and fat.

In Robyn’s 2010 track Dancing on My Own, the Swedish pop-singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this way, she transforms her solitude into a more complex joy. Taking inspiration from Robyn’s seminal track, emerging art critic and curator Simon Wu dances through the institutions of art, capitalism, and identity in these expertly researched, beautifully rendered essays.

Across these twenty fresh and boldly intimate stories, Erin Riley writes about the things that matter most: family, heartbreak, humanity, justice and swimming, and the messy, hard graft of becoming one's authentic self. In weaving together their everyday while questioning society and its structures, Erin gifts us stories that double as a manifesto on how to disrupt and reinvent narrative, identity, love and community.

Uprooting ourselves and putting down roots elsewhere has become second nature. Americans are among the most mobile people on the planet, moving house an average of nine times in adulthood. Mobile Home explores one family's extreme and often international version of this common experience. Inspired by Megan Harlan's globe-wandering childhood, Mobile Home maps the emotional structures and metaphysical geographies of home.

Hockey forms the backdrop of our lives. For many Canadians, the big moments - births, deaths, marriages, moves - are all mixed up with the wins and losses of our teams. The voices of Hockey Night in Canada sportscasters are our soundtrack, and visions of skates scraping across the ice lull us to sleep. George Bowering, Canada's former poet laureate, is no different.

Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life. This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change.

Boyhood in the 1960s and ‘70s was a time for exploration and mischief. Author Michael Tougias found more than his share of misadventures in the woods and on the water: some life-threatening, but others innocently hilarious. Over time - and after reading a multitude of adventure books - these experiences took shape in his quest to be a mountain man, owning a cabin in the forest and living off the land. Part of that dream would come true, but only after a family tragedy that shook his world and forced changes in his life.

Not everyone has to be dragged kicking and screaming through adulthood. Dave Barry will help through this process - with his hilarious takes on parenting, changing self-image, the battle of the sexes, technology, health care, celebrityhood, and even vampires!

As a Pennsylvania Game Warden for more than three decades, Wasserman investigated thousands of game law violations and arrested many violent career poachers. But another big part of his job was in the public relations and education field where he penned a weekly newspaper column entitled It’s a Wild Life. Hence, the title of this audiobook, which contains twenty-six of his most notable stories selected from more than seven hundred published over a fifteen-year period.

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".

大ブレイク中のガールズグループ「NiziU」をはじめ、「2PM」「TWICE」など数々の人気アーティストを生んだ世界的プロデューサーが、自らのこれまでの歩みと哲学をつづる。