Memoir Essays

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.

The last 20 years have brought us the rise of the Internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.

America Ferrera has always felt wholly American, and yet, her identity is inextricably linked to her parents’ homeland and Honduran culture. Speaking Spanish at home, having Saturday morning salsa-dance parties in the kitchen, and eating tamales alongside apple pie at Christmas never seemed at odds with her American identity. Still, she yearned to see that identity reflected in the larger American narrative. Now, in American Like Me, America invites 31 of her friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories about life between cultures.

In this age of billion dollar athletic marketing campaigns, “feel good” philosophy with no connection to reality, and a Sports Media echo chamber that’s all too eager swallow whatever idiotic notion happens to be in vogue at the moment, it’s tough to find people who aren’t afraid to say what they’re really thinking.

Acclaimed author of The Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true-crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today.

Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of work, Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances, from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life and his restless and ever-curious mind.

La cocaina: la merce più usata, trafficata, desiderata del nostro tempo. Le infinite vie del narcotraffico, dal Messico alle spiagge di Miami, dalla Colombia alla Russia, dall'Africa alle strade di Milano, New York, Parigi. Il viaggio di un grande scrittore nei gironi infernali del mondo contemporaneo, dove la ferocia dilaga incontrastata ma i boss hanno imparato tutte le regole più sofisticate del business. Uno straordinario romanzo-verità.

The Jerusalem Syndrome is a genuine psychological phenomenon that often strikes visitors to the Holy Land - the delusion that they are suddenly direct vessels for the voice of God. Marc Maron seems to have a distinctly American version of the Jerusalem Syndrome, which has led him on a lifelong quest for religious significance and revelation in the most unlikely of places.

In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey through life. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth.

What does it mean to endure as a woman? Percy, who has written extensively on trauma responses and PTSD, revisits these subjects using her personal experience, including sexual assault, to examine a broader social and cultural history of trauma. Beginning with her childhood in rural Oregon, Percy dissects the moments that shaped her girlhood.

Flailing in jobs, failing at love, getting addicted and un-addicted to people, food, and drugs - I'll Tell You in Person is a disarmingly frank account of attempts at adulthood and all the less than perfect ways we get there. Chloe Caldwell has an unsparing knack for looking within and reporting back what's really there, rather than what she'd like you to see.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

Here is Hemingway: the adventurer, the reporter, the man! More intimately than all his fiction, Hemingway the reporter reveals Hemingway the man, driving an ambulance through a bullet-barrage or leading guerrilla forces into Paris, always in the thick of the action. Here are his most sensational dispatches, the behind-the-scenes stories that became For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.

In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature.

Joan Didion and Nora Ephron have both written, by turns grimly and hilariously, about the indignities of getting older. Now comes Jane Juska, laying bare (literally) everything no one has yet said about life in the later years. With her characteristic wit, unsparing eye for detail, and famously frank opinions on gender issues, Juska, author of the best-selling memoir A Round-Heeled Woman, talks sex, the ups and downs of body parts well below the neck, and the indomitable human need for connection, whatever a woman's age.

In the three decades that Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has devoted himself to writing fiction, he has also produced scores of witty, moving, and provocative essays and articles. He engages the work of Nabokov, Kundera, Rushdie, and Vargas Llosa, among others, and he discusses his own books and writing process. We also learn how he lives, as he recounts his successful struggle to quit smoking, describes his relationship with his daughter, and reflects on the controversy he has attracted in recent years.

Amanda ha tenido siempre una mirada aguda e irónica acerca de sí misma y de quienes la rodean: sabe estar sola y acompañada. Sin embargo, en este libro nos revela dos aspectos de su ser menos conocido: su destreza informal para la fabulación: sabe relatar historias breves por medio de un ritmo más seductor que acosador. Y, por otra parte, abandona la guerra cotidiana que libra a cada momento de su vida como artista popular y nos propone a un ser menos glamuroso, pero más humano.

Timbaland is indisputably one of the most innovative music producers working today. The Grammy Award–wining producer, rapper, songwriter, and composer has collaborated with the mega-superstars of pop, rap, hip-hop, and R&B, from Jay Z to 50, Madonna to Justin, Nelly to Björk. His solo album Shock Value has sales tipped in the millions, and the video for his international chart-topping single "Apologize" has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.

Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to “banish the evil” from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren’t just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere—including your own family and community—and look just like you. Dinner on Monster Island is Tania’s memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore—where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic.