Memoir Essays

In her debut book, Everybody Come Alive, Marcie Alvis Walker invites listeners into a deeply intimate and illuminating memoir comprising lyrical essays and remembrances of being a curious child of the seventies and eighties, raised under the critical and watchful eye of Jim Crow matriarchs who struggled to integrate their lives and remain whole. This is a coming-of-age journey touching on the bittersweet pain and joy of what it takes to become a person who embraces being Black, a woman, and holy in America.

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.

Sex and Cupcakes is a collection of essays from writer Rachel Kramer Bussel reflecting on her years as a sex columnist and cupcake blogger, detailing her dirty and sweet sides as well as sexual adventures, politics, heartbreak, tattoos, and more.

Here is an audiobook that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the 21st century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll hear about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to 10-pound babies.

What compels mountain climbers to take the risks that they do? Is it the thrill in the physical accomplishment, in managing to defy the odds, or both - and why do they continue to do what they do in the face of such great danger? In On the Ridge Between Life and Death, David Roberts confronts these questions head-on as he recounts the exhilarating highs and desperate lows of his climbing career.

When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of 60 after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted listeners who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon.

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.

In To Name the Bigger Lie, Sarah Viren “has pulled off a magic trick of fantastic proportion” (The Washington Post), telling the story of an all-too-real investigation into her personal and professional life that she expands into a profound exploration of the nature of truth. The memoir begins as Viren is researching what she believes will be a book about her high school philosophy teacher, a charismatic instructor who taught her and her classmates to question everything—eventually, even the reality of historical atrocities.

Jonathan Franzen’s best seller Freedom was the most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the 21st century. The New York Times Book Review proclaimed it “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Now a new collection of Franzen’s non-fiction brings fresh evidence of that moral intelligence, confirming his status not only as a great American novelist but also as a keen observer, social critic and self-investigator.

Cet ouvrage courageux et sans concessions est le récit autobiographique de l’auteure. Victime d’un viol collectif à douze ans, elle perd son enfance, son innocence et la substance d’ellemême. Elle grandit en taisant ce drame à son entourage, mais garder un tel secret ne se vit pas impunément. Pour survivre, elle se met à manger. Sans faim. Tout le temps. La nourriture devient son refuge, sa protection, son amie, pour combler son vide intérieur, pour cesser d’être désirable en érigeant une forteresse imprenable autour d’elle. Elle devient obèse.

Rising literary star and Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Sarah Gerard uses her experiences growing up along Florida's Gulf Coast to illuminate the struggles of modern human survival - physical, emotional, environmental - through a collection of essays exploring intimacy, addiction, obsession, religion, homelessness, and incarceration.

Born on the West Coast, the son of Bronx-born parents, Steve Wasserman is a generalist and public intellectual but is perhaps less well known as a cultural essayist and social critic of the first rank. In thirty splendid essays, originally published in such diverse publications as The New Republic and The Nation, The American Conservative and The Progressive, The Village Voice and The Economist, Wasserman delivers a riveting account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind.

Through personal essays and interviews, punk musician and cultural icon Lydia Lunch claws and rakes at the listener's conscience in this powerful, uninhibited feminist collection.

What happens when a weekend athlete - of average skill at best - joins the professional golf circuit? George Plimpton, one of the finest participatory sports journalists, spent a month of self-imposed torture on the tour to find out. Along the way, he meets amateurs, pros, caddies, officials, fans, and hangers-on. In The Bogey Man, we find golf legends, adventurers, stroke-saving theories, superstitions, and other golfing lore and, best of all, Plimpton's thoughts and experiences.

The Army major who led the legendary September 2016 surgical strikes on terror launch pads across the LoC; a soldier who killed 11 terrorists in 10 days; a Navy officer who sailed into a treacherous port to rescue hundreds from an exploding war; a bleeding Air Force pilot who found himself flying a jet that had become a screaming fireball...their own accounts or of those who were with them in their final moments.

Rapper and singer Dessa gives a candid account of her life as a touring musician, her determination to beat long odds to make a name for herself, and her struggle to fall out of love with someone in her band. Raw and intimate, Dessa demonstrates just how far the mind can travel while the body is on the six-hour ride to the next rap show. Dessa finds unconventional approaches to all of her subjects - braiding her lived experience with academic research and a poet's tone and timing. In the vein of thinkers who defy categorization, we get the debut of a deft, likable, and unusual voice.

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

After covering the American sports scene for 15 years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world - the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.”

Capturing the beauty of a mother-daughter relationship, Divya Dutta, in this moving memoir, celebrates her mother’s struggles to turn her into the woman she is today. Divya walks us through the most intimate memories of her life, those that strengthened her relationship with her mother. The incredible bond she forged with her mother helped her through tragedies and difficulties, discouragements and failures, and led her to become an award-winning actor of stature, both in the Hindi as well as the Punjabi film industry.

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.