Memoir Essays

オーケストラを指揮したい! 東京藝大で指揮者修行に奮闘するイワキとナオズミ。師と出逢い、ケンカと失恋を越え、ついに演奏会の日がやって来た! 名エッセイストが綴る、涙と笑いの傑作藝大青春記。

As a young woman, Kate Betts nursed a dream of striking out on her own in a faraway place and becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. After college—and not without trepidation—she took off for Paris, renting a room in the apartment of a young BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) family and throwing herself into the local culture. She was determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay.

Winner of Child magazine's Book of the Year award for her hilarious and candid book on single motherhood, The Lunch-Box Chronicles, Marion Winik returns to the topic of parenting in these nine essays. Beginning with the story of her second wedding and her move to rural Pennsylvania, she covers everything from blending families and having a child in one's 40s to dealing with the legal problems of teenage boys to the evolution of the values of a family over generations.

A wide range of women—actors, athletes, academics, CEOs, writers, small-business owners, birth workers, physicians, and activists—share their experiences of becoming mothers in this multifaceted, moving, and revealing collection.

A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

Like so many American women, Shauna M. Ahern spent decades feeling not good enough about her body, about money, and about her worth in this culture. For a decade, with the help of her husband, she ran a successful food blog, wrote award-winning cookbooks, and raised two children. In the midst of this, at age 48, she suffered a mini-stroke. Tests revealed she would recover fully, but when her doctor impressed upon her that emotional stress can cause physical damage, she dove deep inside herself to understand and let go of a lifetime of damaging patterns of thought.

This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and mercurial writers. In letters and journals, occasional pieces and interviews, Italo Calvino recalls growing up in seaside Italy and fighting in the antifascist resistance during World War II, traces the course of his literary career, and reflects on his many travels, including a journey through the United States in 1959 and 1960.

With the trademark wisdom, humor, and honesty that made Anne Lamott's book on faith, Traveling Mercies, a runaway best seller, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith is a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times.

Viewed as too libelous to print in England until 1968, the title essay in this collection reveals the abuse Orwell experienced as a child at an expensive and snobbish boarding school and offers insights into his lifelong concern for the oppressed. "Why I Write" describes Orwell's sense of political purpose, and the classic essay "Politics and the English Language" insists on clarity and precision in communication in order to avoid the Newspeak later described in 1984.

From her well-remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff in Harper's about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

Life on the Mississippi expresses the full range of Twain's literary personality. It remains the most vivid, boisterous, and provocative account of the cultural and societal history of the Mississippi Valley, from 'the golden age' of steamboating to the violence wrought by the Civil War.

Maeve Higgins was a best-selling memoirist and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the grand old age of 31, she left the only home she’d ever known in search of something more. Like many women in their early 30s, she both was and was not the adult she wanted to be. At once smart, curious, and humane, Maeve in America is the story of how Maeve found herself, literally and figuratively, in New York City.

When Jack and Denny Smith decided to build a vacation dream house in Baja, California, they had no idea they were entering a phase of their lives "that would capture the fancy of readers throughout the United States". Through a series of strange and whimsical adventures, they would find that building a house takes God and Mr. Gomez.

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.

週刊文春連載エッセイ「夜ふけのなわとび」から抜粋した林真理子さんのお言葉集。毒舌が芸にまで昇華された林さんのエッセイですが、中でも含蓄があっておもしろい言葉のエッセンスを集めた金言格言集ともいうべき一冊です。

Growing up, Jena Friedman didn’t care about being likable. And she never wanted to be a comedian, either. She wouldn’t discover her knack for the funny business until research for her college thesis led her to take an improv class in Chicago. That anthropology paper, written on race, class, and gender in the city’s comedy scene, was, in Jena’s own words, “just as funny as it sounds.” But it did lay the groundwork for a career that has seen her write and produce for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the Late Show with David Letterman, and the Oscar-nominated Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

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.

Centuries ago, sound theology and good fiction were friends and not strangers. Decades ago, authors strove not for self-expression and self-disclosure but for a mastery of craft and language and books that transformed the reader with wisdom and love. In more recent years, the old ideals have been exchanged for lesser ones. Few guides to writing, which tend to focus on mechanics, point of view, and plot, address the more important matters of meaning, depth, and heart. But it is the latter qualities that make a book a blessing and gift to both writer and reader.

Have you ever read a suspense novel so good you had to stop and think to yourself, "How did the author come up with this idea? Their characters? Is some of this story real?" For more than five years, Mark Rubinstein, physician, psychiatrist, and mystery and thriller writer, had the chance to ask the most well-known authors in the field just these kinds of questions in interviews for the Huffington Post. Collected here are interviews with 47 accomplished authors, including Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Meg Gardiner, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Don Winslow.