Memoir Essays

In his debut essay collection, award-winning poet Jaswinder Bolina meditates on "how race," as he puts it, "becomes metaphysical": the cumulative toll of the microaggressions and macro-pressures lurking in the academic market, on the literary circuit, in the dating pool, and on the sidewalks of any given US city. Training a keenly thoughtful lens on questions that are never fully abstract, Of Color is a bold, expansive, and finally optimistic diagnosis of present-day America.

Chuck Klosterman IV consists of three parts:

THINGS THAT ARE TRUE
Profiles and trend stories: Britney Spears, Val Kilmer, McDonalds, '70s rock band nostalgia cruises. With new introductions and asides.

In 1997 Tiger Woods was already among the most-watched and closely examined athletes in history. But it wasn't until the Masters Tournament that his career would definitively change forever. Woods, then only 21, won the Masters by a historic 12 shots, which remains the widest margin of victory in the tournament's history, making it an iconic moment for him and sports.

In the late 1990s, a young physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, published a stunning memoir of his experiences in the highly charged world of the ER. Presented in a series of powerful, poetic vignettes, The Blood of Strangers became an instant classic. Now, over two decades later, Dr. Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch from the trenches—this time from the perspective of middle age. In portraits visceral, haunting, sometimes surreal, Huyler reveals the gritty reality of medicine practiced on the razor’s edge between life and death.

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.

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.

The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any you have ever experienced before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind.

The searing intimacy of Girl, Interrupted combined with the uncomfortable truths of The Empathy Exams in a collection of essays chronicling one woman’s experiences as both patient and caregiver, giving a unique perspective from both sides of the hospital bed.

It happens to us all: We think we’ve settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us - in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds. In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree.

スポーツコラムニストとして活躍するミッチ・アルボムは、偶然テレビで大学時代の恩師の姿を見かける。

Irena is a Russian Jewish immigrant, a PhD in comparative literature, a former Stanford admissions officer, and a private college counselor in Palo Alto, California—a city where everyone has to be good at something and where success often means the name of a prestigious college on the back of a late-model luxury car. But as Irena works with some of the most ambitious, tightly wound students in the world, she struggles to keep her own family from unraveling, and that sharp-edged divide lies at the heart of her memoir.

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.

In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life. Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary, and learning to see the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach.

A spiritual aspirant’s journey is sprinkled with many battles overcoming mind over matter through different sadhanas (spiritual practices). One such sadhana is going on a pilgrimage, which provides challenges for the body, mind, and intellect.

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.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles—and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.

In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.

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!

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.