Writing Memoir Essays

Originally published in 1969, The Inland Island is Josephine W. Johnson’s startling and brilliant chronicle of nature and the seasons at her rambling 37-acre farm in Ohio, which she and her husband reverted to wilderness with the help of a state forester. Over the course of 12 months, she observes the changing landscape with a naturalist’s precision and a poet’s evocative language. Listeners will marvel at the way she brings to life flashes of beauty, the inexorable cycle of growth and decay, and the creatures who live alongside her, great and small.

Twenty-seven-year-old Nell Stevens was determined to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way. Then came a game-changing opportunity: she won a fellowship that would let her spend three months, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a book. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell chose Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. There, in a guesthouse where she would be the only guest, she could finally rid herself of distractions and write.

Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, Journeys offers access to Ramanujan's personal diaries and journals, providing a window into his creative process. It will include literary entries from his travels, his thoughts on writing, poetry drafts, and dreams. His diaries and journals served as fertile ground where he planted the seeds for much of his published work....

Previously published as A Private War, Marie Brenner’s Richard Jewell tells a gripping true story of heroism and injustice. In the early morning hours of July 27, 1996, three pipe bombs exploded at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, killing one person and injuring 111 others. Hundreds more potential casualties were prevented by the vigilance and quick actions of security guard Richard Jewell, who uncovered the bombs and began evacuating the area. But no good deed goes unpunished. Investigators and journalists pursued Jewell as a potential suspect.

It started as a simple journal exercise. Tom Sullivan wanted to list his top 10 favorite hunting, fishing, and climbing trips. Once completed, however, he noted something he found quite interesting. The majority of the excursions he noted didn't result in a harvest of fin or fur, nor did they remind him of any found and conquered summit. Instead, he had selected past trips where something remarkable had occurred and valuable lessons had been learned. This became the inspiration for his first collection of adventure essays.

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy is a new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by touching pieces from the beloved author's many friends. The book collects some of Conroy's most charming pieces of short nonfiction, many of them addressed directly to his listeners, with his habitual greeting: "Hey, out there".

In this perceptive, compelling essay, Katharine Murphy offers a profile of Anthony Albanese in motion – a piece about character, the balance of forces, and the mood of the nation. Are Albanese and his party up for change? Are Australians up for it? What does the new prime minister embody, if anything? Has the centre of the polity shifted, with the success of the Teals and the Greens? Where could – and should – the new government be ambitious?

Bill Littlefield (NPR's Only a Game) presents the second installment in the Library of America series devoted to classic American sportswriters, a definitive collector's edition of the pathbreaking writer who invented the long-form sports story.