Literary Memoir

Budo is lucky as imaginary friends go. He's been alive for more than five years, which is positively ancient in the world of imaginary friends. But Budo feels his age, and thinks constantly of the day when eight-year-old Max Delaney will stop believing in him. When that happens, Budo will disappear. Max is different from other children. Some people say that he has Asperger's Syndrome, but most just say he's "on the spectrum." None of this matters to Budo, who loves Max and is charged with protecting him from the class bully.

In a voice both haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri describes her life as a geisha. Taken from her home at the age of nine, she is sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. Witness her transformation as you enter a world where appearances are paramount, virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder, women beguile powerful men, and love is scorned as illusion.

The Trail is a moving story of how nature helps us find what’s missing in our lives. The tale begins with Gil, who in the wake of his father’s death and recently fired from his job, agrees to accompany his father’s old hiking partner Syd on a month-long trek on the John Muir Trail. There’s just one problem: Gil hates camping and is woefully unprepared for the rigors of the journey. Moreover, he soon learns Syd may not survive the hike.

In February 1990, Oregon State Police arrested John Sosnovke and Laverne Pavlinac for the vicious rape and murder of Taunja Bennet. Pavlinac had come forth and confessed, implicating her boyfriend and producing physical evidence that linked them to the crime. Authorities closed the case. There was just one problem. They had the wrong people. And the real killer wasn't about to let anyone take credit for his kill.

He was an ambitious but drifting writer from a prominent Scottish family. She was a tough Nevada silver miner’s wife, with children, when they met. Who could have predicted that Fanny Van de Grift and Robert Louis Stevenson would go on to create one of history’s great literary marriages? From their first encounter in France in 1876, Fanny and Louis’s partnership transcended societal expectations to become a literary union that was progressive, eccentric, and tempestuous, but always animated by a profound mutual respect

In The Climb up to Hell, master storyteller Jack Olsen delivers a harrowing true tale of survival, obsession, and the brutal cost of ambition. Set on the treacherous North Face of the Eiger—the most feared peak in the Swiss Alps—this gripping account follows an ill-fated 1957 climb where courage clashed with the cold, and hope dangled by a rope.

Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning and unforgettable classic about convicted killer Gary Gilmore now in audio. Arguably the greatest book from America's most heroically ambitious writer, The Executioner's Song follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.

“A vivid, clear-eyed glimpse into American politics from a woman who grew up in the hinterlands of Mississippi and against all odds propelled herself into the rooms of power in Washington and New York City. Disarmingly honest, Hinton has invited us into her extraordinary life, from her complicated relationship with the Mississippi Delta of her youth, to the famous—too often, infamous—men she met along the way in her career in Democratic politics. Hinton’s first book is brimming with the steady perseverance, relentless ambition and maddening frustrations of a talented woman who found...

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep the child. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days.

The fullest, most textural, most accurate - most human - account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life - based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life.

Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression.

Frantz Fanon (1925 - 1961) fought to free Algeria from French rule and rallied against the oppressive grip of colonialism. In this fictionalized view of the revolutionary's life, an African-American writer travels the world to do research for a biography of Fanon. In a tale that is part love story, mystery, and biography, Fanon examines how a political radical's views apply in a post-9/11 world.

En este audiolibro, la propia Rosa Montero nos habla de la superación del dolor, de las relaciones entre hombres y mujeres, del esplendor del sexo, de la buena muerte y de la bella vida, de la ciencia y de la ignorancia, de la fuerza salvadora de la literatura y de la sabiduría de quienes aprenden a disfrutar de la existencia con plenitud y con ligereza.

The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo.

Some of the parchment pages were the color of cream, thick and substantial, made to last many, many lifetimes. Other pages were thin and desiccated, positively yellow from age, and crackled alarmingly as Van Richten turned them over. There were no ornate illuminations, no fussy borders, only lines of plain text in hard black ink. The flowing handwriting was a bit difficult to follow at first; the writer's style of calligraphy had not been in common use for 300 years. No table of contents, but from the dates it looked to be some kind of history.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work.

The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem.

Charles M. Blow’s mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their segregated Louisiana town, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to “love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel.” Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his “do-right” mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After—the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy.

Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs - including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger's words, "Anything is possible: after all, it's the Year of the Monkey."

When her daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and fell into a coma, Isabel Allende began to write the story of her family for her unconscious child. Bizarre ancestors are introduced; delightful and bitter childhood memories are shared; amazing anecdotes of youthful years are relived, and the most intimate secrets are quietly passed along. Like Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits, this powerful memoir is infused with the real, the magical, and the spiritual, creating a haunting, sad, and beautiful tale.