Memoir Essays

Amanda ha tenido siempre una mirada aguda e irónica acerca de sí misma y de quienes la rodean: sabe estar sola y acompañada. Sin embargo, en este libro nos revela dos aspectos de su ser menos conocido: su destreza informal para la fabulación: sabe relatar historias breves por medio de un ritmo más seductor que acosador. Y, por otra parte, abandona la guerra cotidiana que libra a cada momento de su vida como artista popular y nos propone a un ser menos glamuroso, pero más humano.

Consisting of over 20 years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, Frantumaglia is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. Ferrante answers many of her listeners’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives.

R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went - whether it was his rich, mostly White, suburban high school, his conservative Black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city - he found himself on the outside looking in. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an "other" through the lens of his own life experience.

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent '60s and early '70s displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain - the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

In his instant New York Times best-selling book Do You Mind If I Cancel?, Gary Janetti had us all in stitches as he recounted the pains and indignities of everyday life in the way only he can. Now, in Start Without Me, Janetti returns with a hilarious collection about how sometimes the things we most want to get done and over with are the ones that define us for a lifetime. Gary turns his acid tongue (and secretly beating heart) to the moments and times that have defined him, no matter how embarrassing or annoying they might be to admit.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

Gary Janetti, the writer and producer for some of the most popular television comedies of all time, and creator of one of the most wickedly funny Instagram accounts there is, now turns his skills into a hilarious, and poignant audiobook chronicling the pains and indignities of everyday life. Gary spends his 20s in New York, dreaming of starring on soap operas while in reality working at a hotel where he lusts after an unattainable colleague and battles a bellman who despises it when people actually use a bell to call him.

This “celebration of the world of books” (Kirkus) from New York Times bestselling author James Patterson is a collection of riveting stories celebrating the heroic efforts of the people who are on the front lines getting our books into the world.​

New York Times essayist and author of We Learn Nothing, Tim Kreider trains his virtuoso writing and singular power of observation on his (often befuddling) relationships with women - romantic, platonic, and the murky in-between. He talks about his difficulty finding lasting love, and seeks to understand his commitment issues by tracking down the John Hopkins psychologist who tested him for a groundbreaking study on attachment when he was a toddler. He talks about his valued female friendships, one of which landed him on a circus train bound for Mexico.

An inspiring and revealing essay about motherhood, self-acceptance, and overcoming the fears that hold you back by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Open Book.

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers, or even soccer stars, to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector’s pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love.

Bestselling true-crime master Harold Schechter explores the real-life headline-making psychos, serial murderers, thrill-hungry couples, and lady-killers who inspired a century of classic films.

With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which she has become known, Leslie Jamison offers us 14 new essays that are by turns ecstatic, searching, staggering, and wise. In its kaleidoscopic sweep, Make It Scream, Make It Burn creates a profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Among Jamison's subjects are 52 Blue, deemed "the loneliest whale in the world"; the eerie past-life memories of children; the devoted citizens of an online world called Second Life; and more...

For Cazzie David, the world is one big trap door leading to death and despair and social phobia. From shame spirals caused by hookups to panic attacks about being alive and everyone else having to be alive too, David chronicles her life’s most chaotic moments with wit, bleak humor, and a mega-dose of self-awareness. In No One Asked for This, David provides listeners with a singular but ultimately relatable tour through her mind, as she explores existential anxiety, family dynamics, and the utterly modern dilemma of having your breakup displayed on the Internet.

At a remote little inn not far from the Kansas homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the Bender family. These pioneers welcomed unwary visitors with jackrabbit stew and a sledgehammer to the skull. In time, their apple orchard gave up its secrets - a burial ground for their mutilated victims, each stripped of their possessions. The devilish enterprise on “Hell’s Half-Acre” would earn the Bloody Benders an undying place in the annals of American infamy. But it was the mysterious fate of eldest daughter, Kate, that would make them the stuff of mythic campfire prairie tales.

After a 12-year absence, a real-life prodigal seeks to serve his hometown, New Auburn, Wisconsin, population: 485, by joining the volunteer fire and rescue department. In a place where men post claims of manhood on bug deflectors, where the local vigilante is a farmer's wife with a pistol and a Bible, and where the most senior firefighter is a cross-eyed butcher with one kidney and two ex-wives, writer Michael Perry sets out "to meet my neighbors at the invitation of the fire siren".

Kristin Newman spent her 20s and 30s dealing with the stresses of her high-pressure job as a television comedy writer, and the anxieties of watching most of her friends get married and start families while she wrestled with her own fear of both. Not ready to settle down and yet loathe to become a sad-sack single girl, Kristin instead started traveling the world, often alone, for a few months each year, falling madly in love with attractive locals who provided moments of the love she wanted without the cost of the freedom she needed.

From the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up and set her groundbreaking The House on Mango Street to her abode in Mexico in a region where “my ancestors lived for centuries,” the places Sandra Cisneros has lived have provided inspiration for her now-classic works of fiction and poetry. But a house of her own, where she could truly take root, has eluded her. With this collection—spanning three decades, and including never-before-published work—Cisneros has come home at last.

In 1994, retired CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt set out to spend a perfect year in America - traveling to his 12 favorite American places, in just the right month for a visit to each. With his well-known warmth, humor, and insight, he shows them to us now in Charles Kuralt's America.