Memoirs Books

An informal yet informed journey through the classic works of Japanese cinema and their directors.This is a passionate, personal journey through one of the world's greatest national cinemas, beginning with the classic directors who came to the fore in...

60 years of observation: an American journalist's memoir about Tokyo's modern urban transformation, its criminal underworld and, oh yes, baseball.Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark,...

The Heart Sutra is the most widely read, chanted, and copied text in East Asian Buddhism. Here Frederik L. Schodt explores his lifelong fascination with the sutra: its mesmerizing mantra, its ancient history, the "emptiness theory, and the way it is used...

An unforgettable memoir of the horrors suffered by a Japanese family trapped in Changchun, China, at the end of WW2.Over 150,000 innocents died of starvation in Changchun, northeastern China, after the end of WW2 when Mao's army laid siege during the...

In these essays, Marcia simultaneously navigatesthe globe while carving out a second career as a travel writer for majormagazines, while navigating her own past and the bumpy and sometimes complicatedroad of midlife. Marcia's voice has quiet power,...

We spend a majority of our lives as survivors with no clue what we are actually surviving.To protect us, our brains have frozen in time the incidents fueling our ability to be in denial. Unfortunately, the truth of our sexual abuse seeps out into all...

A young woman, raised in a wealthy family, sets off alone into a primitive jungle culture because she feels that God has called her to evangelize the people.Raised in wealth and privilege in Southern California, the last thing Sharon Porterfield ever...

The paperback of Bad Indians[978-1-59714-201-4], published in 2012, is Heyday's best-selling California Indian title with over 21,000 copies sold A key Heyday backlist titles for years, Bad Indians is being published in hardcover for the first time...

American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents-and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who's won three Stanley Cups-and her...

Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games takes you inside the video arcade game industry during the pivotal decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Warren Davis, the creator of the groundbreaking Q*bert, worked as a member of the creative teams who...

When you stray from a trail and strike out into the woods, you are bushwhacking. The term implies a physical thrashing about-pushing past branches, slicing through thickets, leaping across downed trees-but it also implies a certain fortitude and...

Acclaimed poet and MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Lucia Perillo, a former park ranger who loved to hike the Cascade Mountains alone and prided herself on daring solo skis down the wild slopes of Mount Rainier, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she...

When The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused an immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the...

In August 2003, virtually overnight, Jan Frazier experienced "a dramatic falling away of fear"not just the immediate fear of her annual medical test but, as she learned as time went on, her fear of everything. She was "flooded with a causeless joy that...

Summer is fireflies and sparklers. Fat red tomatoes sliced thin and salted. Lemonade and long dreamy days. The treasures of the season are gone much too soon - but they're captured here, in loving sensuous prose that's both personal and universal, for...

From National Book Award-nominee Iliana Regan, a new memoir of her life and heritage as a forager, spanning her ancestry in Eastern Europe, her childhood in rural Indiana, and her new life set in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula...

LONGLISTED for the National Book Award 2019Michelin-starred chef Iliana Regan's (Elizabeth, Kitsune) culinary memoir, chronicling this intensely driven chef's upbringing in rural Northwest Indiana, her battle with addiction, and the development of her...

The only psychic ever to lecture at the FBI Academy, Noreen Renier has assisted law-enforcement officials all over the world, working on more than 400 criminal cases. From the discovery and development of her unique talents to becoming a respected figure...

A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.For poet...

"Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year." -NPRFrom beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction-a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and...

"I was in the car the first time music seemed strange: the instruments less distinct, the vocals less crisp." John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came...

Like a long, funny letter from an old friend, an album of drawings by the legendary singer and activist for social justice, Joan Baez.Since retiring from active performing, Baez has focused her formidable talents on painting and drawing. This collection...

The story of a man coming into his own by coming home.Since he was a boy, Bill Eville knew he wanted two things in life: to be a writer and a father. Being a minister's husband had not been on this list, having left the church as a teenager as soon as...

"One of the Year's Best," Times Literary SupplementWhen a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he's famous...

"Old Poets is an indispensable jewel." -Washington Post"An astonishing array of encounters...Hall's observations are shrewd and generous." -Boston GlobeIntimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and...

An intimate portrait of an extended Jewish family in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, who, when faced with imminent deportation and death, refused to comply.As the Nazis tightened their grip on the Netherlands' Jewish population, Daphne Geismar's family...

A woman from New England falls for a charming Scottish landowner only to discover she's also in a complex relationship with his family's 400-year-old ancestral estate, The Guynd. Funny and heartwarming, this is the story of a house, a place, and a...

A meditation on in vitro fertilization that expands and complicates the stories we tell about pregnancy.Medical interventions become an exercise in patience, desire, and delirium in this intimate account of bodily transformation and disruption. In...

Praise for Karen Tei Yamashita:"It's a stylistically wild ride, but it's smart, funny and entrancing." -NPR"Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." -New York Times Book ReviewWith delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an...

Foreword by Bishop Karen Oliveto. Oliveto is the first openly lesbian bishop to be elected in the United Methodist Church. Resonates with young people as it is both a memoir of coming of age and of coming out. Readers looking for queer stories-Cultural...

In this courageous memoir, Elizabeth Heineman "illuminates the complex emotional landscape of stillbirth-putting into frank and poetic words the unspeakable experience of simultaneously grieving and mothering a baby who has died" (Deborah L. Davis)...

In this evocative account of navigating pregnancy loss, Jessica Zucker confronts the cultural silence around miscarriages and illuminates how she built a movement from her experience, transforming trauma into human connection.Sixteen weeks into her...

More than any other black leader, H. Rap Brown, chairman of the radical Black Power organization Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), came to symbolize the ideology of black revolution. This autobiography-which was first published in 1969,...

A reconsideration of Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking A Room of One's Own through a very modern lens, revisiting Woolf's now archaic politics and mining the text for lessons on how to be a writer. The central message of A Room of One's Own is that, to...

For fans of Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our personal, social, economic, and sexual lives. By examining the politics of gender, environment and sexuality, we can see the ways straight, cis, white, and especially male upper-class people control and...

The frank and bracing memoir of a woman who spent ten years as a stripper.This Is My Real Name is the memoir of Cid V Brunet, who spent ten years working as a dancer at strip clubs, using the name Michelle. From her very first lap dance in a small-town...

Inthis jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in adysfunctional Asian family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons when theyshould really be on anti-psychotic meds. Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoidschizophrenic...

Michael V. Smith is a multi-talented force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male - a fey kid...

A gorgeous full-colour coffee table book celebrating the art of one of BC's finest potters, My Life as a Potter recounts Mary Fox's long journey to the peak of her craft. Part memoir, part coming-of-age story and part handbook for ceramicists, Fox's...

Part memoir, part cultural history, these memories of seven aunts holding home and family together tell a crucial, often overlooked story of women of the twentieth centuryThey were German and English, Anishinaabe and French, born in the north woods and...

A tour diary of life on the road with one of Minnesota's greatest bands-with nearly 100 never-before-seen photographs"Don't bore us, get to the chorus" is Bill Sullivan's motto, which will come as no surprise to anyone who opens Lemon Jail. A raucous...

The account of one radically new school year for a Teacher of the Year and for his nonbinary, art-obsessed, brilliant childSeven-year-old Ollie was researching local advanced school programs-because every second grader does that, right? Ollie, who used...

The story of starting and running an organic farm-told by the woman who owned one of the first Community-Supported Agriculture operations in the Upper Midwest On a twenty-acre farm in Iowa in 1995, Angela Tedesco planted the seeds (quite literally) of a...

A tribute to an impossible and impossibly rewarding profession, It Won't Be Easy captures the experience of teaching in all its messy glory. Short on jargon and long on practical wisdom, it is accessible to anyone interested in a...

LARGE PRINT EDITION.Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant (1902) is a posthumously published autobiography by Walter Besant. Although he is more widely known for his works of fiction and book-length studies of the city of London, Besant was also a gifted...

"Eve's brave and honest experiment reveals the shocking impact of the throwaway society we've become and at the same time showing small ways we can all do better." -Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder of Plastic Free JulyYear of No Garbage is Super Size Me...

A WALL STREET JOURNAL, USA TODAY, and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NATIONAL BESTSELLERNEW BOOK CLAIMS DONALD TRUMP WILL RUN AND WIN IN 2024!A riveting account of the HOAX that sent a presidential campaign chairman to solitary confinement because he wouldn't turn...