Memoirs Books

"A harrowing, culturally rich memoir."-Kirkus ReviewsBuilding upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to...

Engaging, funny, and unflinching essays about coming of age as a transplant patient and living each day as a giftAdina Talve-Goodman was born with a congenital heart condition and survived multiple operations over the course of her childhood, including a...

Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award * 2022 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winner * Shortlisted for the John Burroughs Medal * Finalist for the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize * Shortlisted for a Reading the West...

HONORABLE MENTION, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, Autobiography & Memoir!Lifelong activist Judy Gumbo, an original member of The Yippies, a 1960s anti-war satirical protest group, offers an insider feminist memoir of her involvement with the...

As necessary conversations about racism, state violence, and the legacy of American slavery continue, it is important to consider the myriad forms of violence that living in a racialized society can take. In We Are Bridges, Cassandra Lane explores the...

In this disarming and candid memoir, cultural critic Clarkisha Kent unpacks the kind of compounded problems you face when you're a fat, Black, queer woman in a society obsessed with heteronormativity.There was no easy way for Kent to navigate personal...

"We were invisible. We had to be. We took an oath of absolute secrecy. We never even told our immediate families who we were. We went about our lives in New York City. Just like you. We were your accountants, money managers, lawyers, executive...

Winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, The Loved Ones presents an intimate portrait of family grief, for fans of Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder and Kristin Prevallet's I, AfterlifeThere are so many ways to bury the dead. In an autobiographical series of...

In (Low)life, Charles Farrell lets the public in on his gripping, harrowing, rich, and often amusing life that transverses his path from a teenage jazz prodigy, to mob-involved boxing fight-fixer, to his business partnership with the legendary Floyd...

Nonwhite and Woman celebrates how women of color live and thrive in the world, and how they make their lives their own. The anthology's title is from Lucille Clifton's luminous poem, "won't you celebrate with me," which serves as the anthology's epigraph.

Adam Lorenzo owned a college bar while attending college at Syracuse University. No joke. Working and laughing with people from all over the world, he learned invaluable life lessons in that cathedral of knowledge known as a . . . college bar! Adam...

In his late thirties, John Julius Reel left his native New York for Seville, hoping to reinvent himself, find his voice as a writer, and cast off the shadow of his famous father. When his girlfriend dumped him after a month-long visit, the last tie was...

A touching and thought-provoking account of how a woman explored a spectrum of religions--ancient and new--and ended up, unexpectedly, becoming a bona fide witch--plus a celebration of modern Wicca and witchcraft, spell books, broomsticks, holiday...

Joseph Di Prisco's anticipated memoir brings the hustler, gambler, criminal, bookmaker, and confidential informer-Joe's father-back to life, and reveals the fascinating and unsettling truths that simultaneously bound and separated father and son. On the...

Beth Kephart is a writing teacher and the award-winning author of more than thirty books; her many fans and students will embrace this intimate and beautiful memoir in essays The author's books on how to write memoir as well as previous memoirs have...

In this searing, honest memoir, a Black queer emergency-room nurse works the front lines of care during COVID-19.Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been...

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Anna Salton Eisen's memoir, Pillar of Salt: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, breaks down the barrier of silence that was intended as a protective shield for her parents and their children. From...

Nicholas Ray was cinema. The legendary director of such classic films as Rebel Without a Cause was an innovative force who dramatically changed the Hollywood landscape. He was also Nicca Ray's dad, Nick. After he disappeared from her life in...

A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and...

"Engrossing ... The book reads like a detective story."-The Washington PostIt all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather,...

This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre's native Latvia during the 1920s and 30s, and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and...

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg's great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, hides in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique...

When Jennifer Risher joined Microsoft in 1991, she met her husband, and with him became an extra-lucky beneficiary of the dot-com boom. By their early thirties, they had tens of millions of dollars. Today, there are millions of people like her...

The Silver Invicta is a stream of impressions from a fishing life, in its varying moods, coloured with plenty of whisky and eccentric company. Join Tom Harland on his light-hearted journeys with his fly rod; take part in his triumphs and disasters on...

Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bookman and for book-people of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty...

In 2003 the former Women's Press editor and critic Sarah LeFanu published her acclaimed biography of Rose Macaulay with Virago Press.'A magnificent job ... imaginative and thoughtful, dense with distilled information ... LeFanu offers a skilled, visual,...

An urgent, funny, shocking, and impassioned memoir by the winner of the Spectrum Art Prize 2018, How To Be Autistic presents the rarely shown point of view of someone living with autism.Poe's voice is confident, moving and often funny, as they reveal to...

'Where is home, Mum?' From the foothills of the Himalayas in the Kashmiri valleys to bustling Green Street in East London, Sabba Khan researches her identity from the global to the local, covering partition, displacement, and clothing choices for an...

Looking to commission an introduction from a fan of Norah Lange's previous works. Translated by award winning translator Charlotte Whittle and we may commission translators note. First translation in English of Norah Lange's memoir. An influential...

How would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? In this captivating and best-selling memoir Vesna Goldsworthy tells the story of herself, her family and her early life in her lost country. There follows marriage, a move to...

In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites travelled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated...

Karoline Kan was born in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre: her generation has always been caught between China's authoritarian politics and its hyper-modern technology and economic boom. In her quest to understand the shifting sands of...

The emotion and trauma of the Partition are buried deep, but Aanchal Malhotra has found a way to recover them. Through the possessions saved by her own great-grandparents as they fled their homes, she discovers the unique power of such objects: to unlock...

When her beloved small dog died, Bel Mooney wasastonished at the depth of her ongoing sorrow. Sharing her loss online and in anewspaper article brought a deluge of responses, spurring Bel to explore thesefeelings further. Why do humans mourn pets? Can...

In the summer of 1992, Jason Salkey was cast in a role that would change his life forever. Sharpe's Rifles, a Napoleonic war drama, was to be shot in the Crimean Peninsula. Little did the producers know that they would be sending Jason and the crew to...

The highly anticipated, first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino.Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived...

This is the latest groundbreaking anthology from the publishers of The Good Immigrant, Repeal the 8th and Common People. Laura Kate Dale (@LaurakBuzz, 57.1k followers on Twitter) is the author of Uncomfortable Labels (2019), a first-of-its-kind memoir...

After the 1993 Oslo Accords, a handful of Palestinians were allowed to return to their hometowns in Israel. Fida Jiryis and her family were among them.This beautifully written memoir tells the story of their journey, which is also the story of Palestine,...

Quiet your mind, and the silence will help you hear your inner voice-the one that says,"Stay strong enough to forgive, to heal, and to have hope."In her stirring, vulnerable new memoir, Karena Dawn reveals what it was like to grow up with a mother...

"Funny and whimsical. There are wonderful asides ... It is also poignant." -The New York TimesAn utterly charming book by beloved Parisian artist Pierre Le-Tan, filled with dazzling illustrations and intriguing tales about often eccentric art collectors...

The enormously entertaining memoir by One of the Great Artists of Our Time - Now a New York Times,USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller.In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and...

In 1958, Michel Foucault arrived in Poland to work on his thesis-a work that eventually came to be published as The History of Madness. While he was there, he became involved with a number of members of the gay community, including a certain "Jurek," who...

As Daniel Hardcastle careers towards thirty, he looks back on what has really made him happy in life: the friends, the romances...the video games. Told through encounters with the most remarkable - and the most mind-boggling - games of the last...

This is the story of how one man, with a bit of help from his friends, created a revolution in the hitherto staid world of Scotch Whisky. But by creating the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, he gave whisky drinkers access to the finest distilled liquor on the...

Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing meets Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep in this fascinating deep-dive into the science and history of sleep.In Search of Sleep is both a self-help manual for insomniacs, and a sweeping critique of the hustle culture that...

Contemporary themes: the search for meaning and for spirituality in a secular world; the art of attention; reconciliation with the Catholic Church; the meaning and value of art (and the humanities) in the 21st century, especially art from cultures and...

The bookshop is, and will always be, the soul of the trade. What happens there does not happen elsewhere. The multifariousness of human nature is more on show there than anywhere else, and I think it's because of books, what they are, what they release...