Showing titles in Art & Literature

Antwone Quenton Fisher was raised in institutions from the moment his single mother gave birth to him in prison. As a foster child, he suffered more than a dozen years of emotional abandonment and physical abuse, until he escaped and forged a life on the streets. And just as his life was about to hit rock bottom, Antwone enlisted in the U.S. Navy, a decision that would ultimately save him. There, he became a man and discovered a loving family he never had.

My Russia is an autobiography that traces Jill Dougherty's fascination with Russia and shares the insights into the country, its people, and its leader she has gleaned through forty years of reporting. Listeners will see Russia's evolution through the eyes of the dedicated and compassionate woman they have watched on cable since 1983.

A searing confessional infused with the darkest humor, Permanent Midnight chronicles the opiated abyss of a Hollywood screenwriter and his formidable climb into sobriety. Made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, Permanent Midnight is revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted fans as one of the most compelling contemporary memoirs.

My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood. Beautiful, audacious, moving and so very funny, Sarah Moss’s memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself, and then offers a way out: it is a blindingly brilliant experiment in and celebration of what a creative mind can do.

Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.

Rose Boyt explores her complicated relationship with her beloved father, the renowned artist Lucian Freud, through the diary and other accounts of sitting for him, naked or otherwise. Enthralled by his genius, it was only after his death that she began to question the version of events she had come to accept. The shock of the truth is profound but what emerges is her love and compassion not just for herself as a vulnerable young woman, but for the man himself, who is shown in all his brilliant complexity.

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the undisputed giants of 20th-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism, combined with his creative and artistic flair, have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high-profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion.

Edward Enninful has lived an extraordinary life. Here, for the first time, he shares the remarkable, inspiring story of his journey from a childhood bedroom in Ghana overlooking firing squads, to 1990s London—becoming the youngest-ever fashion director of i-D magazine at just eighteen years old. Now the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue, he has created game-changing images of everyone from Beyoncé to Meghan Markle, Kate Moss to Oprah Winfrey, Adele to Rihanna, and many more stars he now counts as friends.

A compelling memoir by ABC News correspondent James Longman in which he discusses mental illness and trauma in families, what the latest genetic science is telling us, and how to not only persevere but thrive.

Samuel Pepys kept a diary in which he wrote with astonishing candour about the life he saw around him in London in the 1660s, and about his private desires and ambitions. The diary was kept for fewer than 10 years of his long life: Claire Tomalin tells the whole story of the Fleet Street tailor's son who made himself rich and powerful, an MP and adviser to royalty.

El verano de Cervantes surge de toda una vida leyendo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Durante el proceso de escritura de este libro, Antonio Muñoz Molina va entreverando recuerdos de su infancia y de sus primeras lecturas con la revelación del lugar que Don Quijote ha ocupado en su vocación literaria, mostrando además su influencia en otros autores, como Melville, Balzac, Joyce, Thomas Mann o Mark Twain, que han consolidado la novela como la forma narrativa suprema siguiendo la estela de Cervantes.

In The Night of the Gun, David Carr redefines memoir with the revelatory story of his years as an addict and chronicles his journey from crack-house regular to regular columnist for The New York Times. Built on 60 videotaped interviews, legal and medical records, and three years of reporting, The Night of the Gun is a ferocious tale that uses the tools of journalism to fact-check the past.

Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.

Master Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and writer Benvenuto Cellini is best remembered for his magnificent autobiography. In this work, which was actually begun in 1558 but not published until 1730, Cellini beautifully chronicles his flamboyant times. He tells of his adventures in Italy and France, and his relations with popes, kings, and fellow artists.

Lucia Santa has traveled 3,000 miles of dark ocean, from the mountain farms of Italy to the streets of New York, hoping for a better life. Instead, she finds herself in Hell's Kitchen, in a bad marriage, raising six children on her own. As Lucia struggles to hold her family together, her daughter confronts the adult world of work and romance while her eldest son is drawn into the Mafia. Meanwhile, her youngest son aspires to American pursuits she cannot understand.

Julia and her adopted brother, David, are 16 years old. Julia is White. David is Black. It is the mid-1980s and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all-encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children and a violent father.

In Youth, the first of two volumes, Feaver conjures Freud’s early childhood: Sigmund Freud’s grandson, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934 before being dropped into successive English public schools. Following Freud through art school, his time in the navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his return to Soho - consorting with duchesses and violent criminals, out on the town with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret - Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man’s coming of age.

Carr, best known for his dark one-liners and signature laugh, didn't begin life as a comedian. After studying social science and political science at Cambridge, he began working for fuel company Shell. While there, he began reading self-help books and, feeling miserable, decided to make a change - he gave up his job and learned how to write jokes, got his first gig as a stand-up and changed his life!

Fergal Keane has spent his adult life witnessing war, travelling through dangerous or devastated places and reporting the atrocities back to the rest of the world. In the course of those decades, he has lost friends, sustained injuries and experienced countless near misses. He has patched up colleagues and seen the worst of humanity: mothers robbed of their children and bodies mutilated. Along the way, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet he could not stop going back to the wars.

Jenni Fagan was property of the state before birth. She drew her first breath in care and by the age of seven, she had lived in fourteen different homes and had changed name multiple times. Twenty years after her first attempt to write this powerful memoir, Jenni is finally ready to share her account. Ootlin is a journey through the broken UK care system - it is one of displacement and exclusion, but also of the power of storytelling. It is about the very human act of making meaning from adversity.