Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in Authors

Drawing on previously hidden historical documents and interviews with the long-silent "illegitimate" branch of the family, William J. Mann paints an elegant, meticulously researched, and groundbreaking group portrait of this legendary family. Mann argues that the Roosevelts' rise to power and prestige was actually driven by a series of intense personal contests that at times devolved into blood sport. His compelling and eye-opening masterwork is the story of a family at war with itself, of social Darwinism at its most ruthless.

On May 31, 1953, 20-year-old Sylvia Plath arrived in New York City for a one-month stint at Mademoiselle to be a guest editor for its prestigious annual college issue. Over the next 26 days, the bright, blond New England collegian lived at the Barbizon Hotel, attended Balanchine ballets, watched a game at Yankee Stadium, and danced at the West Side Tennis Club. This captivating portrait invites us to see Sylvia Plath before she became an icon - a young woman with everything to live for.

From her famous diaries, which she began in 1914 at the age of 11, Anais Nin reads passages that reflect the recurring themes of her work. In a slow, clear, heavily accented but hypnotic voice, Nin draws the listener into her spell-binding stories of a highly personal world as she paints a vivid picture of a woman as artist and self. This is an extraordinary, historic, archival, and memorable recording that will speak in a fresh voice to new generations.

Before Larry McMurtry became one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, he worked on his family’s ranch in rural Texas. He spent his days on horseback and his nights listening to vivid stories of his cowboy uncles driving herds of cattle across the plains where there once were bison and Native Americans. “McMurtry Means Beef,” as one ranching magazine put it. By the time he died in 2021, McMurtry had published forty books, won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove and an Oscar for his cowritten adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and seen his work made into classic films.

Between 1987 and 1989, Paul Bowles, at the suggestion of a friend, kept a journal to record the daily events of his life. What emerges is not only just a record of the meals, conversations, and health concerns of the author of The Sheltering Sky but also a fascinating look at an artist at work in a new medium.

Paul Bowles, the acclaimed author of The Sheltering Sky, offers moving, powerful, subtle, and fascinating insights into his life, his writing, and his world.

In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature - age-old classics as well as his own - that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading.

An accomplished former ghostwriter and book researcher who worked with Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and Hillary Clinton goes behind the scenes of the nation's capital to tell the story of how she survived the exciting but self-important and self-promoting world of the Beltway.

In this darkly funny, surprising memoir, the original "Lit Girl" and author of the era-defining Slaves of New York considers her life in and outside of New York City, from the heyday of the 1980s to her life today in a tiny upstate town that proves that fact is always stranger than fiction.

New York Times best-selling author J. A. Jance's heartrending collection of poetry and essays recounts a dark chapter of her own life, her first marriage to an alcoholic - a powerful look at the emotional cost of addiction and an inspiring story of courage and triumph in the wake of crushing defeat.

What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our 40s and 50s, the period now generously known as middle age. It's both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover, for better and worse, who we are.

Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up.

Join mother and daughter as they wade through the trenches of flowers and favors, grueling gown decisions…and the cold, cruel realities of a budget. With luck, love and loads of patience, they come out on the other side, bloodied but unbowed, replete with life lessons - and closer than ever before.

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir has the same power. In it, Mason tells the story of her own family - a multilayered saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.

A fiercely personal memoir about coming of age in the male-dominated literary world of the 90s, becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire, and Miller's personal and working relationship with David Foster Wallace.

A hopeful look at coping with the ravages of serious chronic illness by an accomplished journalist, a contributing columnist for the New York Times, and former senior producer of the CBS Evening News.

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life.