Author Memoirs

A few days before Thanksgiving 1994, Jeffrey Eugenides’s father, Gus, was piloting a small plane when it crashed in Daytona Beach, Florida. The circumstances surrounding his death added to the mystery of a life that defied expectations, but left many questions unanswered. Now, more than 30 years later, Eugenides tells the story of how his father, a first-generation American, rose from Detroit’s east side to find financial success as a mortgage banker and real estate developer–only to lose it all.

This is a biography of James Baldwin, author, one-time preacher, and civil rights activist. He chose David Leeming, a close friend and colleague, to write his biography and granted him access to his correspondence. Leeming traces his life from his birth in Harlem in 1924 to his self-imposed exile in Europe, his later years as political activist, and his public funeral in 1987.

This is the story of John McGahern's childhood - of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and of his own discovery of literature and his ambition to become a writer. At the heart of the book is an unembarrassed homage by a loving son to a woman who protected him and his sisters from his father's unpredictable moods. His joy in her presence is recovered with great lyrical tact.

With seven unpublished novels wasting away on his hard drive, Tony Vanderwarker is astonished when John Grisham offers to take him under his wing and teach him the secrets of thriller writing. The beginning and the end are easy,” Grisham tells him. It’s the three hundred pages in the middle that’s the hard part.” To ensure his plot doesn’t run out of gas, Grisham puts Tony though his outline process. Tony does one, and then Grisham asks for another and another and another.

A moving and illuminating memoir about the life of world-famous author and historian Iris ChangIris Chang's best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking, forever changed the way we view the Second World War in Asia. It all began with a photo of a river choked with the bodies of hundreds of Chinese civilians that shock Iris to her core. Who were these people? Why had this happened and how could their story have been lost to history? She could not shake that image from her head.

Ramona Koval has been praised as a master of the interview genre, renowned for engaging writers in conversations that are incisive, provocative, and often funny.In this new collection, Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, she shares the most fascinating interviews from her 2005 book Tasting Life Twice, along with brand-new ones with some of the most important writers of our times.

Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde is a timeless collection of the sharpest observations, paradoxes, and epigrams from one of literature’s most brilliant minds. Oscar Wilde’s wit is elegant, mischievous, and relentlessly insightful. With effortless precision, he skewers social conventions, exposes hypocrisy, and reveals enduring truths about love, ambition, beauty, morality, and human folly. Each quotation stands alone yet contributes to a larger portrait of Wilde’s worldview—one that prizes individuality, intellectual courage, and the art of living well.

Renowned as a novelist, journalist, and humorist, Mark Twain is not only one of the most widely read and admired American writers, he is also among the most quoted. Wit and repartee permeate his work — from the short, light pieces to his great novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and even later, in dark meditations on the human condition where his humor takes on a cynical, satirical twist.

Generations of children have fallen in love with the pioneer saga of the Ingalls family, of Pa and Ma, Laura and her sisters, and their loyal dog. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books have taught millions of Americans about frontier life, giving inspiration to many and in the process becoming icons of our national identity. Yet few realize that this best-selling series wandered far from the actual history of the Ingalls family and from what Laura herself understood to be central truths about pioneer life.

Yeats is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language writers of the 20th century. A hero of the pen rather than the sword. A Nobel Prize winner for Literature and a two-term senator of the Irish Free State, Yeats lived a full, active life that combined poetry and politics.

This letter is the closest that Kafka came to setting down his autobiography. He was driven to write it by his father's opposition to his engagement with Julie Wohryzek. The marriage did not take place; the letter was not delivered.

Born into one of the wealthiest families in America—he was the youngest son of Standard Oil scion John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the celebrated patron of modern art Abby Aldrich Rockefeller—David Rockefeller has carried his birthright into a distinguished life of his own. His dealings with...

Joanne "Jo" Rowling is known to readers the world over as J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling book series of all time. The creator of Harry Potter was once a single mother writing in cafés and living on welfare, who experienced a fairytale-like rise from poverty and obscurity to becoming one of the richest and most influential women on the planet. And following her controversial stances in the cultural and political war over transgender rights, Rowling found herself a pariah in circles that had previously adored her.

Using hundreds of primary sources, Charles Dickens in Love narrates the story of the most intense romances of Charles Dickens’ life and shows how his novels both testify to his own strongest affections and serve as memorials to the young women he loved all too well, if not always wisely. Charles Dickens has no rival as the most fertile creative imagination since William Shakespeare, and no one influenced his imagination more powerfully than these three women, his muses and teachers in the school of love.

From the New York Times Bestselling author of Running With Scissors comes the story of one man trying to out-drink his memories, outlast his demons, and outrun his past. "I was addicted to "Bewitched" as a kid. I worshipped Darren Stevens the First. When he'd come home from work and Samantha...

The definitive critical study of Tolkien’s greatest works by the respected and world renowned Tolkien scholar Professor T.A. Shippey. Following the unprecedented and universal acclaim for The Lord of the Rings, the respected academic and world-renowned Tolkien scholar, Professor Tom Shippey...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Arsenio Hall, America’s beloved late-night TV host, reveals the ups and downs of his remarkable career as a trailblazing pioneer with this “vivid, outrageous” (The New York Times) behind-the-scenes, star-studded, no-holds-barred memoir of celebrity, race...

Hergé created only 24 Tintin books, which have been translated into more than 70 languages and sold 230 million copies worldwide. The Real Hergé: The Inspiration Behind Tintin takes an in-depth look at the man behind the cultural phenomenon and the history that helped shape these books. As well as focusing on the controversies that engulfed Hergé, this biography will also look at his personal life, as well as the relationships and experiences that influenced him.

Between 1948 and 1961, Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner traveled together, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, and ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Everywhere they went, they talked. For 14 years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared their thoughts and as Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene of the 20s, and recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction, Hotchner took it all down.

Dedicated to the memory of two wrestling coaches and two writer friends, The Imaginary Girlfriend is John Irving's candid memoir of his twin careers in writing and wrestling. The award-winning author of best-selling novels from The World According to Garp to In One Person, Irving began writing when he was 14, the same age at which he began to wrestle at Exeter. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years, was certified as a referee at 24, and coached the sport until he was 47.