Art Biography

We all know that life in prison ain't grand, but the utter horror of it springs from the pages of this autobiography, written by a one-time death-row inmate. Billy Wayne Sinclair is now serving a reduced 90-year sentence for murdering a Baton Rouge convenience store owner in a robbery gone wrong more than three decades ago. His story of an adult life spent in one of Louisiana's harshest prisons is amazing, not only because he has survived with his soul intact, but because it provides such a raw look at the inner workings of a system bent on revenge, not rehabilitation.

The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world—everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud.

Each week, when Sports Illustrated's 21 million readers open up their magazine, many turn right to the last page - because that's where to find SI's most popular feature: the Life of Reilly column, written by best-selling author Rick Reilly. This new collection includes 100 of Reilly's favorite columns from the last six years, along with an introduction by Lance Armstrong.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.

Lou Reed was a musician, singer, songwriter, poet, and founding member of the legendary rock band the Velvet Underground. He collaborated with many artists, from Andy Warhol and John Cale to Robert Wilson and Metallica. Reed had a groundbreaking solo career that spanned five decades until his death in 2013.

When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment.

Peter Wolf grew up in the Bronx, a child of “fellow travelers” whose artistic inclinations influenced both his love of music and his initial desire to become a painter. Stories of his loving and sometimes eccentric parents complement scenes depicting a very young Bob Dylan as he arrived on the Greenwich Village folk scene. Reflections on Wolf’s studies in Boston—where he shared an apartment with David Lynch—are braided with accounts of first love, an untraditional literary education, and early musical influences such as Muddy Waters.

The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family's spoons, tried on their underpants, and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions.

It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award-winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie’s books still sell over four million copies each year - more than thirty years after her death - and it shows no signs of slowing.

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club: a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.

Over fifteen years of dirty secrets, shocking reveals, and all of the celebrity gossip that’s unfit to print . . . but we’re going to anyway. When Jay Z defended himself against unfair charges that he slapped a woman, when Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez got tagged by an escort agency madam, when Bill O’Reilly dissed Muslim women, and when Ruth Madoff discovered her scam artist husband, Bernie, had also been cheating on her, it all came out in the pages of Rush & Molloy.

“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.

While he's not quite a household name, most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin, the voice-actor star of Archer and Bob's Burgers (and a sentient can of mixed vegetables in 2015's Wet Hot American Summer) a comedy show business success. But he'd like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. In a hilarious, self-deprecating memoir, Jon lays out some of his many failures in all areas of life, from Work ("wherein I'm unable to deliver a sizzling fajita") to Family ("wherein a trip to PF Chang's fractures a family").

From Cat Marnell, "New York's enfant terrible" ( The Telegraph), a candid and darkly humorous memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs.

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction - both her own and others' - and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.

Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world.

A giant in American journalism in the vanguard of "The Greatest Generation" reveals his World War II experiences in this National Geographic book. More than 100 of Cronkite's letters from 1943-45 (plus a few earlier letters) survive. They reveal surprising and little-known facts about this storied public figure in the vanguard of "The Greatest Generation". They chronicle both a great love story and a great war story.

For fans of Tune In, an anthology of essays from 30 luminaries about their favorite Beatles songs. Blauner anthologizes essays from 30 authors, actors, and musicians reflecting on their favorite Beatles songs, creating a monument to the enduring impact of the most popular band of all time. The diversity of favorite tracks and the variety of reasons contributors love them speak to the range of the Beatles' song catalog and the power their music still has more than 50 years after they arrived in the United States.

Millions of viewers know and love Bob Saget from his role as the sweetly neurotic father on the smash hit Full House, and as the charming wisecracking host of America's Funniest Home Videos. And then there are the legions of fans who can't get enough of his scatological, out-of-his-mind stand-up routines, comedy specials, and outrageously profane performances in such shows as HBO's Entourage and the hit documentary The Aristocrats.

This is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan '80s - when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives reenergized American rock with punk rock's do-it-yourself credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging, and immensely influential. This sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing, and faith has been recognized as an indie rock classic in its own right.