Memoir Essays

An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world.

As a Pennsylvania Game Warden for more than three decades, Wasserman investigated thousands of game law violations and arrested many violent career poachers. But another big part of his job was in the public relations and education field where he penned a weekly newspaper column entitled It’s a Wild Life. Hence, the title of this audiobook, which contains twenty-six of his most notable stories selected from more than seven hundred published over a fifteen-year period.

Welcome to essayist Kimberly Harrington’s poetic and funny world of motherhood, womanhood, and humanhood, not necessarily in that order. It’s a place of loud parenting, fierce loving, too much social media, and occasional inner monologues where timeless debates are resolved such as Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure (“Pro: Skim the crappiest brownies for myself. Con: They’re really crappy.”) With accessibility and wit, she captures the emotions around parenthood in artful and earnest ways.

Have you ever read a suspense novel so good you had to stop and think to yourself, "How did the author come up with this idea? Their characters? Is some of this story real?" For more than five years, Mark Rubinstein, physician, psychiatrist, and mystery and thriller writer, had the chance to ask the most well-known authors in the field just these kinds of questions in interviews for the Huffington Post. Collected here are interviews with 47 accomplished authors, including Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Meg Gardiner, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Don Winslow.

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, one of the principal New England Transcendentalists, left the town for the country. Beside the lake of Walden, he built himself a log cabin and returned to nature, to observe and reflect, while surviving on $8 a year. From this experience emerged one of the great classics of American literature, a deeply personal reaction against the commercialism and materialism that he saw as the main impulses of mid-19th century America.

As a young woman, Kate Betts nursed a dream of striking out on her own in a faraway place and becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. After college—and not without trepidation—she took off for Paris, renting a room in the apartment of a young BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) family and throwing herself into the local culture. She was determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay.

It happens to us all: We think we’ve settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us - in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds. In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree.

Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. "Taken together," as the editor Ignacio Echevarra remarks in his introduction, they provide “a personal cartography of the writer: The closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented 'autobiography.'"

Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and one of today's most hilarious comedians and insightful social critics, pens a brilliant account of how she discovered her comedic voice. In this collection of autobiographical essays, Winstead vividly recounts how she fought to find her own voice, both as a comedian and as a woman, and how humor became her most powerful weapon in confronting life's challenges.

Acclaimed author of The Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true-crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today.

Un delicioso recorrido por la obra y los lugares más emblemáticos de ocho escritores fundamentales. El regreso de Savater a su faceta más divulgativa. En Aquí viven leones, Fernando Savater vuelve a una de sus facetas favoritas, la de divulgador de la literatura y el pensamiento. A través de ocho viajes inolvidables, ilustrados magníficamente por Anapurna, nos presenta la obra y la vida de Shakespeare, Valle Inclán, Poe, Leopardi, Agatha Christie, Reyes, Flaubert y Zweig.

Plato recorded the final days of his mentor, Socrates, who was tried and condemned in Athens in 399 B.C. on trumped-up charges of being a heretic and corrupter of the young. This collection comprises 4 books: Euthyphro, in which Socrates engages Euthyphro in a debate on the steps of the courthouse where he is to stand trial, The Apology, in which Socrates argues on his own behalf, Crito, in which Socrates's friends and supporters visit him in prison and urge him to recant.

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

There are moments throughout our lives when we discover an artist, an album, a film, or a cultural artifact that leaves a lasting impression, helping inform how we understand the world, and ourselves, moving forward. In No Sense in Wishing, Lawrence Burney explores these profound interactions with incisive and energizing prose, offering us a personal and critical perspective on the people, places, music, and art that transformed him.

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives.

The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer's and activist's life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V's lifelong journals that takes listeners from Berlin to Oklahoma to the Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family.

En el año 1974, la artista serbia Marina Abramovic colocó alrededor de su cuerpo setenta y dos objetos divididos en dos categorías: objetos de placer y objetos de dolor. Luego invitó al público a que los usase sobre sucuerpo, transformándose, de esta manera, en otro objeto más. El fin era observar el comportamiento humano ante la indefensión. Cuentan que Abramovic estuvo a punto de perder la vida. Al fin y al cabo, lo fácil siempre fue hacer daño. Al fin y al cabo, lo difícil siempre es amar.

Alongside their personal stories, the writers -decorated novelists, poets, and essayists - address the history of the C-section as well as its risks, social inequities, impact on the body, and psychological aftermath. My Caesarean is a heartfelt meditation, offering much-needed comfort through shared experience.

The international sensation that illuminates the experiences women are supposed to hide - from addiction, anger, sexual assault, and infertility to joy, sensuality, and love. In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the events that have marked her life - those emotional disruptions for which our society has no adequate language, at once bittersweet, clandestine, and ordinary. She writes with radical honesty on the unspeakable grief of infertility, on caring for an alcoholic parent, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self.

These days, the road to success can feel jampacked with scheduling, networking, nonstop hustle, and flat-out absurdity. And no one knows that better than Al Roker - beloved cohost of The Today Show, weatherperson extraordinaire, and the man we all secretly wish we could turn to for wisdom and wisecracks in our everyday lives. Al has learned worthwhile lessons over a long, successful career. And now, for the first time, Al is ready to unleash savvy advice on how to embrace happiness.