Small Memories

Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

A Strong West Wind

Gail Caldwell · 228 pages

In this memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. Beginning in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle, she grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, and took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. W

Just Kids

Patti Smith · 336 pages

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

Frances Mayes · 322 pages

"A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region's powerful influence on her life. The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including Under the Tuscan Sun and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and

To the Is-land: An Autobiography

Janet Frame · 253 pages

"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth." Thus opens this first volume of autobiography by Janet Frame, one of the most highly regarded writers of today. Recounting her childhood in N

Out of Egypt: A Memoir

Andre Aciman · 339 pages

Set in luxuriant cosmopolitan Alexandria, this richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family from its bold arrival in Egypt at the turn of the century to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, Andre Aciman introduces us to the Olympian figures who shaped his life: Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, by turns soldier, salesman, Itali

Jacky Daydream

Jacqueline Wilson · 352 pages

A wonderful depiction of her own childhood which every child will want to read, from the Children's LaureateEverybody knows Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson's best-loved character. But what do they know about Jacqueline herself? In this fascinating book, discover. . . . . . how Jacky played with paper dolls like April in Dustbin Baby.. . . how she dealt with an unpredictable father like Prue in Lov

My Family and Other Animals

Gerald Durrell · 285 pages

My Family and Other Animals is an autobiographical work by naturalist Gerald Durrell, telling of the part of his childhood he spent on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939.

Cider With Rosie

Laurie Lee · 259 pages

Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity and cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past. 'It sings in the memory' Sunday Times Laurie Lee's matchless

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

Bill Bryson · 288 pages

Bill Bryson on his most personal journey yet: into his own childhood in America's Mid-West.Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have l

Aké: The Years of Childhood

Wole Soyinka · 230 pages

A dazzling memoir of an African childhood from Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian novelist, playwright, and poet Wole Soyinka. "Aké: The Years of Childhood" gives us the story of Soyinka's boyhood before and during World War II in a Yoruba village in western Nigeria called Aké. A relentlessly curious child who loved books and getting into trouble, Soyinka grew up on a parsonage compound, raised by Ch

Uncle Tungsten

Oliver Sacks · 337 pages

"From his earliest days, Oliver Sacks - the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time - was irresistibly drawn to understanding the natural world. Born into a large family of doctors, metallurgists, chemists, physicists, and teachers, his curiosity was encouraged and abetted by aunts, uncles, parents, and older brothers. But soon after his sixth b

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana

Haven Kimmel · 288 pages

When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period - people h

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz · 533 pages

Love and darkness are just two of the many forces which run through Amos Oz's extraordinary, moving autobiographical novel. He takes us on a bold, courageous journey through his childhood and adolescence, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his parents. At the tragic heart of the story, its defining moment, is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half

A Girl from Yamhill

Beverly Cleary · 279 pages

Generations of children have grown up with Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and all of their friends, families, and assorted pets. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful images of childhood brought to life in Beverly Cleary books, here is the fascinating true story of the remarkable woman who created them.

Growing Up

Russell Baker, Gilbert Riswold · 348 pages

Pulitzer prize-winning writer Russell Baker shares his memories of growing up between the two world wars, telling of his life in Virginia, New Jersey, and Baltimore, and discussing his loving mother and family, teachers, schoolmates, and how they all survived the Depression years.

Moab Is My Washpot

Stephen Fry · 368 pages

"Stephen Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar, and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love affairs, carnal violation, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment to emerge, at the age of eighteen, re

Knots in My Yo-Yo String: The Autobiography of a Kid

Jerry Spinelli · 148 pages

"A master of those embarrassing, gloppy, painful, and suddenly wonderful things that happen on the razor's edge between childhood and full-fledged adolescence" (The Washington Post), Newbery medalist Jerry Spinelli has penned his early autobiography with all the warmth, humor, and drama of his best-selling fiction. From first memories through high school, including first kiss, first punch, first

My Salinger Year

Joanna Rakoff · 286 pages

1996. Joanna Rakoff takes a job at one of New York's oldest literary agencies. On her first day, her boss gives her a stern talk about someone named 'Jerry'. She is never to give out Jerry's address or phone number, or talk to reporters about Jerry, or to call him with questions. It is only then she notices an entire wall of books containing myriad editions of the works of J.D. Salinger. Filled wi

Cross Creek

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings · 368 pages

Warm, leisurely account of author's neighbors, and her everyday affairs while living for thirteen years in a remote section of the Florida hammock at Cross Creek.

A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

Kevin Brockmeier · 199 pages

"At age twelve, [the American novelist] Kevin Brockmeier is ready to become a different person: not the boy he has always been--the one who cries too easily and laughs too easily, who lives in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes--but someone else altogether. Over the course of one school year--seventh grade--he sets out in search of himself"--Page 4 of cover.

My Boyhood Days

Rabindranath Tagore · 54 pages

Autobiographical reminiscences of author's childhood.

The Snows of Yesteryear

Gregor von Rezzori · 280 pages