What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jean-Dominique Bauby · 141 pages
The author, former editor of French Elle magazine, describes the rare stroke to the brain stem that left his mind intact in a nearly totally paralyzed body.
Townie
Andre Dubus III · 387 pages
After their parents divorce in the 1970's, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed, or killing someone else, o
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway · 209 pages
A Moveable Feast is a 1964 memoir belles-lettres by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expat journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. It was published posthumously.[1] The book details Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his associations with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in Interwar France. The memoir consists of various per
This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Ivan Doig · 314 pages
Autobiography of a newspaperman and editor who grew up in the wilderness of Montana.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Nick Flynn · 288 pages
"Nick Flynn met his father when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled (his mother committed suicide when he was in his late teens), was living alternatively in a r
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 248 pages
An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civiliza
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.
An Angel at my Table
Janet Frame · 514 pages
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: LITERARY. New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually fo
Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
Tom Robbins · 384 pages
Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins delivers the long awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe. "In Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins turns that unparalleled literary sensibility inward, stitching together stories of his unconventional life, from his Appalachian childhood to his globetrotting adventures -- told in his unique voice that com
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Steve Martin · 216 pages
The author shares the stories of his years in stand-up comedy in a humorous memoir that recalls a first job selling guidebooks at Disneyland, his early magic and comedy act, his years of honing his craft, and the sacrifice, discipline, and originality it took to take him to the top.
Dust Tracks on a Road
Zora Neale Hurston · 336 pages
An exuberant account of Zora Neale Hurston's rise from poverty in the rural south to a prominent place among the leading artists and intelectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.
Autobiography of a Face
Lucy Grealy · 230 pages
Lucy Grealy's ruthless self-examination, rich fantasy life, and great derring-do inform this powerful memoir about the premium we put on beauty and on a woman's face in particular. It took Lucy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood surgery left her jaw disfigured. As a you
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion · 227 pages
[In this book, the author] explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete sept
All Over But the Shoutin'
Rick Bragg · 329 pages
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the hab
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages
Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi · 256 pages
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve me
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Stephen King · 291 pages
"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." In 1999, Stephen King began to write about his craft -- and his life. By midyear, a widely reported accident jeopardized the survival of both. And in his months of recovery, the link between writing and living became more crucial than ever. Rarely has a book on writing been so clear, so useful, and so reveal
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou · 281 pages
She was born Marguerite, but her brother Bailey nicknamed her Maya ("mine"). As little children they were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Their early world revolved around this remarkable woman and the Store she ran for the black community. White people were more than strangers - they were from another planet. And yet, even unseen they ruled. The Store was a microcosm
Where We Going, Daddy? Life with Two Sons Unlike Any Other
Jean-Louis Fournier · 107 pages
My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir
Chris Offutt · 272 pages
"After inheriting 400 novels of pornography written by his father in the 1970s and '80s, critically acclaimed author Chris Offutt sets out to make sense of a complicated father-son relationship in this carefully observed, beautifully written memoir,"--NoveList. Andrew Offutt's writing career began as a strategy to pay for his son's orthodontic needs and peaked during the 1970s when the commercial