What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorLove Is a Mix Tape
Rob Sheffield · 240 pages
In the 1990s, "alternative" was suddenly mainstream, and bands like Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nirvana and R.E.M.--bands that a year before would have been too weird for MTV--were MTV. The boundaries of American culture were exploding, and music was leading the way. It was also the 1990s when a shy music geek named Rob Sheffield met a hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl named Renée, who was way t
Signs of Life: A Memoir
Natalie Taylor · 306 pages
Twenty-four-year-old Natalie Taylor has led a charmed life. Surrounded by her large, close-knit family, she enjoys her meaningful job as a high school English teacher, cherishes being married to her college sweetheart and is ecstatic about their baby on the way. But her life suddenly changes.
Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
Mark Doty · 312 pages
The year is 1989 and Mark Doty's life has reached a state of enviable equilibrium. His reputation as a poet of formidable talent is growing, he enjoys his work as a college professor and, perhaps most importantly, he is deeply in love with his partner of many years, Wally Roberts. The harmonious existence these two men share is shattered, however, when they learn that Wally has tested positive for
A Grief Observed
C.S. Lewis · 67 pages
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional b
The 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.
The Pilot's Wife
Anita Shreve · 304 pages
Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to
M Train
Patti Smith · 288 pages
M Train is a journey through eighteen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafâe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin
Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
Madeleine L'Engle · 231 pages
This moving memoir documents a marriage of more than forty years between two gifted people, a long term marriage that was: "full of wonderful things, terrible things, joyous things, grievous things, but ours."
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
Bag of Bones
Stephen King · 604 pages
Four years after the sudden death of his wife, forty-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan is still grieving. Unable to write, and plagued by vivid nightmares set at the western Maine summerhouse he calls Sara Laughs, Mike reluctantly returns to the lakeside getaway. There, he finds his beloved Yankee town held in the grip of a powerful millionaire, Max Devore, whose vindictive purpose is to t
Young Widower: A Memoir
John W. Evans · 185 pages
"John W. Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania, when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. In an instant, their life together was shattered. Katie became separated from the group. When Evans finally found her, he could only
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love
Carole Radziwill · 268 pages
A memoir about a girl from a working class town who becomes an award-winning television producer and marries a prince, Anthony Radziwill, nephew of John F. Kennedy. Carole DiFalco Radziwill grew up in a suburb with a large, eccentric cast of characters. At the age of nineteen, she struck out for New York. Her career at ABC News led her to the refugee camps of Cambodia, a bunker in Tel Aviv, and th
Life's That Way
Jim Beaver · 303 pages
Lifes That Way is a modern-day Book of Job. In August 2003, Jim Beaver, a character actor whom many know from the popular HBO series Deadwood, and his wife Cecily learned what they thought was the worst news possible their daughter Maddie was autistic. Then six weeks later the roof fell inCecily was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. Jim immediately began writing a nightly e-mail as a way to k
From Scratch
Tembi Locke · 352 pages
Say Her Name
Francisco Goldman · 350 pages
In a novel based on the author's real-life tragedy, Goldman, consumed with grief and guilt over the accidental death of his wife just before their second anniversary, obsessively collects every memory of her, especially her writings, with the hope of keeping her alive in his mind.
Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words
Michael Ausiello · 309 pages
Television industry journalist Michael Ausiello tells the story of his final year with his partner of thirteen years, Kit Cowan--diagnosed with a rare and very aggressive form of neuroendocrine cancer--while revisiting the many memories that preceded it, and describes how their undeniably powerful bond carried them through all manner of difficulties, with humor always front and center of the relat
A Widow's Story
Joyce Carol Oates
The Shipping News
Annie Proulx · 337 pages
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing
Let's Roll!: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage
Lisa Beamer, Ken Abraham · 346 pages
Lisa Beamer was thrust into the national spotlight after her husband, Todd, led a counterattack against terrorists on United Flight 93. He -- and all the other passenger heroes -- lost their lives in a Pennsylvania field. But that plane was the only one of the four hijacked planes on 9-11 that didn't hit its target- most likely the white House or the Capitol. Todd's last known words, "Let's rol
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir
Paul Monette · 342 pages
This "tender and lyrical" memoir (New York Times Book Review) remains one of the most compelling documents of the AIDS era-"searing, shattering, ultimately hope inspiring account of a great love story" (San Francisco Examiner). A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and the winner of the PEN Center West literary award.
Regretting You
Colleen Hoover · 363 pages
A Single Man
Christopher Isherwood · 158 pages
Classic fiction. The best prose writer in English' Gore Vidal Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life
Bough Down
Karen Green · 186 pages
A book of dualities, probing the small spaces between lucidity and madness, desire and ambivalence, the living and the absent. Both an evocation of her love for her husband David Foster Wallace and an act of defiance in the face of devastating loss, Bough Down is a lapidary, keenly observed and composed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.