From the #1 bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry—a contagiously funny, heartwarming, shocking, twisted, and absolutely magical collection. True stories that give voice to the thoughts we all have but dare not mention.

It begins with a Tang Instant Breakfast Drink television commercial when Augusten was seven. Then there is the contest of wills with the deranged cleaning lady. The execution of a rodent carried out with military precision and utter horror. Telemarketing revenge. Dating an undertaker. And much more.

A collection of true stories that are universal in their appeal, yet unabashedly intimate and very funny.

A candid and captivating memoir from award-winning and beloved actress Kelly Bishop, spanning her six decades in show business from Broadway to Hollywood with A Chorus Line, Dirty Dancing, Gilmore Girls, and much more.

Kelly Bishop’s long, storied career has been defined by landmark achievements, from winning a Tony Award for her turn in the original Broadway cast of A Chorus Line to her memorable performance as Jennifer Grey’s mother in Dirty Dancing. But it is probably her iconic role as matriarch Emily in the modern classic Gilmore Girls that cemented her legacy. Now, Bishop reflects on her remarkable life and looks towards the future with The Third Gilmore Girl. She shares some of her greatest stories and the life lessons she’s learned on her journey. From her early transition from dance to drama, to marrying young to a compulsive gambler, to the losses and achievements she experienced—among them marching for women’s rights and losing her second husband to cancer—Bishop offers a rich, genuine celebration of her life. Full of witty insights and featuring a special collection of personal and professional photographs, The Third Gilmore Girl is a warm, unapologetic, and spirited memoir from a woman who has left indelible impressions on her audiences for decades and has no plans on slowing down.

Better is a gutsy, riveting memoir that intimately explores suicide, its legacy in families, and the often cyclical, crooked path of recovery. Arianna Rebolini delves into the profound questions surrounding the choice of death by one's own hands and the struggle to understand the desire to die.

After a decade of therapy and overcoming suicidal depression, Arianna was "better." Her life was seemingly on track with the publication of her first book, a fulfilling job, and the joy of motherhood. Yet, the dark pull of suicide lingered. In a poignant moment, as her young son played, she found herself contemplating the end of her life.

The narrative weaves through Arianna's month-long crisis as a new mother with decades of family history. From her childhood cries for help to the fear of passing the shadow of suicide to her son, Arianna seeks to understand the mechanisms of suicidality. Her journey includes an exploration of the writings of famous individuals who took their own lives, as she searches for insights into the fateful moment of committing to the act of suicide—or the harrowing realization that it cannot be undone.

When her brother faces a similar battle, Arianna confronts the limits of her insights into depression's grip. Better is a harrowing intellectual and emotional odyssey marked by clarity and compassion, a tour through the seductive darkness of death, and a life-affirming testament to the quest for getting better for good.

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin’s Lament, Feh: A Memoir is an exploration of Shalom Auslander's attempt to escape the biblical story he was raised on and his struggle to construct a new narrative for himself and his family. Raised in a dysfunctional family within the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York, Auslander recounts his life as the son of an alcoholic father, a guilt-wielding mother, and a violent, overbearing God.

Now, reaching middle age, he suspects that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't easily escape: a story. The story. Implanted in him at an early age, it told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting—a narrative we have all been told for thousands of years by both the religious and secular worlds, a story called “Feh”, Yiddish for “Yuck.”

Feh follows Auslander's midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari, and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles. Can he move from Feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that? Auslander's recounting of his attempt to exorcise the story he was raised with—before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him—isn't sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt, and fearlessly provocative.

A National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honoree delivers her first work of nonfiction: a compulsively readable, genre-bending story of finding her missing birth mother and, along the way, learning the priceless power of self-knowledge.

In 2020, Tracy O'Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship, thirtysomething, and in a world playing by new rules, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious birth mother she'd never met--may be dying somewhere in South Korea. Hiring a grizzled private investigator, O'Neill took his suggested homework to heart and, when he disappeared before the job was done, picked up the trail, becoming her own hell-bent detective.

Covid could have already gotten to her mother. Yet the promise of whom and what she might discover--the possibility that her biological mother was her own kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own--was too tempting. Written like a mystery novel, Woman of Interest is a tale of self-discovery, featuring a femme fatale of unique proportions, a former CIA operative with a criminal record, and a dogged investigator of radical connections outside the nuclear family and fugitivity from convention.

O'Neill gorgeously bends the detective genre to her own will as a writer, stepping out of the shadows of her own self-conception to illuminate the hope-filled woman of interest she is becoming.

Searching, propulsive, and deeply spiritual, Accordion Eulogies is an odyssey to repair a severed family lineage, told through the surprising history of a musical instrument.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez never knew his grandfather. Stories swirled around this mythologized, larger-than-life figure: That he had abandoned his family, and had possibly done something awful that put a curse on his descendants. About his grandfather, young Noé was sure of only one thing: That he had played the accordion.

Now an adult, reckoning with the legacy of silence surrounding his family’s migration from Mexico, Álvarez resolves both to take up the instrument and to journey into Mexico to discover the grandfather he never knew. Álvarez travels across the US with his accordion, meeting makers and players in cities that range from San Antonio to Boston. He uncovers the story of an instrument that’s been central to classic American genres, but also played a critical role in indigenous Mexican history.

Like the accordion itself, Álvarez feels trapped between his roots in Mexico and the U.S. As he tries to make sense of his place in the world—as a father, a son, a musician—he gets closer to uncovering the mystery of his origins.

An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Hey girlfriend I got a proposition, goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want. Kathleen Hanna's rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 90s and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like "Rebel Girl" and "Double Dare Ya" are more powerful than ever.

But where did this transformative voice come from? In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes clear, being in a "girl band," especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her—including with her bandmates, Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Johanna Fateman; her friendships with Kurt Cobain and Ian MacKaye; and her introduction to Joan Jett— were all a testament to how the punk world could nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin.

She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how it continues to fuel her revolutionary art and music.

Mean Boys: A Personal History delves into the complex world of male friendships and rivalries, exploring how they shape our identities and experiences. Geoffrey Mak shares his personal journey, examining the intricate dynamics of competition and camaraderie among men.

Through a series of vivid anecdotes and reflective insights, Mak reveals the often unspoken rules that govern male relationships. He sheds light on the challenges and triumphs that come with navigating these bonds, offering a candid look at the role of masculinity in modern society.

This memoir is not just a tale of personal growth but a broader commentary on the societal expectations placed on men. Mak's narrative is both thought-provoking and relatable, as he invites readers to reconsider what it means to be a 'mean boy' in today's world.

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America's most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. In his thirties, he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.

Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved. The Goodwins' last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.

Their expedition gave Dick's last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.

Briefly Perfectly Human is a deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more fulfilling, and authentic lives, from America’s most visible death doula.

For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.

Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.

This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.

Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls “death embrace.” Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,” Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”

Committed is a raw and masterful memoir that navigates the complexities of becoming a woman and going mad—and the intersection of both. Suzanne Scanlon's journey begins in the 90s as a student at Barnard College, where the loss of her mother sends her adrift in a sea of grief and inexpressible pain. This turmoil leads to a suicide attempt that results in her admission to the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Spanning nearly three years and a myriad of experimental treatments, Suzanne eventually leaves the institute on unsteady footing. The following decades mark her path to recovery and a profound understanding of her suffering as part of a broader narrative—a lineage of women whose intricate and often silenced stories of self-realization are dismissed as mere “crazy chick” and “madwoman” clichés.

Through her personal odyssey, Suzanne discovers a resonating thrill in the works of influential women writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, and Shulamith Firestone. Committed is both a tale of personal discovery and a call to reclaim the archetype of the madwoman, celebrating it as a source of insight and a means to transcendence.

From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, Knife is a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.

Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

Being Reflected Upon is a memoir in verse from one of America's legendary poets. Alice Notley delivers a collection that serves as a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics. The book is a reflective journey through Notley's Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, a period that encapsulates her experiences with illness and recovery following her first breast cancer treatment.

As Notley penned these poems, she discovered connections between events of this period and those from previous decades. The narrative moves from reminiscences of her mother and childhood in California to meditations on illness and recovery. It also encompasses various poetic adventures in cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh.

The collection is deeply concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and the dead. The term "stream-of-consciousness" is not just a stylistic description but also teases out a lived physics or philosophy that Notley explores through her work.

From the acclaimed and bestselling writer Nicholson Baker, a deeply personal account of his journey learning how to paint for the first time, and a meditation on the power of art in times of crisis.

Nicholson Baker wanted to learn how to paint. In 2019, after years of researching and writing about secret and often horrible government programs for his book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, he was wiped out. Having been steeped for so long in the history of war, violence, and conspiracy, the world had lost some of its brightness. Photography had scratched a creative itch for years, but now, Baker was desperate to squeeze more out of what he saw – he wanted to live, slowly, through the snatches of life he was recording in photos. Maybe, he thought, he could learn to paint? The idea consumed him, but he was nagged by an even more debilitating doubt: What if he failed?

Finding a Likeness is Baker's record of the years he worked to improve his artistic skills, beginning with his first, humble attempts to set paintbrush to paper. Driven by a natural curiosity and a strong desire to paint faces, clouds, and landscapes that actually resemble faces, clouds, and landscapes, he attends classes from local artists, watches YouTube tutorials, and seeks out master painters from the past and present in the hopes of uncovering their secrets. In his inimitable voice, Baker recounts the highs and lows of the creative process, reflects on memories of growing up as the son of two painters, and learns what it means to really see.

Filled with Baker's own art, as well as the work of artists from around the world, Finding a Likeness is a tender and deeply felt testimony to taking a step back and going back to basics. Baker improves dramatically in his craft, but as he considers what it means to try, fail, and try again, he discovers far more than what it takes to paint a cloud – rather, he shows us how to bear witness to the world, to the good and the bad, and to do it all justice with paper and ink.

New and Selected Poems is an indispensable collection that spans more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from acclaimed poet Marie Howe. Characterized by "a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions," as noted by Matthew Zapruder in the New York Times Magazine, Howe's poetry effortlessly transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles.

This essential volume draws from each of Howe's four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood—and contains more than fifteen new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or contemplating aging while walking the dog, Howe is hailed as "a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy" by Dorianne Laux.

Sociopath: A Memoir is a compelling narrative that delves into the life of an individual grappling with sociopathy. Patric Gagne brings readers into her world, beginning with the realization in her early years that she was different from her peers. Emotions that come naturally to most—fear, guilt, empathy—were foreign to her, leaving her feeling an overwhelming sense of nothingness.

Struggling to conform to societal expectations, Patric resorted to theft, deceit, and occasional violence, all in an attempt to feel something. Her journey took a turn in college when she received confirmation of her long-held suspicion: she was a sociopath. Despite the bleak outlook presented by mental health professionals, who offered no treatment or hope for a 'normal' life, Patric's story takes a hopeful turn when she reconnects with a past love.

This reunion sparks a glimmer of possibility: if she is capable of love, perhaps she isn't the monster society makes sociopaths out to be. With new-found motivation, she sets out on a mission, with the support of her partner and a cast of intriguing characters, to challenge the stigma surrounding her diagnosis and advocate for the millions who, like her, are often misunderstood.

Sociopath: A Memoir is not just a tale of self-discovery and redemption; it's a testament to the power of love and the human spirit's capacity for change. It's a narrative that offers hope and understanding for those who have been labeled as different or difficult, and it encourages a deeper, more empathetic view of mental health.

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet is an intimate evocation of the glory of nature, our vexed position in the animal kingdom, and the difficulty of adoring what we destroy. In her first work of nonfiction, acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet offers a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of nonhuman beings.

Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, Millet offers intimate portraits of what she calls “the others”―the extraordinary animals with whom we still share the world, along with those already lost. Humans, too, fill this book, as Millet touches on the lives of her world-traveling parents, fascinating partners and friends, and colorful relatives, from diplomats to nut farmers―all figures in the complex tapestry each of us weaves with the surrounding world.

Written in the tradition of Annie Dillard or Robert Macfarlane, We Loved It All is an incantatory work that will appeal to anyone concerned about the future of life on earth―including our own.

There's Always This Year is a poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent, and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America. While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan.

Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir. "Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jumpshot," Abdurraqib writes. "The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time."

There's Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It's about basketball in the way They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, Abdurraqib's exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau uses the lens of motherhood to craft a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice —and what it takes to find shelter. Lessons For Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises.

With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and ways her children may safely play in city parks while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community discovers the most intimate meanings of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black women/motherhood, and to the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature.

This innovative work of reportage and autobiography will appeal to readers of the bestseller All We Can Save and Joan Didion’s The White Album alike. Lessons For Survival stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.

Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression.

She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In this collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Morgan and her therapist, Morgan examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the ubiquity of a beauty culture that excludes Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche—and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.

Change is an autobiographical novel from Édouard Louis, hailed as one of the most important voices of his generation—about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind.

One question took center stage in my life, it focused all of my thoughts and occupied every moment when I was alone with myself: how could I get this revenge, by what means? I tried everything. Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination, and violence in his working-class hometown—so he sets out for school in Amiens, and, later, university in Paris.

He sheds the provincial “Eddy” for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug-dealers alike. Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else.

At once harrowing and profound, Change is not just a personal odyssey, a story of dreams and of “the beautiful violence of being torn away,” but a profound portrait of a society divided by class, power, and inequality.

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein tells the story of her own disordered eating alongside, and through, other women from history, pop culture and the girls she's known and loved. Tracing the medical and cultural history of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Clein investigates the economic conditions underpinning our eating disorder epidemic, and illuminates the ways racism and today's feminism have been complicit in propping up the thin ideal.

While examining goop, Simone Weil, pro-anorexia blogs, and the flawed logic of our current methods of treatment, Clein also grapples with the myriad ways disordered eating has affected her own friendships and romantic relationships.

Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression and denial that is insidious, pervasive, and dangerous, one that internalizes and promotes the fetish of self-shrinking as a core tenet of the American cult of femininity. This is replicated in our algorithms, our television shows, our novels, and our relationships with one another. A sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic for readers fascinated by the external forces shaping our lives, Dead Weight is electrifying, unapologetically bold, and fiercely compassionate.

Disarmingly witty and poignant, Sloane Crosley's first memoir explores multiple kinds of loss following the death of her closest friend. Grief Is for People is an unusual kind of grief book—the story of several compounding, unexpected losses, and the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it, but told with the verve and voice we have come to expect from Sloane Crosley.

Focusing her trademark humor and wit on the deep pain and confusion of losing her closest friend and mentor to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, searching for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief to understand her new reality. Sloane and Russell worked together and played together, navigating the corridors of office life, the literary world, weekends in the country, and the dramatic ups and downs of making it in New York City. In a city where friends become family, they were best friends. When Russell dies, Sloane is already reeling from a break-in and the theft of her jewelry, her most prized and meaningful possessions. While Russell's death puts that loss in perspective, it also propels her on a quest to right the losses she is feeling, as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic.

Crosley's search for answers is frank, funny, and gilded with a deeply resounding empathy. Upending the "grief memoir" in utterly unexpected and entirely welcome ways, Grief Is for People rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of loss during these grief-stricken times.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. 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. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world.

The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.

How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we've caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to "stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon" (NPR).

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life is a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage and divorce in America today, presenting an argument that the former needs a reboot. Journalist and proud divorcée Lyz Lenz delivers an exuberant and unapologetic account, flipping the script on the media's portrayal of divorced women.

Studies indicate that nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women—women who seek liberation from relationships premised on their fundamental inequality. Through a combination of reportage, sociological research, literature, and popular culture, this book weaves personal stories of union and separation to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of American marriage.

Lenz pushes for a collective reevaluation of the institution, challenging the notion that divorce is a personal failure when, in fact, it may be a practical and powerful solution for women to reclaim the power they deserve. This raucous manifesto for acceptance, solidarity, and collective female refusal offers readers a riveting ride, all the while pointing toward a future of greater freedom.

An iconic writer's lapidary memoir of a life spent pursuing a dream of artistic truth while evading the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was. For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States without ever entirely settling here, she only really felt at home when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s. In that feral moment, she found her people among a band of fellow bohemians picking their way through the wreckage. Some of her friends would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous.

Sante flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But in the deepest sense, she still felt like her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself. Sante's memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. It is a story with many twists and turns: however necessary and long overdue her embrace of womanhood was, it was nonetheless a fearful business, filled with pitfalls and pratfalls.

Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man's identity, in a man's world. She had found herself, widening the aperture of her heart in the bargain. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond.

Smoke And Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories is a compelling blend of travelogue, memoir, and historical essay by renowned author Amitav Ghosh. In this captivating narrative, Ghosh unravels the complex web of the opium trade's impact on global history, including its entanglement with his own family's past.

Ghosh's journey begins with the startling realization during his research for the Ibis trilogy that the lives of nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers were profoundly influenced by the currents of the Indian Ocean and the lucrative cargo they bore: opium. This revelation leads him to explore the opium trade's transformative effect on Britain, India, and China, and the role it played in the financial survival of the British Empire.

The narrative delves into the origins of some of the world's largest corporations, the fortunes of America's elite families and prestigious academic institutions, and the foundations of contemporary globalism. Ghosh's exploration is rich with insights into horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism.

Through Smoke And Ashes, Amitav Ghosh reveals the significant yet often overlooked role that the opium poppy has played in shaping our modern world—a world that now stands at the precipice of significant change.

Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse brings forth a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir from the beloved author of 100 Boyfriends, Brontez Purnell. With his unique literary style, Purnell turns his keen gaze inward, crafting a narrative that is as much a collection of genre-defying verse as it is a candid self-exploration.

In this series of thirty-eight autobiographical pieces, Purnell is at his unapologetic best. He vividly recounts events ranging from a ferocious altercation at a poetry conference to the challenges of navigating TV writers' rooms while dealing with personal trauma. Purnell grapples with the legacies inherited from his family, both curses and gifts, and lays bare a whirlwind of experiences that include misadventures and intimate encounters.

Throughout the memoir, Purnell's musings extend to a diverse array of subjects, from love and loneliness to the intricacies of capitalism and Blackness, as well as reflections on physical exercise and the ethics of artistic creation. His writing, marked by a balance of humor and insight that garnered acclaim for 100 Boyfriends, thrives on its unpredictability and fluidity. Ten Bridges I've Burnt stands as yet another testament to Purnell's boundary-pushing creativity, offering a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.

Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson's travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.

Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.

An account of the emergence of creative nonfiction, written by the "godfather" of the genre. In the 1970s, Lee Gutkind, a leather-clad hippie motorcyclist and former public relations writer, fought his way into the academy. Then he took on his colleagues. His goal: to make creative nonfiction an accepted academic discipline, one as vital as poetry, drama, and fiction.

In this book, Gutkind tells the true story of how creative nonfiction became a leading genre for both readers and writers. Creative nonfiction--true stories enriched by relevant ideas, insights, and intimacies--offered liberation to writers, allowing them to push their work in freewheeling directions. The genre also opened doors to outsiders--doctors, lawyers, construction workers--who felt they had stories to tell about their lives and experiences.

Gutkind documents the evolution of the genre, discussing the lives and work of such practitioners as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, Upton Sinclair, Janet Malcolm, and Vivian Gornick. Gutkind also highlights the ethics of writing creative nonfiction, including how writers handle the distinctions between fact and fiction. Gutkind's book narrates the story not just of a genre but of the person who brought it to the forefront of the literary and journalistic world.