I worked for ten years as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as narrated in my memoir, All the Beauty in the World. I’ve found that readers are fascinated by the art in the Met but also by the “living museum,” which includes five hundred security guards keeping watch over millions of visitors each year. I’ve read a variety of workplace memoirs to study how authors depict the rhythms of work and the feel of particular workplaces. I’m especially passionate when there are larger themes at play and thus clear reasons why we should care.
This is a workplace memoir in part because of the engaging, disgusting scenes where he labors as a plongeur (dishwasher) in a grimy French restaurant. But in a broader sense, it’s a book about the hard work of being poor.
Every sentence is intelligent and the overall thrust is deeply moral—Orwell’s calling card.
From the author of 1984, the classic semi-autobiographical story about the adventures of a penniless British writer in two cities.
Down and Out in Paris and London follows the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities. Without self-pity and often with humor, this novel is Orwell at his finest-a sobering, truthful protrayal of poverty and society.
Jim Bouton broke baseball’s code of silence to write this tell-all memoir about life in the Major Leagues.
What’s shocking is how good it is: how fun, readable, and thoughtful. There are salacious stories about drug use, Mickey Mantle, and many varieties of barbaric and knuckleheaded behavior.
But the heart of the story is about a fading star trying to reinvent himself as a knuckleballer—and then, in a much later addendum, coping with the death of a child.
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION New York Public Library Book of the Century Selection Time Magazine “100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books” Selection New Foreword from Jim Bouton’s Wife, Paula Bouton When Ball Four was first published in 1970, it hit the sports world like a lightning bolt. Commissioners, executives, and players were shocked. Sportswriters called author Jim Bouton a traitor and "social leper." Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force him to declare the book untrue. Fans, however, loved the book. And serious critics called it an important social document. Following his death, Bouton’s landmark book has remained popular, and his legacy lives on…
I like when memoirs are about something much bigger than the author.
Hope Jahren narrates her upbringing as a budding scientist and brings us inside a geobiologist’s lab, but the book really soars when she’s writing about “resurrection plants” and “monkeypods” and other obscure wonders of nature.
My agent gave me this book when I was plotting my own memoir, which takes on a vast universe of art. I was inspired by her urgent need to communicate her subject’s majesty.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER •NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also a celebration of the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every scientist.
"Does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology.” —The New York Times
In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father’s college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary…
This is a book about mortality that was famously written by a dying author.
It’s also a book about the life of a surgeon, who has special insight into the stuff of life, i.e. the organs he severs in an unforgettable dissection scene. What I admire most is the quiet, lyrical voice of the book.
It’s sad, but it’s lovely, and it has a kind of stillness I often aspire to match in my own writing. Passages float in the air.
'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal
What makes life worth living in the face of death?
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and…
Douglass wrote his Narrative when he was just twenty-seven years old, depicting one of the most consequential of all American workplaces, the Southern plantation.
The story is sobering while the prose is poetic and haunting. My favorite history teacher re-read it every year along with students, but we could have easily read it in an American literature class.
At less than a hundred pages, you could read it in a day, but you’re likely to meditate on its weightier moments.
Packaged in handsome and affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our literary history through the words of the exceptional few.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is perhaps the most widely read and well-known slave narrative. Originally published in 1845, the work was an instant success, selling more than 11,000 copies…
A revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard. The Washington Post calls it “exquisite;” NPR calls it “hauntingly beautiful;” and The New York Times calls it “an empathic chronicle of one museum, the works collected there and the people who keep it running — all recounted by an especially patient observer.”
My book is fantastical historical fiction about two characters who're wrestling with the monstrosity of their grief.
It takes you into London high society, where Ambrose tries to forget about how much he misses Bennett and how much he dreads becoming as cold as their Grandfather. It takes you to the family's country manor house, where Mattie isolates and old ghosts start to come out of the woodwork.
It's a story about loss and depression; it's a story about friends who don't let you walk through the valley of death alone.
Ambrose Bancroft returns to London society with his younger sister, hoping they'll leave ghosts of memory behind. They have only each other left. While Ambrose attempts to draw Mattie out, dragging her to balls and threatening to seek suitors for her, his sister recoils from his meddling. Finally, when Ambrose compels her to attend art class before she's ready, Mattie paints something horrific enough to banish them from society in public disgrace.
At Linwood Manor, Mattie and Ambrose aren't as alone as they think. Taking advantage of Mattie's desperate need to find freedom, a vanishing room lures Ambrose's sister into…
