I write memoir. I didn’t set out to write memoir. But I’ve become convinced by the power of personal narrative, both on its own merits, and as a frame and lens through which to view the world—a way to take a reader by the hand before slipping into whatever other subject matter sings its siren call. And the memoirs I love best are always in conversation with something bigger, or beyond the self. As Annie Dillard wrote, “there’s nothing you can’t do with [literary nonfiction]. No subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own form every time.” I like to see these works as doing just that.
Look, you don’t like memoirs, and I don’t have the slightest interest in falconry. Nevertheless—this book is transcendent. At once the story of a daughter grieving her father, it is also a year-in-the-life narrative of a woman learning to raise (and fly) a goshawk named Mabel, and, as if that weren’t enough, a sneaky literary biography of forgotten dinosaur (and hawk enthusiast) T.H. White. The book would have worked on any one of these levels, but braided together, it is a masterclass in narrative nonfiction. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be transported—and you’ll learn a lot of ornithology along the way.
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)
The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of…
Margo Jefferson is one of the smartest humans on the planet and her memoir reflects that. She tells her story as intertwined with the story of her first cultural context—the Black elite of the 1950s, and the crisis of identity she experienced with the rise of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. She brings her critic’s sharp intelligence and wit to bear in every paragraph, but doesn’t hold back any of her heart. It’s a terrifically moving book anda masterpiece of personal/cultural criticism, full of elegance and nuance.
The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.
Few writers manage to blend theory and narrative like Maggie Nelson, let alone make the combination sing. In this book of ‘autotheory’ she writes about desire, the body, identity, transformation, the queerness of pregnancy, the formation of her queer family, and the relationship of freedom to caretaking. Follow her beautiful mind through this book that will never be called memoir, but which should change your mind, nevertheless, as to what memoir can do.
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
This astounding book of nonfiction folds outright fiction, in the form of folk tales and “talk-story”, into autobiographical narrative. The result is a mille-feuille of mirrors and arcs and threads that gives us the truest possible portrait of a woman told through the fullest expression of her cultural, familial, and personal contexts. Mary Karr says “God is in the truth,” but sometimes ‘actuality’ cannot tell the whole truth. Without breaking any covenant with her readers, Maxine Hong Kingston finds a way to widen our sense of what ‘truth’ is—at least for these 209 pages.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With this book, the acclaimed author created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.
“A classic, for a reason” – Celeste Ng via Twitter
As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of…
Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.
This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…
You’d never expect such a literary triumph from the pen of a ceramicist (and academic in possession of not one, but five honorary doctorates), and yet: I dare anyone to read this book and remain unconvinced of its lyrical brilliance. It is a gripping, searching family—and world—history traced and told through actuality and artifact. You’ll learn all you never knew about netsuke, as well as a few things about (literary) craft.
264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great uncle Iggie's Tokyo apartment. When he later inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger and more dramatic than he could ever have imagined.
From a burgeoning empire in Odessa to fin de siecle Paris, from occupied Vienna to Tokyo, Edmund de Waal traces the netsuke's journey through generations of his remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century.
From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut memoir about a young woman learning to dance tango, becoming comfortable in her own skin and in the arms of others.
“Well-researched, eloquent, and entertaining, Flaherty’s book is not only a witty, incisive reflection on a beloved dance and its history. It is also an intimate celebration of dance, life, and the art of taking chances. A vibrantly intelligent reading pleasure.” -Kirkus “From the first page, Tango Lessons engages, charms, and inspires. Like the best memoirs, it tells a story of self-discovery that transcends the personal.” - Sari Botton
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
A breathtaking journey across Iran where war and superstition, jealousy and betrayal, and passion and loyalty rage behind the impenetrable walls of mansions and the crumbling houses of the Jewish Quarter.
Against the tumultuous background of World War II, Dr. Yaran will find himself caught in the thrall of the…
