"This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," writes Elizabeth McCracken in her powerful, inspiring memoir. A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed...
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has...
From this renowned philosopher comes a debut work of fiction, at once a brilliant précis of the history of philosophy, a semiautobiographical meditation on the absurd relationship between knowledge and memory, and a very funny story.
A French...
This book is both a work of memory and a work about memory. Miron Bialoszewski (1922-83), the great avant-garde Polish poet, memorializes the doomed uprising of the Polish population against their Nazi masters which began on August 1, 1944, and was...
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,...
A dazzling philosophical investigation of the challenge of living in the present, by a brilliant practitioner of the new essay.
In her third book, which continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a...
In this rare glimpse into the life of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, the author takes up his pen to tell his personal story. He addresses his early years — shadowy times in postwar Paris that haunt his memory and have inspired his world-cherished...
The ascension of Vladimir Putin—a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB—to the presidency of Russia in 1999 should have been a signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years—as America and the world’s...
Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and bestselling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals – also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells,...
“Half my life ago, I killed a girl.”
So begins Darin Strauss’ Half a Life, the true story of how one outing in his father’s Oldsmobile resulted in the death of a classmate and the beginning of a different, darker life for the author. We...