The Award—winning author recounts coming of age in 1950s Washington State with his mother and abusive stepfather in this classic memoir. This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. As he fights for identity and self-respect...

A New York Times Notable Book
A Daily Beast Best Book of the Year
A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year
From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead...

"Mary Pope Osborne recalls memories and lessons from her childhood side-by-side with quotations from her bestselling Magic Tree House series"--

In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. Recording his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India," Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. Lyrical and witty, tragic and deliriously romantic, Running in the Family is an inspired marriage of travel narrative and family memoir

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Mildred Armstrong Kalish's "Little Heathens" is a compelling memoir of her hardscrabble life on an Iowa farm during the 1930s. With no electricity or indoor plumbing and with little heat or money on the farm, Mildred learns to find joy in the priceless blessings of life.

A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES- IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here- highly varied in length and theme-McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods...

A personal account by the late author traces his youth in Lisbon with his parents, marked by frequent visits to his wise grandparents in the village of Azinhaga, his older brother's tragic early death, and his initial encounters with literature.

In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba--exiled from his family, his country, and his own childhood by the revolution. The memories of Carlos's life in Havana are at the heart of this stunning, evocative, and unforgettable memoir. Waiting for snow in Havana is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. For the Cuba of Carlos's youth--when its lizards and turquoise seas and sun-drenched siestas--becomes...