This volume presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended. Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present. There are reminiscences from his youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acid-etched profiles of friends and enemies, from his "fiendish" Florentine...

Newbery Awards.

A #1 best-selling author shows how a boy from small-town New York made it to literary stardom. How did a kid whose dad lived in the poorhouse become the most successful storyteller in the world? On the morning he was born, he nearly died. His dad grew up in the Pogey--the Newburgh, New York, poorhouse. He worked at a mental hospital in Massachusetts, where he met the singer James Taylor and the poet Robert Lowell. While he toiled in advertising hell,...

Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King's critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work."Long live the King" hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King's On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of...

Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor," or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice -- Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women...

Thirty years ago Tobias Wolff wrote a memoir that changed the form. This Boys Life is the story of the young, tough-on-the-outside but vulnerable Toby Wolff. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother travel from Florida to Utah to a small village in Washington state, with many stops along the way. As each place doesn't quite work out, they pick up to find somewhere new. In the story of their journey, Wolff masterfully recreates...

Correspondence between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York, and a used-book dealer in London.

The author relates incidents in his life and how they inspired parts of his books about the character, Brian Robeson.

Bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson is known for the unflinching way she writes about, and advocates for, survivors of sexual assault. Now, inspired by her fans and enraged by how little in our culture has changed since her groundbreaking novel Speak was first published twenty years ago, she has written a poetry memoir that is as vulnerable as it is rallying, as timely as it is timeless. In free verse, Anderson shares reflections, rants, and...

"John Hodgman--New York Times bestselling author, semi-famous personality, deranged millionaire, increasingly elderly husband, father, and human of earth--has written a memoir about his cursed travels through two wildernesses: from the woods of his home of Massachusetts, birthplace of rage, to his exile on the coast of Maine, so-called 'Vacationland,' home to the most painful beaches on earth. Vacationland is also about John's wandering in the metaphoric...