Matter of fact in its presentation of difficult material -- sexism, child marriage, emotional and sexual abuse -- what's most striking about Samra Habib's memoir, We Have Always Been Here, is the sense of compassion with which she writes.
Chuck Palahniuk has lived some amazing stories while he has written his much-consumed stories. As we're lead to believe, anyway.
Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali's raw and visceral memoir, Angry Queer Somali Boy, brilliantly reveals the impact of racism and colonialism on immigrant lives.
Eve Babitz is more than a child of the 1960s. She is also '50s glamour and '70s glam. In I Used to Be Charming, she reflects on those decades with her sharp eye on cultural trends and transformations.
Day built his everything on top of Prince's everything, and it's no secret. In his memoir, On Time, he channels the superstar to enjoyable effect.
Chavis Woods' 100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism) is the ideal tool for inciting the collective rage needed to subvert gender-based harassment and violence.
In her music industry memoir, Horror Stories, Liz Phair has a knack for imbuing the ordinary with a weighty and relatable significance.
Folk tales, fantasy, pop culture and family weave gracefully throughout Carmen Maria Machado's harrowing yet graceful memoir of domestic abuse, In the Dream House.
In the '70s Dennis Altman was a founding figure of gay liberation. Now more restrained than radical, the Australian author and activist recounts the past and present of sexual politics in his new book, Unrequited Love.
Jaquira Diaz's memoir, Ordinary Girls, provides an extraordinary guide to becoming fierce, strong, and loving in a world of monsters.
In her memoir My Time Among the Whites, Jennine Capó Crucet demonstrates that making your home among strangers is harder than it seems.
Journalist Katya Cengel's memoir, From Chernobyl with Love, is more illuminating of the American mindset than it is of Latvia and Ukraine.
Against the backdrop of Dutch East Indies colonialism and Nazi sympathizers, two families come together amidst the ashes of World War II in Mieke Eerkens' moving family history, All Ships Follow Me.
Chris Schwartz's memoir on founding Ruffhouse Records attempts to be many things but doesn't fully deliver on any of them, making for a conventionally-structured memoir that often reads as slapdash and dry.
Maggie O'Farrell's I Am, I Am, I Am is a unique twist on the memoir, framed by 17 stories of harrowing near-misses.
Actor Amber Tamblyn is aspiring to something deeper than just the chronicle of herself as a young ingénue who came of age as a TV star in her memoir, Era of Ignition. In our politically tumultuous times, does she succeed?
His intellectual and journalistic training, coupled with an eloquent capacity for literary expression, enables Behrouz Boochani to bridge the lived experience of refugees with non-refugee audiences and to express it in the context of the critical social and political theory which shapes intellectual elites' understanding of the refugee crisis.
As political partisanship grows more fierce let us realize what happens when such bluster and rage escape the realm of the abstract. Scholastique Mukasonga's The Barefoot Woman is a thoughtful tribute to her mother, who was murdered in the Rwandan genocide.
These days, when personal grief becomes a public performance on social media, it's heartening to have a book such as Katharine Smyth's All the Lives We Ever Lived, wherein deep introspection is given space and literature provides both solace and inspiration.
Jessica Hopper's Night Moves is a dozen thorny roses for the city that keeps blowing its windy-ness beneath her darkly comic wings.
In writing about the inability to write, Theodor Kallifatides has produced a book, Another Life, which aches with its own quiet beauties and inspires with its resilient creativity.
Wilco founder Jeff Tweedy creates a frank, plain-spoken tale of love, perseverance, and recovery in his memoir, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back).
David Auerbach offers a unique perspective on the fascinations of technology as well as how it can often blight our sensibilities when thinking about our fellow human beings.
If there is one thing even harder than parenting, it's writing about parenting well.
Enduring loss and grief is never easy but it's rendered remarkably in Santlofer's work.
The writing in Lemon Jail is at times as anarchic as a tour, occasionally bordering on incoherent.
The Black Lives Matter movement has disrupted an undeserved comfort and acceptance of an unjust society. Rightfully so.
A Spy In The House of Loud works best on quiet stages, taking singular trips down clearly paved roads with definite endings.
Tessa Fontaine's memoir will dazzle.
Wherein understanding is synonymous with compassion, then surely the effort Eggers has extended through most of his publishing career should be applauded.
Patricia Hampl explores the intersection between wandering, leisure, and the power of the imagination in this thoughtful memoir.
A reader will understand and sympathize with the illness and its ramifications presented here. But with the unreliable narrator -- not so much.
Ryan Walsh chronicles the making of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and the chaotic Boston scene that gave birth to it and tells us all about it in this expansive interview.
The Art of Vanishing is strongest when it covers the life of an independent girl, Barbara Follett, a prodigy molded almost to death by demanding parents.
Calypso uses a wandering style of storytelling to conjure a sense of Sedaris traveling through his own thoughts, getting lost on particular charming tangents before coming back to what he ultimately wants you to take away.
In Kate Hennessy, a cautious voice emerges over the pious chatter about her famous grandmother, activist Dorothy Day.
All her life, and in much of her music, she had parsed her relationships, her failings and her tribulations for meaning. Now, here in the room with her -- in her very body -- was Death, that annihilator of meaning.
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