Collection: Biography & Memoir

In the vein of Educated and Hillbilly Elegy comes a young woman's memoir chronicling her harrowing journey from despair to salvation that showcases the depths and resilience of the human spirit and empowers readers on their own paths toward healing, forgiveness, and redemption.

Carrie Sheffield grew up fifth of eight children with a violent, mentally ill, street-musician father who believed he was a modern-day Mormon prophet destined to become U.S. president someday. She and her seven siblings were often forced to live as vagabonds, remaining on the move across the country. They frequently subsisted in sheds, tents, and, most notably, motorhomes. They often lived a dysfunctional drifter existence, camping out in their motorhome in Walmart parking lots. Carrie attended 17 public schools and homeschool, all while performing classical music on the streets and passing out fire-and-brimstone religious pamphlets--at times while child custody workers loomed.

Carrie's father was eventually excommunicated from the official LDS Church, and she was the first of her siblings to escape the toxic brainwashing of his fundamentalist creed. Declared legally estranged from her parents, Carrie struggled with her mental health during college and for most of her adult life. But she eventually seized control of her life, transcended her troubled past, and overcame her toxic inner voice (and a near death experience)--thanks to the power of forgiveness, cultivated through her conversion to Christianity. She evolved from a scared and abused motorhome-dwelling girl to a Harvard-educated professional with a passion for empowering others to reject the cycles of poverty, depression, and self-hatred.

Motorhome Prophecies is the story of Carrie's unbelievable, yet in many ways, very American journey. It resonates with those trapped in difficult situations and awes all who are enchanted by the depths and resilience of the human spirit.

#1 New York Times Bestseller

Amy Schumer's book will make you love her even more. For a comedian of unbridled (and generally hilarious) causticity, Schumer has written a probing, confessional, unguarded, and, yes, majorly humanizing non-memoir, a book that trades less on sarcasm, and more on emotional resonance. --Vogue

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo is an alternatingly meditative, sexually explicit, side-splittingly hilarious, heart-wrenching, disturbing, passionately political, and always staggeringly authentic ride through the highs and lows of the comedic powerhouse's life to date. --Harper's Bazaar

This is your happy hour with Amy Schumer...It's Bossypants meets Trainwreck meets your long weekend. --TheSkimm

"Amy's got your back. She's in your corner. She's an honesty bomb. And she's coming for you."
--Actress Tilda Swinton and Trainwreck co-star

The Emmy Award-winning comedian, actress, writer, and star of Inside Amy Schumer, Hulu's Life & Beth, and the acclaimed film Trainwreck has taken the entertainment world by storm with her winning blend of smart, satirical humor. Now, Amy Schumer has written a refreshingly candid and uproariously funny collection of (extremely) personal and observational essays.

In The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Amy mines her past for stories about her teenage years, her family, relationships, and sex and shares the experiences that have shaped who she is--a woman with the courage to bare her soul to stand up for what she believes in, all while making us laugh.

Ranging from the raucous to the romantic, the heartfelt to the harrowing, this highly entertaining and universally appealing collection is the literary equivalent of a night out with your best friend--an unforgettable and fun adventure that you wish could last forever. Whether she's experiencing lust-at-first-sight while in the airport security line, sharing her own views on love and marriage, admitting to being an introvert, or discovering her cross-fit instructor's secret bad habit, Amy Schumer proves to be a bighearted, brave, and thoughtful storyteller that will leave you nodding your head in recognition, laughing out loud, and sobbing uncontrollably--but only because it's over.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BESTSELLER

The legendary Willie Mays shares the inspirations and influences responsible for guiding him on and off the field in this reflective and inspirational memoir.

Even if, like me, you thought you had pretty much read and heard all there was to read and hear about Willie Mays, this warmhearted book will inform and reward you. And besides, what true baseball fan can ever get enough of Willie Mays? Say Hey! Read on and enjoy. --From the Foreword by Bob Costas

"It's because of giants like Willie that someone like me could even think about running for President." --President Barack Obama

Widely regarded as the greatest all-around player in baseball history because of his unparalleled hitting, defense and baserunning, the beloved Willie Mays offers people of all ages his lifetime of experience meeting challenges with positivity, integrity and triumph in 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid.

Presented in 24 chapters to correspond with his universally recognized uniform number, Willie's memoir provides more than the story of his role in America's pastime. This is the story of a man who values family and community, engages in charitable causes especially involving children and follows a philosophy that encourages hope, hard work and the fulfillment of dreams.

"I was very lucky when I was a child. My family took care of me and made sure I was in early at night. I didn't get in trouble. My father made sure that I didn't do the wrong thing. I've always had a special place in my heart for children and their well-being, and John Shea and I got the idea that we should do something for the kids and the fathers and the mothers, and that's why this book is being published. We want to reach out to all generations and backgrounds. Hopefully, these stories and lessons will inspire people in a positive way." --Willie Mays

New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Honor recipient Steve Sheinkin gives young readers the causes and curses that divided America into Union and Confederate nations in Two Miserable Presidents: The Amazing, Terrible, and Totally True Story of the Civil War, illustrated by Tim Robinson.

A Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year
A Beacon of Freedom Award Winner

Get the feeling something big is about to happen? Welcome to the Civil War--one of the scariest, saddest, and occasionally wackiest stories in American History.

1856: Northern and Southern settlers attack each other in Kansas.
1858: Congressmen start sneaking guns and knives into the Senate chamber.
1860: President James Buchanan is heard wailing, "I am the last president of the United States!"

Unraveling a very complicated string of events--the small things, the personal ones, the big issues--Steve Sheinkin takes readers behind the scenes that led to The Civil War. It is a time and a war that threatened America's very existence, revealed in the surprising true stories of the soldiers and statesmen who battled it out.

"Chatty and accessible, this book does double duty: it introduces Civil War history for readers who don't know much about it and supplies browsable commentary for those familiar with the big picture...Beginning with a look at the role cotton played in the history, his fast-paced narrative is broken into short, tersely titled vignettes...The horrors of slavery and battlefield slaughter are clear, as are achievements of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and many more." --Booklist

Also by Steve Sheinkin:

Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon
The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism & Treachery
The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights
Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team
Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War
Which Way to the Wild West?: Everything Your Schoolbooks Didn't Tell You About Westward Expansion
King George: What Was His Problem?: Everything Your Schoolbooks Didn't Tell You About the American Revolution
Born to Fly: The First Women's Air Race Across America

Moss Hart's Act One, which Lincoln Center Theater presented in 2014 as a play written and directed by James Lapine, is one of the great American memoirs, a glorious memorial to a bygone age filled with all the wonder, drama, and heartbreak that surrounded Broadway in the early twentieth century. Hart's story inspired a generation of theatergoers, dramatists, and readers everywhere as he eloquently chronicled his impoverished childhood and his long, determined struggle to reach the opening night of his first Broadway hit. Act One is the quintessential American success story.

Answers to a range of questions asked by young people regarding the Baha'i Faith and its perspective on many issues. A book written to support young people's search for spiritual truth through independent investigation. Topics covered range from the existence of God, human evolution, aliens, angels and the devil through to the afterlife, as well as some of the teachings, principles and laws of the Baha'i Faith.

Target audience 11 - 15 years

I became homeless after I got out of the Army, so I began walking between towns to look for a new job. Although I wasn't having much luck at finding any work, I quickly realized all that hiking and sleeping under the stars seemed to be helping with my PTSD. I then decided to walk across America with hopes that it would bring me some sort of peace. Alone and unsupported, I spent the next three years traveling from Tennessee to Delaware, to California, to Florida, to Alaska, back to Florida, and back to California again. This is a true story that details all of my experiences on a daily basis.

Get to know the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader and one of the most popular world leaders today.

Two-year-old Lhamo Thondup never imagined he would be anything other than an ordinary child, but after undergoing a series of tests, he was proclaimed the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet. By age 15, he found himself the undisputed leader of six million people who were facing the threat of a full-scale war from the Chinese. After the defeat of the Tibetan national uprising in 1959, the Dalai Lama had to flee Tibet and went into exile in India. For nearly 50 years, he has aimed to establish Tibet as a self-governing, democratic state. In 1989, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts for the liberation of Tibet and his concern for global environmental problems. As the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama continues to spend his life working to benefit humanity and preserving Tibetan culture.

In these pages Roger Corman, the most successful independent filmmaker in Hollywood relates his experiences as the director and/or producer of such low-budget classics Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, The Man with the X-ray Eyes, The Wild Angels, The Trip, Night Call Nurses, Bloody Mama, Piranha, and many others. He also discusses his distribution of the Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut movies that later won Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Film category. Corman alumni--John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Fonda, Joe Dante, and Jonathan Demme, among others--contribute their recollections to give added perspective to Corman's often hilarious, always informative autobiography.

THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF THE THRIVING AND INFLUENTIAL ROCK SCENE IN CHAPEL HILL, WHICH GAVE THE WORLD ARTISTS LIKE BEN FOLDS FIVE, SUPERCHUNK, AND SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS

North Carolina has always produced extraordinary music of every description. But the indie rock boom of the late 1980s and early '90s brought the state most fully into the public consciousness, while the subsequent post-grunge free-for-all bestowed its greatest commercial successes. In addition to the creation of legacy label Merge Records and a slate of excellent indie bands like Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, and Polvo, this was the decade when other North Carolina artists broke Billboard 's Top 200 and sold millions of records--several million of which were issued by another indie label based in Carrboro, Chapel Hill's smaller next-door neighbor. It's time to take a closer look at exactly what happened.

A Really Strange and Wonderful Time features a representative cross section of what was being created in and around Chapel Hill between 1989 and 1999. In addition to the aforementioned indie bands, it documents--through firsthand accounts--other local notables like Ben Folds Five, Dillon Fence, Flat Duo Jets, Small, Southern Culture on the Skids, The Veldt, and Whiskeytown. At the same time, it describes the nurturing infrastructure which engendered and encouraged this marvelous diversity. In essence, A Really Strange and Wonderful Time is proof of the genius of community.

A son's poignant letter to his father--from the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial, and one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. - "One of the great confessions of literature." --The New York Times Book Review

Franz Kafka wrote this letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in November 1919. Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, relates that Kafka actually gave the letter to his mother to hand to his father, hoping it might renew a relationship that had lost itself in tension and frustration on both sides. But Kafka's probing of the deep flaw in their relationship spared neither his father nor himself. He could not help seeing the failure of communication between father and son as another moment in the larger existential predicament depicted in so much of his work. Probably realizing the futility of her son's gesture, Julie Kafka did not deliver the letter but instead returned it to its author.

A Newbery Honor Book

In a moving, lyrical tale about the cost and fragility of freedom, a New York Times best-selling author and an acclaimed artist follow the life of a man who courageously shipped himself out of slavery.

What have I to fear?
My master broke every promise to me.
I lost my beloved wife and our dear children.
All, sold South. Neither my time nor my body is mine.
The breath of life is all I have to lose.
And bondage is suffocating me.

Henry Brown wrote that long before he came to be known as Box, he "entered the world a slave." He was put to work as a child and passed down from one generation to the next -- as property. When he was an adult, his wife and children were sold away from him out of spite. Henry Brown watched as his family left bound in chains, headed to the deeper South. What more could be taken from him? But then hope -- and help -- came in the form of the Underground Railroad. Escape!

In stanzas of six lines each, each line representing one side of a box, celebrated poet Carole Boston Weatherford powerfully narrates Henry Brown's story of how he came to send himself in a box from slavery to freedom. Strikingly illustrated in rich hues and patterns by artist Michele Wood, Box is augmented with historical records and an introductory excerpt from Henry's own writing as well as a time line, notes from the author and illustrator, and a bibliography.

A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity.

When you turn the music off, and suddenly you feel an unbearable sadness, that means turn the music back on, right? When you still feel the sadness, even with the music, that means there's something wrong with this music. Sometimes I feel like sex without context isn't sex at all. And sometimes I feel like sex without context is what sex should always be.
--The Freezer Door

The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life.

Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Rajiv Mohabir's Antiman is an impassioned, genre-blending memoir that navigates the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States.

Growing up a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida, Rajiv Mohabir is fascinated by his family's abandoned Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. In Toronto he sits at the feet of Aji, his grandmother, listening to her stories and songs in her Caribbean Bhojpuri. By now Aji's eleven children have immigrated to North America and busied themselves with ascension, Christianity, and the erasure of their heritage and Caribbean accents. But Rajiv wants to know more: where did he come from, and why does he feel so out of place?

Embarking on a journey of discovery, he lives for a year in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, perfecting his Hindi and Bhojpuri and tracing the lineage of his Aji's music. Returning to Florida, the cognitive dissonance of confederate flags, Islamophobia, and his father's disapproval sends him to New York, where finds community among like-minded brown activists, work as an ESL teacher, and intoxication in the queer nightlife scene. But even in the South Asian paradise of Jackson Heights, Rajiv feels like an outsider: "Coolie" rather than Desi. And then the final hammer of estrangement falls when his cousin outs him as an "antiman"--a Caribbean slur for men who love men--and his father and aunts disown him.

But Aji has taught Rajiv resilience. Emerging from the chrysalis of his ancestral poetics into a new life, he embraces his identity as a poet and reclaims his status as an antiman--forging a new way of being entirely his own. Rapturous, inventive, and devastating in its critique of our own failures of inclusion, Antiman is a hybrid memoir that helps us see ourselves and relationships anew, and announces an exciting new talent in Rajiv Mohabir.

Learn all about important leaders who represent, empower, and support the LGBTQIA+ community in this engaging board book perfect for proud leaders-in-training!

Now even the youngest readers can learn all about important people who are from or helped support the LGBTQIA+ community! Highlighting ten memorable people who paved the way, parents and little ones alike will love this discovery primer full of fun, age-appropriate facts and bold illustrations.

Host Peter Marshall recounts his years on this revolutionary hit game show, featuring stories of stars Paul Lynde, Karen Valentine, Charlie Weaver, and a host of superstars from the movies, the pop charts and more! Includes a discount on the newly reissued CD ZINGERS FROM THE HOLLYWOOD SQUARES.