Collection: Biography & Memoir

On June 3rd, 2017, Alex Honnold became the first person to free solo Yosemite's El Capitan--to scale the wall without rope, a partner, or any protective gear--completing what was described as "the greatest feat of pure rock climbing in the history of the sport" (National Geographic) and "one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever" (New York Times). Already one of the most famous adventure athletes in the world, Honnold has now been hailed as "the greatest climber of all time" (Vertical magazine).

Alone on the Wall recounts the most astonishing achievements of Honnold's extraordinary life and career, brimming with lessons on living fearlessly, taking risks, and maintaining focus even in the face of extreme danger. Now Honnold tells, for the first time and in his own words, the story of his 3 hours and 56 minutes on the sheer face of El Cap, which Outside called "the moon landing of free soloing...a generation-defining climb. Bad ass and beyond words...one of the pinnacle sporting moments of all time."

He was only 42 years old when he was sworn in as President of the United States in 1901, making TR the youngest president ever. But did you know that he was also the first sitting president to win the Nobel Peace Prize? The first to ride in a car? The first to fly in an airplane? Theodore Roosevelt's achievements as a naturalist, hunter, explorer, author, and soldier are as much a part of his fame as any office he held as a politician. Find out more about The Bull Moose, the Progressive, the Rough Rider, the Trust Buster, and the Great Hunter who was our larger-than-life 26th president in Who Was Theodore Roosevelt?

One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time * One of The Economist's Best Books of 2022 * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Nominated for The Next Big Idea Club * The Week Magazine Book of the Week

From Alec Nevala-Lee, the author of the Hugo and Locus Award finalist Astounding, comes a revelatory biography of the visionary designer who defined the rules of startup culture and shaped America's idea of the future.

During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he enthralled a vast popular audience, inspired devotion from both the counterculture and the establishment, and was praised as a modern Leonardo da Vinci. To his admirers, he exemplified what one man could accomplish by approaching urgent design problems using a radically unconventional set of strategies, which he based on a mystical conception of the universe's geometry. His views on sustainability, as embodied in the image of Spaceship Earth, convinced him that it was possible to provide for all humanity through the efficient use of planetary resources. From Epcot Center to the molecule named in his honor as the buckyball, Fuller's legacy endures to this day, and his belief in the transformative potential of technology profoundly influenced the founders of Silicon Valley.

Inventor of the Future is the first authoritative biography to cover all aspects of Fuller's career. Drawing on meticulous research, dozens of interviews, and thousands of unpublished documents, Nevala-Lee has produced a riveting portrait that transcends the myth of Fuller as an otherworldly generalist. It reconstructs the true origins of his most famous inventions, including the Dymaxion Car, the Wichita House, and the dome itself; his fraught relationships with his students and collaborators; his interactions with Frank Lloyd Wright, Isamu Noguchi, Clare Boothe Luce, John Cage, Steve Jobs, and many others; and his tumultuous private life, in which his determination to succeed on his own terms came at an immense personal cost. In an era of accelerating change, Fuller's example remains enormously relevant, and his lessons for designers, activists, and innovators are as powerful and essential as ever.

In this unusual, engaging, and intimate collection of personal essays, Lambda Literary Award finalist Tania De Rozario recalls growing up as a queer, brown, fat girl in Singapore, blending memoir with elements of history, pop culture, horror films, and current events to explore the nature of monsters and what it means to be different.

Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to "banish the evil" from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren't just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere--including your own family and community--and look just like you.

Dinner on Monster Island is Tania's memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore--where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic. As she pulls back the veil on life on the small island, she reveals the sometimes kind, sometimes monstrous side of all of us. Intertwined with her experiences is an analysis of the role of women in horror. Tania looks at films and popular culture such as Carrie, The Witch, and The Ring to illuminate the ways in which women are often portrayed as monsters, and how in real life, monsters are not what we think.

Moving and lyrical, written with earnest candor, and leavened with moments of humor and optimism, Dinner on Monster Island is a deeply personal examination of one woman's experience grappling with her identity and a fantastic analysis of monsters, monstrous women and the worlds in which they live.

Pioneer, patriot, politician...

John Harris Jr. was a true visionary in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania-during a time in history when taking a risk meant putting your life on the line. He proudly took bold steps in supporting monumental changes that now define history. His legacy is strong in Pennsylvania, but his story has never been told, until now.

Visionary Road to the Capital sheds light on Harris' journey-filled with both tragedies and triumphs-during life on the frontier. While his name doesn't stand out amongst other influencers during that era, like Washington or Jefferson, Harris' life is woven into the fabric of America's birth. He funded and supported the cause for freedom and took brave measures to secure the land that would eventually become Pennsylvania's capital city, Harrisburg.

Soon to be an Apple TV+ Series

"A terrific narrative of the hunt for Lincoln's killers that will mesmerize the reader from start to finish just as the actual manhunt mesmerized the entire nation. It is a triumphant book."--Doris Kearns Goodwin

The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history--the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin led Union cavalry troops on a wild, 12-day chase from the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness.

Based on rare archival materials, obscure trial transcripts, and Lincoln's own blood relics Manhunt is a fully documented, fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, it is history as it's never been read before.

An inspiring story about the oldest lobster trapper in Maine, and maybe even the world. Virginia Oliver is 102 and began catching lobsters off Rockland's coast when she was a little girl. People all over the country think Virginia is brave and strong, but Ginny, as her friends call her, knows the secret to staying young is doing what you love. People often ask Ginny when she plans to stop lobstering. She smiles and tells them, "When I die."

* 2019 EUREKA! Honor Award *

This beautiful, bold book celebrates the achievements of LGBTQ+ people through history and from around the world--featuring dynamic full-color portraits of a diverse selection of 53 inspirational role models accompanied by short biographies that focus on their incredible successes.

From Freddie Mercury's contribution to music and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to James Baldwin's best-selling essays and more, discover tales of courage, triumph, and determination. Published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, this extraordinary book shows children that anything is possible.

Discover the inspiring stories of these LGBT artists, writers, innovators, athletes, and activists who have made great contributions to culture, from ancient times to present day. This is the perfect book for anyone who wants to learn more about a collection of inspiring figures in LGBTQ+ history:

Freddie Mercury, Sappho, Audre Lorde, Manvendra Singh Gohil, Frida Kahlo, Emma Gonzalez, James Baldwin, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Wang, Subhi Nahas, Tove Jansson, Alan Turing, Michelangelo, Martina Navratilova, Sia, Tim Cook, Pedro Almodovar, Virginia Woolf, Tchaikovsky, Vikram Seth, Yotam Ottolenghi, Johanna Sigurðardóttir, Marsha Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, David Bowie, Kasha Nabagsera, Lili Elbe, Matthew Bourne, Alvin Ailey, Harvey Milk, Willem Arondeus, Nergis Mavalvala, Rufus Wainwright, Marlene Dietrich, Larry Kramer, Didier Lestrade, Nabuko Yoshiya, Bayard Rustin, Claire Harvey, Barbara Jordan, Josephine Baker, k.d. lang, Kristen Stewart, Jazz Jennings, Elio di Rupo, Oscar Wilde, Harish Iyer, Khalid Abdel-Hadi, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Ellen DeGeneres, and Portia de Rossi.

"Superb . . . [The] final, splendid, most personal work of [Janet Malcolm's] long career." --Charles Finch, The New York Times Book Review

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life--a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be.

Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing a memoir from memories that pose questions of their own.

Still Pictures begins with the image of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague for New York at the age of five in 1939. From her fitful early loves, to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House, to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Still Pictures delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama.

Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like few others in our literature.

Once upon a time in France, a baby was born under the summer sun. His parents named him Jacques. As he grew, Jacques fell in love with the sea. He dreamed of breathing beneath the waves and swimming as gracefully as a fish. In fact, he longed to become a manfish. Jacques Cousteau grew up to become a champion of the seas and one of the best-known oceanographers in the world. In this lovely biography, now in paperback, poetic text and gorgeous paintings come together to create a portrait of Cousteau that is as magical as it is inspiring.

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.

How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.

This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

Before there was Flash Boys and The Big Short, there was Liar's Poker. A knowing and unnervingly talented debut, this insider's account of 1980s Wall Street excess transformed Michael Lewis from a disillusioned bond salesman to the best-selling literary icon he is today. Together, the three books cover thirty years of endemic global corruption--perhaps the defining problem of our age--which has never been so hilariously skewered as in Liar's Poker, now in a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author.

It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never before had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time. After you learned the trick of it, all you had to do was pick up the phone and the money poured in your lap.

This wickedly funny book endures as the best record we have of those heady, frenzied years. In it Lewis describes his own rake's progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick, the most dangerous beast in the jungle, a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars' worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.

As he has continued to do for a quarter century, Michael Lewis here shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. In the Salomon training program a roomful of aspirants is stunned speechless by the vitriolic profanity of the Human Piranha; out on the trading floor, bond traders throw telephones at the heads of underlings and Salomon chairmen Gutfreund challenges his chief trader to a hand of liar's poker for one million dollars.

A tender and perspective-shifting book that offers a rare level of understanding about the subtle and and no-so-subtle layers of internalized oppression and deep feelings and dilemmas of Deaf people, written by former Deaf teacher Rachel Zemach.

This mesmerizing, funny, and disruptive narrative invites you to be a fly on the wall in a Deaf classroom at a hearing school, experiencing the immense frustration, unbridled joy, and indelible humor that arise for Deaf adults and children in a hearing environment.

Rachel struggles with staff, administration, and aides who sabotage her efforts at every turn. The students contend with a principal who removes their textbooks, intercom announcements that are totally inaccessible and a system that renders them all defenseless against these dysfunctional and often absurd forces.

You'll meet seven-year-old Laszlo, the brilliant, language-hungry boy who will capture your heart, and the political, fiercely intelligent elite members of the Deaf community who rally to change legislation after his life takes a shocking turn at age sixteen when he makes a heart-wrenching decision.

In a series of short, distinctive chapters, Zemach shares her personal Deafhood journey, poignant scenes from the classroom, shocking individualized education meetings and their impact, and the larger political and historical picture surrounding Deaf education.

You will never be the same after you read The Butterfly Cage, intended to spark a national dialogue about the current state of Deaf education, and the lifelong impact of the language deprivation, oralism and audism that prevails in the majority of schools for the majority of our Deaf children, many of whom are unnecessarily set up for failure.

Who should read this book?

• Parents and anyone in contact with Deaf people whether professionally or personally
• Teachers, of any kind
• ASL students
• ASL interpreters
• People who enjoy well-written, entertaining and powerful memoir
• Readers interested in diversity, cultures or language.

The Butterfly Cage comes with ASL Videos (captioned) and supplementary materials for college-level class discussions/assignments. Book group discussion questions also provided.

Now a major motion picture, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin and starring Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, and Michael Cera--the true story of "Hollywood's poker princess" who gambled everything, won big, then lost it all.

Molly Bloom reveals how she built one of the most exclusive, high-stakes underground poker games in the world--an insider's story of excess and danger, glamour and greed.

In the late 2000s, Molly Bloom, a twentysomething petite brunette from Loveland Colorado, ran the highest stakes, most exclusive poker game Hollywood had ever seen--she was its mistress, its lion tamer, its agent, and its oxygen. Everyone wanted in, few were invited to play.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were won and lost at her table. Molly's game became the game for those in the know--celebrities, business moguls, and millionaires. Molly staged her games in palatial suites with beautiful views and exquisite amenities. She flew privately, dined at exclusive restaurants, hobnobbed with the heads of Hollywood studios, was courted by handsome leading men, and was privy to the world's most delicious gossip, until it all came crashing down around her.

Molly's Game is a behind the scenes look at Molly's game, the life she created, the life she lost, and what she learned in the process.

2019 Eisner Award Winner for Best U.S. Edition of International Material

Throughout history and across the globe, one characteristic connects the daring women of Brazen: their indomitable spirit.

With her characteristic wit and dazzling drawings, celebrated graphic novelist Pénélope Bagieu profiles the lives of these feisty female role models, some world famous, some little known. From Nellie Bly to Mae Jemison or Josephine Baker to Naziq al-Abid, the stories in this comic biography are sure to inspire the next generation of rebel ladies.

This title has Common Core connections.

In the fall of 2020, as the pandemic raged around the globe, Zito Madu traveled to Venice for a writing fellowship. There, he found a deserted, silent, but still beautiful city, "one of those extraordinarily strange places in the world." As he details his walks through a haunted landscape, we learn about his family's immigration from Nigeria to Detroit, his troubled relationship with his father, his meditations on race and otherness, the small joys of daily life and solitude, and his own rage and regret. With nods to Calvino and Borges, and reminiscent of Teju Cole, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is an unforgettable travel memoir about the mysterious transformations that may lurk inside us all.