Book cover of Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik by Winston James
Biography & Autobiography

Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik

One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. […Learn More]

Book cover of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
Biography & Autobiography

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

From the standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.
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Book cover of Poet Warrior: A Memoir by Joy Harjo
Biography & Autobiography

Poet Warrior: A Memoir

Three-term poet laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life.

Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. A musical, kaleidoscopic, and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. […Learn More]

Book cover of These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett
Biography & Autobiography

These Precious Days: Essays

At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.” When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks’ short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both.  […Learn More]

Book cover of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Edward Gorra
Biography & Autobiography

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War

How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner’s life and legacy.

William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. […Learn More]

Book cover of Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard
Biography & Autobiography

Festival Days

When “The Fourth State of Matter,” her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. […Learn More]

Book cover of What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forche
Biography & Autobiography

What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life. […Learn More]

Book cover of William Wells Brown: An African American Life by Ezra Greenspan
Biography & Autobiography

William Wells Brown: An African American Life

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres: travelogue, novel (the now canonized Clotel), printed play, and history. […Learn More]

Book cover of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir by Jenn Shapland
Biography & Autobiography

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love. […Learn More]