"A deeply funny and bittersweet memoir of having grown up in an eccentric family of faded wealth and gentility (think shades of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums) in which the father's failed dreams of being a writer put the family in the poor-house, drove the mother to weepy alcoholism, and provided Jeanne with a highly unusual approach to life--and a wicked sense of humor"--Provided by publisher.

"A glimpse into a beloved novelist's inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud's own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and...

In "Reading My Father," William Styron's youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, "Darkness Visible," so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression.

"A Pakistani-Dutch writer's multicultural memoir of grief and immigrant experience that illuminates the complexities of identity and inheritance in a global world"--

"The intimate, gorgeous, garish confessions of Joshua Mohr--writer, father, alcoholic, addict"--

"In Amina Cain's first nonfiction book, a series of essayistic inquiries come together to form a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors-including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee...