""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. 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...

Using mostly short entries organized from A to Z, many of which are cross-referenced, Rosenthal captures in wonderful and episodic detail the moments, observations, and emotions that comprise a contemporary life. Start anywhere -- preferably at the beginning -- and see how one young woman's alphabetized existence can open up and define the world in new and unexpected ways.

Sellers has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that prevents her from reliably recognizing people's faces. As she came at last to trust her own perceptions, she learned the gift of perspective: that embracing the past as it is allows us to let it go.

"My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a collection of personal essays by Sandra Gail Lambert which reflect upon her experience becoming a writer alongside discussions of disability, queerness, and aging. A seventy-year history of disability is threaded throughout these essays and intertwined with writing that celebrates lesbian love, explores the slapstick moments of life, and shares the obstacles and triumphs of becoming a writer later in life. The...

In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor,...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “beautiful and eye-opening” (Jacqueline Woodson), “hilarious and heart-rending” (Celeste Ng) graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families,  and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, The New York Public Library, Publishers...

"Life is a work-in-progress, full of mystery and unexpected twists. The only certain thing is that whatever story you think you are telling yourself about your life, is that story will change. And then it will change again. One minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in upstate New York, finally settling down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, and the next she finds herself separated and...

A memoir of the author's wrestling against parental expectations, the strictures of the church, and the limits of a society dominated by men as she grows up in a family struggling against Depression-era hardship and personal tragedy to carve out a small farm in rural South Dakota.

"I call this book a novoir--a memoir with true characters and actual dialogue, but with the structure and stylistic elements of a novel. It is my story and that of my mentor Anaïs Nin, intertwined as we were, based on her diaries, published and unpublished, and on mine. I have taken liberties with chronology, point of view, and dramatization of events, disguised a few identities, and used novelistic devices to quicken the narrative--but the emotional...

"In this inspiring memoir, the award-winning playwright and bestselling author of What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day reminisces on the art of juggling marriage, motherhood, and politics while working to become a successful writer. In addition to being one of the most popular living playwrights in America, Pearl Cleage is a bestselling author with an Oprah Book Club pick and multiple awards to her credit. But there was a time when such stellar...