Tavis Smiley recounts the story of his friendship with Maya Angelou. Tavis Smiley and Maya Angelou met in 1986, when he was twenty-one and she was fifty-eight. For the next twenty-eight years, Angelou was a teacher and a maternal figure to Smiley, and they talked often of art, politics, history, music, religion, and race. In My Journey with Maya, Smiley beautifully recounts a friendship filled with conversation that began when he, a recent college...

In the Little People, Big Dreams series, discover the lives of outstanding people from designers and artists to scientists. All of them went on to achieve incredible things, yet all of them began life as a little child with a dream. The book follows Agatha Christie, who taught herself to read at the age of five, on her journey to becoming the most famous crime writer of all time. This inspiring and informative little biography comes with extra facts...

"For thousands of years, women in many cultures were excluded from or limited in education. This meant that others told their stories for them. This fascinating book shines a light on women writers who broke that mold. These women wrote some of the most intriguing stories ever written, such as Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the world's first novel, and Olympe de Gouges, whose political essays helped spark the French Revolution."--

Presents a cultural history of independent single women between the 1920s and the 1950s through the reclaimed life of glamorous guru Marjorie Hillis.

"In Places I Stopped on the Way Home, Meg Fee plots a decade of her life in New York City--from falling in love at the Lincoln Center to escaping the roommate (and bedbugs) from hell on Thompson Street, chasing false promises on 66th Street and the wrong men everywhere to finding true friendships over glasses of wine in Harlem and Greenwich Village. Weaving together her joys and sorrows, expectations and uncertainties, aspirations and realities, the...

"A memoir of survival, self-discovery, and forgiveness. For decades, Rachel Louise Snyder has been a fierce advocate reporting on the darkest social issues that impact women's lives. Women We Buried, Women We Burned is her own story. Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and...

"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her...

"In the car she’d had since high school—with the boyfriend she’d had just as long riding shotgun—Minda Honey made the cross-country drive to sunny Southern California. By the end of 2008, Obama would be president, she’d be single, and change would be upon us all. Thousands of miles away from her family and friends in the new era of smartphones and online dating, Minda navigates the treacherous waters of early adulthood...

I took off my wedding ring for the last time--a gold band with half a line of "Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath etched inside--and for weeks afterwards, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn't fling the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free ... A few years into...

"Still known to millions only as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remains curiously absent from the American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author behind such classics as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Placing Jackson...