Popular Authors

In her singular voice--both humble and brave, touching and humorous--Maxine Hong Kingston gives us a poignant and beautiful memoir-in-verse that captures the wisdom that comes with age. As she reflects on her sixty-five years, she circles from present to past and back, from lunch...

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives...

Selected for The Globe 100 Books in 2013.In The Truth about Luck, Iain Reid, author of the highly popular coming-of-age memoir One Bird's Choice, accompanies his grandmother on a five-day vacation -- which turns out to be a "staycation" at his basement apartment in...

A sweeping, definitive biography of the polarizing Italian writer whose infamous politics, relationship with Mussolini, and irrepresable knack for invention made him one of the most provocative artists and thinkers of his time. Curzio Suckert (1898-1957) --best known by his pen-name Malaparte--was not only...

Ernest Hemingway belongs to the triumvirate of the three greatest writers from America's golden age of literature, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, but little is known about his religious faith. Celebrated for The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom...

A behind-the-scenes look at religious radio broadcasting during World War II in which such revered figures as C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers came into the public eye. This fascinating book explores the tensions behind the greatest era in BBC radio broadcasting - the Home...

Inspired by the examples of his heroes Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Joshua Slocum, Jack London determined to sail around the world. In April 1907 he sailed from San Francisco in the forty-five-foot ketch Snark, with his wife, Charmian, a skeleton crew, and...

First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy's passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy's wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs...

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain Ron Chernow, the highly lauded biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, brings his considerable powers...

Based on a true story to the beginning of the storied career of children's book author Jane Yolen, written by her very own daughter. Janie Yolen loves to read, write, dance, and sing. So when her teacher announces Janie's elementary class will perform a...

Angie Thomas was a teen rapper before writing the New York Times bestsellers The Hate U Give and On the Come Up. As a child in Jackson, Mississippi, Angie Thomas was surrounded by civil rights history. But instead of the equality her elders had...

"This is a beautiful, tragic book.... We should be grateful that Ken Bugul found her way back at last to Africa and that she created this searing document as testimony of her suffering."- Booklist "A wise, lyrical account, superbly translated."- Publishers Weekly The subject...

A beloved Japanese modern classic that chronicles the author's twenty-year bond with her cat, meditating on solitude, independence, and the writing life. On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze of Tokyo's Tamagawa River. She...

A new memoir from renowned political activist and author of Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties The revolutionary upsurge of 1968-1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can't Please All. Tariq Ali...

An artist and writer whose charming and inventive works are at once modest and ambitious, Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City's vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I...

A searing tribute of sisterhood and family, love and profound loss from the acclaimed author of The World According to Fannie Davis.In Love, Rita, Bridgett M. Davis tells the story of her beloved older sister, a vivacious woman who in leaving home to attend...

The fourth book in the Modern Library's Paris Review Writers at Work series, Latin American Writers at Work is a thundering collection of interviews with some of the most important and acclaimed Latin American writers of our time. These fascinating conversations were compiled from...

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most widely read novels in American literature. It's also a perennial favorite in highschool English classrooms across the nation. Yet onetime author Harper Lee is a mysterious figure who leads a very private life in her...

Madeleine B. Stern, one of the world's leading Alcott scholars, shows how the breadth of Alcott's work, ranging from Little Women to sensational thrillers and war stories, serves as a reflection of a fascinating and complicated life dotted with poverty and riches alike, hard...

The storyteller becomes the story in this illuminating biographical picture book of Hans Christian Andersen, father of the modern fairy tale. A century and a half have passed since Hans Christan Andersen's death, but his stories are more alive than ever. Across languages, borders,...