True Books

This is a book about the human hunger for communication: the joy when it can fully take place, the frustration when it's thwarted. Many of its happiest moments happen when a group of Deaf people rearr... (Tom)

In an ideal world, every person would write a book like this near the end of their career, summing up their life's work with anecdotes, some funny, some wistful and even regretful, that capture the ph... (Tom)

Part family saga, part mystery, The Manicurist's Daughter grips you right from the beginning and doesn't let go. Local author Susan Lieu was determined to publish this memoir when she was thirty-eight... (Haley)

About three years ago, Sante, a writer in her mid-60s known until then as Luc, sent to a few dozen close friends a piece of writing titled "Lucy," a tender, exact, joyful, and terrified confession and... (Tom)

In 1933, Christiane Ritter, an Austrian artist, told her husband, who had spent the last few years living off the land on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, that she wanted to join him. And so s... (Tom)

I love this (kind of) memoir for satisfying the inappropriate curiosity I so often feel when the relationships of people I actually know end. Pittard spills all of the tea about the demise of her marr... (Anika)

A memoir looking back on the author's escape from a fundamentalist childhood was as familiar in Gosse's time (1907) as it is in ours (e.g. Tara Westover's Educated), but the two things that continue t... (Tom)

New Books of the Week The Young Man by Annie Ernaux The Pole by J.M. Coetzee Sometimes books you read make themselves into pairs, but rarely as neatly as these two did for me: two very slim books, the... (Tom)

I was already predisposed to liking Scottish comedian Fern Brady's memoir on account of enjoying the hell out of her presence on Taskmasker (a British comedy panel game show) and her stand-up comedy s... (Anika)

Kent doesn't explain why he set out in a sailboat for Greenland in the summer of 1929, with two much younger men he didn’t know. He leapt at the idea, and even when they steered into catastrophe he ne... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week 101 Ways to Read a Book by Timothée de Fombelle and Benjamin Chaud, translated by Karin Snelson The Magicians by Blexbolex, translated by Karin Snelson Our talented friend Kari... (Tom)

Raban's final book is the story of two journeys: his father's, as a British officer, through the World War II battlefields of Dunkirk, North Africa, and Anzio, and his own, as he recovers from, and ad... (Tom)

I've been waiting for years to make Athill's 1963 memoir a Phinney by Post selection, so as soon as NYRB Classics brought it back into print, I pounced. Athill was a prominent British book editor, and... (Tom)

There are few moments in the creative history of America as densely potent as the jazz scene in New York City in the late '50s, when you could find Mingus, Monk, Coltrane, Davis, and Evans all gigging... (Tom)

If, like me, you loved Murphy's first book, the truck-driving memoir The Long Haul, you might have wondered what he's been doing since he retired from the road. The answer: trying to cash in on the su... (Tom)

Jane Wong grew up in her family's Chinese restaurant in New Jersey (until her father's gambling obsession drove it into failure); now she's a poet and professor at Western Washington in Bellingham. Bu... (Tom)

I confess: I am mostly untroubled by art crimes, whether thefts or forgeries. I even find them a little charming, mostly victimless, and a kind of art in themselves. And that's surely how Stéphane Bre... (Tom)

I first read this elegant memoir by a Bay Area software developer when it came out a quarter century ago, at a moment of technological optimism that seems far away now. But the book itself hardly feel... (Tom)

An excellent companion to Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura and Liz Stromquist's Fruit of Knowledge. With warm, witty writing, thorough research, and inclusive language, journalist-midwife-mother Leah... (Anika)

If, like me, your idea of fun is reading stories of others going through almost unfathomable hardship, you can hardly do better than David Grann (the expert nonfiction yarnspinner behind Killers of th... (Tom)

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"Don't write about your childhood," someone told Lucinda Williams when he heard she was writing this memoir. "Just write about your music." Well, as anyone who loves her music knows—"Child in the back... (Tom)

We haven't been short of think pieces on the subject of, to borrow the title of Claire Dederer's viral 2017 essay that was one of the seeds of this book, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men,"... (Tom)

I love, love, love this book. Simply as an anthology of contemporary and classic writing about nature, it's an absolute treasure. It features contributions by Jorge Luis Borges, Robin Wall Kimmerer, U... (Tom)

Reading Under the Henfluence is a lot like hanging out with your most enthusiastic and knowledgeable chicken-loving friend. You're sure to be entertained and to learn something—even if, like me, you'r... (Anika)

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Tom)

“The history of medicine was filled with 'fathers'—the father of the C-section, the father of endocrinology, the father of ovariotomy—but, ironically, there were no mothers.” Rachel E. Gross is basic... (Anika)

Phinney Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago Mayors, even the most powerful, recede in our historical memory almost as quickly as newspaper columnists do, and this compact biography of Chicago's most fam... (Tom)

I think of Love's Work like the small hunk of tungsten I once held, so dense that it immediately sank my hand to the desktop beneath. It's a short book, with few words on each page, but it carries wei... (Tom)

Having abandoned an earlier attempt at an autobiography, out of her journalist's frustration with the slipperiness of memory, Malcolm, the longtime New Yorker writer who died in 2021, left behind this... (Tom)

How do you describe a book as singular as this one? Writing in the wake of family tragedy—the sudden deaths of two sisters—Raffles, a British anthropologist living in New York City, is drawn to the so... (Tom)

Warner, an administrator at the Smithsonian Institution, was nearly sixty when he published this book, his first. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977, and has never been out of print since. It's a grace... (Tom)

New Book of the Week by Darryl Pinckney In 1973, as a Columbia undergraduate, Pinckney talked his way into Elizabeth Hardwick's writing class, and—at least for the decade and a half covered by this wo... (Tom)

As a teenager in the ’80s, the music—the very existence—of Prince had a profound effect on me. Purple Rain (the movie, as well as the album) totally blew my mind. Seeing him in concert in 1985 was a h... (Doree)

It's a too-familiar American story: a city—New Haven, Connecticut, in this case—divided by race, a young black man falsely imprisoned. To it, Dawidoff, who was raised in the city and who has written b... (Tom)

You might know the late Mary Rodgers as the author of the kidlit classic Freaky Friday, or as the composer of the musical Once Upon a Mattress (her one big hit in a long career of trying), or—her most... (Tom)

What is there to say about a story as simple as this one? "This is the story of a man who took part in a dance contest," its first line declares, and that's what it is: a short portrait, told in the p... (Tom)

Murray's life story is a remarkable one, as an often behind-the-scenes influence on the Civil Rights Movement, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and one of the first women ordained... (Tom)

Reang was her mother's youngest, with a special bond founded between them when she barely survived their escape from the war and the coming genocide in Cambodia in her mother's arms in 1975. But once... (Tom)

If many of our favorite recent nature books celebrate the complex and often surprising intelligences of particular organisms—trees, mushrooms, octopuses, birds—Yong's new book is like a sense-by-sense... (Tom)

This is my favorite kind of non-fiction book—a failure. Which is to say that it isn't a biography of the influential mid-century poet Frank O'Hara, although it's full of biographical detail and wise a... (James)

I picked up this book (at New York's McNally Jackson bookstore) because it didn't look like anything else on the shelf, and inside it doesn't read like anything else either. Mostly, it's a biography o... (Tom)

If you noticed me laughing out loud on my walk home in the last week or so, I was probably listening to this new memoir, which, despite being about the death of O'Reilly's mother when he was five, aga... (Tom)

This travelogue of three months Levine, a Canadian expat who had migrated semi-permanently to England, spent tramping across his native land in 1956 proved so unpopular in Canada it took two decades t... (Tom)

Engaging and informative from the first page, The Story of Jane details the experiences of many women involved with Chicago's underground abortion service in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade. These... (Anika)

When Amy Bloom's husband, a vigorous ex-jock architect in his mid-60s, learned he had Alzheimer's, he knew immediately he wanted to end his life well before full dementia could have its own way. Doing... (Tom)

From 2018-2019 Iris Graville served as the first writer-in-residence aboard the Washington State Ferries, spending a couple days a week writing on the route that travels between Lopez, Orcas, Shaw, an... (Haley)

You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe In the season of her life when she is gathering her work, Brown has brought together occasional essays she wrote for the Stranger in the previous decade into a... (Tom)