Category Archives: Memoir
Half in Shade
“Judith Kitchen has written a book that is at once clear and accessible and at the same time insistently complex. Her effortlessly constructed hybrids make Half in Shade part memoir, part speculation, part essay, a demonstration of the interactive art of see- ing, and finally for me, a beautifully sus- tained meditation. It is at that meditative level that the book’s potent, unsentimental emotive power gathers.” —Stuart Dybek
The Latehomecomer
“This is the best account of the Hmong experience I’ve ever read—powerful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.”—Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
From Baghdad to Brooklyn
A stirring portrait of personal and artistic awakening in midcentury New York’s Arabic-speaking Jewish community.
Crossing Three Wildernesses
Death by execution, death by disease, and death by starvation are the three wildernesses Cambodians were forced to traverse during the Khmer Rouge regime. In a harrowing but ultimately triumphant affirmation of the human spirit, celebrated Cambodian poet U Sam Oeur narrates his incredible life story, testifies to the horrors of genocide, and shares his fervent prayers for peace and freedom through the process of democracy.
Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard
“Joe Brainard was an innovative artist who gradually stopped working altogether, a stutterer who gave masterful readings, someone insecure about his lack of education who wrote I Remember, a book of lasting importance. His lifelong friend, the poet Ron Padgett, has given us a limpid memoir of Brainard that captures his saintly gentleness, overwhelming generosity and deep originality. This is a precious portrait of one of the key figures of the New York art scene during its glory days in the 1960s and 1970s.” —Edmund White
Girl Reel
A must-have for all film buffs, Girl Reel is a book about our relationship to popular culture—how media images both preview and rerun our own lives.
’66 Frames
Part record of the New York underground art scene, part history of contemporary American avant garde cinema—Gordon Ball’s vivid memoir lays bare the soul of a decade that redefined the photographic image.
A Long Way from St. Louie
McElroy’s travel memoirs presents a black woman’s experiences with world travel, creating not a dry observational piece but a spirited focus on a heritage of travel and a woman’s search for adventures and cultural insights. The result is unique to travel literature – and contains much food for thought. —Midwest Book Review
Friends in the World: The Education of a Writer
“What Malcolm Cowley did for the expatriates in the twenties, Aram Saroyan does now for the sixties. From Charlie Mingus to Mike Nichols to Ted Berrigan; from a macrobiotic diet to a natural childbirth without even a midwife(!), Saroyan reminds us: ‘the sixties were about happiness,’ and reprises that gentle emotion for us exquisitely.” —Caroyln See
Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan
Previously announced and finally available, Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, edited by longtime friend and colleague Anne Waldman, is a moving tribute to an important poet. “Let none regret my end who called me friend,” wrote Berrigan in “Last Poem”: this is, instead, a celebration of Berrigan’s high-energy life and work.
My Own Alphabet
“If more writers were writing like Bobbie Louise Hawkins—economically and truly about the only human things that interest us in prose: the past, the family, love, hate, duty, forgiveness—then maybe a few more thousand Americans would be reading narrative fiction and nourishing themselves on the oldest of all safe and enduring pleasures: new and fun and consolation.” —Reynolds Price
