Under A Rock, the first memoir from Blondie's Chris Stein, is a quintessentially New York story of the golden age of the East Village and the makings of international superstars, with a foreword by Debbie Harry.[Bokinfo]

The groundbreaking New York Times bestseller--an intimate, fiercely honest memoir of a daughter's struggle to come to terms with her terminally ill mother's decision to die--now in trade paperback with a new reader's guide inside

"Andi Dorfman, the beloved finalist of season eighteen of The Bachelor who infamously rejected Juan Pablo and went on to star on season ten of The Bachelorette, dishes about what it's like to live out a love story--and its collapse--in front of the cameras, offering hard-won advice for moving on after a break-up, public or not"--

ONE OF WATERSTONES BEST ENTERTAINMENT BOOKS OF 2024 'Sometimes fate deals up a wild card. There's a lot to be said for one of these wild cards and from what I've learned over the fifty or so years of our friendship, Chris is a card from the unexpected deck' - from the foreword by Debbie Harry Musician, photographer, storyteller, and longtime partner to Debbie Harry, Chris Stein defined the sound of an era, catapulting the icon band Blondie to #1 and selling over 20 million copies of Parallel Lines. In this no-holds-barred autobiography, Stein reveals himself-this time not in songwriting or photography, which he's previously been known for, but in words. From a Brooklyn boyhood, a move across the river to the gritty and fecund East Village in the late 1970s allowed Stein to tap the explosive creativity that defined the era in the city. It was a time when David Bowie and the Ramones were also making music, when Andy Warhol was still alive and promoting Jean-Michel Basquiat's work, when cool was defined not by where you came from but by what you could contribute to culture. UNDER A ROCK is a plunge into that vanished time period, and into the moments that turned the fresh sound and new look of punk and new wave into a giant artistic and commercial sensation. Stein takes us there in this revelatory, propulsive, distinctive memoir.

At nearly 95, Studs Terkel has written about everyone's life, it seems, but his own. Here he offers a memoir which--embodying the spirit of the man himself--is youthful and vivacious. Terkel begins by taking us back to his childhood, describing the hectic life of a family trying to earn a living in Chicago. He then goes on to his experiences--as a poll watcher charged with stealing votes for the Democratic machine, as a young theatergoer, and eventually as an actor himself in both radio and on the stage--giving us a portrait of the Chicago of the 1920s and 1930s. He tells of his beginnings as a disc jockey after World War II and as an interviewer and oral historian--a craft he would come to perfect. Finally, he discusses his involvement with progressive politics, leading to his travails during the McCarthy period when he was blacklisted.--From publisher description.

Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world--only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at eighteen is arranged and several children soon follow. Deen's first transgression--turning on the radio--is small, but his curiosity leads him to the library, and later the Internet. Soon he begins a feverish inquiry into the tenets of his religious beliefs, until, several years later, his faith unravels entirely. Now a heretic, he fears being discovered and ostracized from the only world he knows. His relationship with his family at stake, he is forced into a life of deception, and begins a long struggle to hold on to those he loves most: his five children. In All Who Go Do Not Return, Deen bravely traces his harrowing loss of faith, while offering an illuminating look at a highly secretive world.

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's return to memoir, a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents, published in tandem with his classic work of Holocaust literature, When Memory Comes Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedlander returns with WHEN MEMORY COMES: THE LATER YEARS, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics. Friedlander's initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedlander goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Scholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others. Most importantly, this memoir led Friedlander to reflect on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"--

Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. Kluger's story of her years in the camps and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth.

“A very personal remembrance of Nora Ephron’s life and loves, and her ups and downs” ( USA TODAY ) by her long-time and dear friend Richard Cohen in a hilarious, blunt, raucous, and poignant recollection of their decades-long friendship. Nora Ephron (1941–2012) was a phenomenal personality, journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and movie director ( Sleepless in Seattle ; You’ve Got Mail ; When Harry Met Sally ; Heartburn ; Julie & Julia ). She wrote a slew of bestsellers ( I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman ; I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections ; Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media ; Crazy Salad : Some Things About Women ). She was celebrated by Hollywood, embraced by literary New York, and adored by legions of fans throughout the world. Award-winning journalist Richard Cohen, wrote this about She Made Me Laugh : “I call this book a third-person memoir. It is about my closest friend, Nora Ephron, and the lives we lived together and how her life got to be bigger until, finally, she wrote her last work, the play, Lucky Guy , about a newspaper columnist dying of cancer while she herself was dying of cancer. I have interviewed many of her other friends—Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Arianna Huffington—but the book is not a name-dropping star turn, but an attempt to capture a remarkable woman who meant so much to so many other women.” With “the nuanced perspective of a confidant” ( The Washington Post ), She Made Me Laugh “is a fine tribute to a fascinating woman” ( Houston Chronicle ): “Nora would be pleased” ( People , “Book of the Week”).

Hand to Mouth is Paul Auster's startling memoir of his career as a young writer - and his accompanying struggle with poverty.

“Lady Pamela Hicks’s joyously entertaining new memoir, arguably the poshest book that ever has or will be written” ( Newsweek ), is a privileged glimpse into the lives and loves of some of the twentieth century’s leading figures. Pamela Mountbatten entered a remarkable family when she was born in Madrid at the very end of the “Roaring Twenties.” Daughter of the glamorous heiress Edwina Ashley and Lord Louis Mountbatten, Pamela spent much of her early life with her sister, nannies, and servants—not to mention a menagerie of animals that included, at different times, a honey bear, chameleons, a bush baby, and a mongoose. Her parents’ vast social circle included royalty, film stars, celebrities, and politicians. Noel Coward invited Pamela to watch him film, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. dropped in for tea. However when war broke out Pamela and her sister were sent to New York to live with Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, while the prime minister appointed her father to be the last Viceroy of India. Amid the turmoil, Pamela came of age, meeting the student leaders who had been released from jail, working in the canteen for Allied forces and in a clinic outside Delhi. She also developed a close bond with Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. “If you are addicted to Downton Abbey , chances are that you will relish Daughter of Empire , a British aristocrat’s memoir of her childhood and coming of age…She is also a keen observer of a way of life now vanished, except on PBS” ( The Wall Street Journal ). “Not many people remain who can tell stories like Lady Pamela Hicks” ( Vanity Fair ).

"In the early 1960s, most middle-class American women in their twenties had their lives laid out for them: marriage, children, and life in the suburbs. Most, but not all. Breathless is the story of a girl who represents those who rebelled against conventional expectations. Paris was a magnet for those eager to resist domesticity, and like many young women of the decade, Nancy K. Miller was enamored of everything French--from perfume and Hermès scarves to the writing of Simone de Beauvoir and the New Wave films of Jeanne Moreau. After graduating from Barnard College in 1961, Miller set out for a year in Paris, with a plan to take classes at the Sorbonne and live out a great romantic life inspired by the movies. After a string of sexual misadventures, she gave up her short-lived freedom and married an American expatriate who promised her a lifetime of three-star meals and five-star hotels. But her husband turned out to be a con man whose promises were lies, and she had to leave Paris and her dreams behind. Upon returning to New York, with more than half of her twenties behind her, Miller was determined to start over. In an era of Vietnam anti-war protests, student unrest, and sexual liberation, she sought to become a new woman: autonomous and creative at a time when women were only expected to look pretty and smile. This stunning memoir chronicles a young woman's coming-of-age tale, and offers a glimpse into the intimate lives of girls before feminism"--

By the author of Attempting Normal and host of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, The Jerusalem Syndrome is The Gospel according to Maron: a spiritual memoir of your average hyperintelligent, ultraneurotic, superhip Jewish standup comedian and seeker. The Jerusalem Syndrome is a genuine psychological phenomenon that often strikes visitors to the Holy Land_the delusion that they are suddenly direct vessels for the voice of God. Marc Maron seems to have a distinctly American version of the Jerusalem Syndrome, which has led him on a lifelong quest for religious significance and revelation in the most unlikely of places. Maron riffs on Beat phenomena with its sacred texts, established rituals, and prescribed pilgrimages. He spends some time exploring the dark side of things, as his obsessions with cocaine (known to Maron as “magic powder”), conspiracy theories, and famous self-destructive comedians convince him that the gates of hell open beneath Los Angeles. As his quest matures, he reveals the religious aspects of Corporate America, pontificating on the timeless beauty of the Coca-Cola logo and even taking a trip to the Philip Morris cigarette factory, where the workers puff their own products with a zealot-like fervor. The culmination of Maron’s Jerusalem Syndrome comes during his own tour of the Holy Land, where, with Sony camcorder glued to his eye socket, he comes face-to-face with his own ambiguous relationship to Judaism and reaches the brink of spiritual revelation_or is it nervous breakdown? Marc Maron has considerably adapted and expanded his praised one-man show to craft a genuine literary memoir. Whether he’s a genuine prophet or a neurotic mess, he’ll make you laugh as you question the meaning of life. “Marc Maron is blazingly smart, rapid-fire, and very funny . . . A brilliant and relentless screed.” –David Rakoff, author of Fraud “Marc Maron is the first crazy person I’ve ever envied. In his brainiac-memoir-meets-hilarious-travelogue, he demonstrates the ability to tell a story with an extraordinary provocative intelligence that is regrettably shared by few.” _ Janeane Garofolo, comedian

"Though it reads like a suspense novel, Escape through the Pyrenees is Lisa Fittko's extraordinary memoir of life as an "enemy alien" in France before and after the German invasion of 1940. Fittko and her husband, Hans, were Jewish leftists in Berlin who became active members of the anti-Fascist German resistance. In 1933, they fled the Gestapo to what they thought was the safety of France. To the French authorities, however, they and thousands of other German émigrés represented a grave political threat. Soon these émigrés were rounded up and crowded into concentration camps."--Back cover.

"From the creator of the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning series Transparent, a memoir of personal transformation set against the profound cultural upheaval and shifting power dynamics that continue to shape our society"--

In a stunningly candid and courageous memoir, the notorious Hollywood Madam tells her own story for the first time. Featuring original text, wiretap transcripts, court documents, news clippings, diary excerpts, interviews with hookers, and fantastic original artwork, Heidi tells her story with a fierce regard for the truth. Color illustrations throughout.

"A New York Times bestselling author traces her father's life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to bustling New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell. Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, and praised by Oliver Sacks as having "a novelist's ear for the way people speak," Deborah Tannen was a little girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, Deborah was profoundly influenced by his love of language and gift for writing and storytelling. As she grew up and he grew old, she spent untold hours with her father, recording their conversations and taking notes. He handed her a journal he kept when he was young--and showed her another he said she could have after his death, all for the account of his life she promised him she'd write. In this memoir, Deborah fulfills her promise to her father, embarking on the poignant, yet perilous, quest to piece together the puzzle of her father's life. Beginning with his astonishingly vivid memories of the Hasidic community in Warsaw that he was born into in 1908, she traces his journey: arriving in New York City in 1920, he quit high school at fourteen to become sole support of his mother and sister, yet attended law school at night and eventually established the largest workmen's compensation practice in New York. In the intervening years, he became active in the Communist Party, then New York's Liberal Party, running for Congress on its ticket. As Deborah comes to better understand her father's--and her own--relationship to Judaism, she also uncovers aspects of her father's life she would never have imagined. When she discovers letters from another woman he might have married, she is forced to rethink her assumptions about her parents' marriage. Finding My Father is a memoir of Eli Tannen's life and the ways it reflects the near century that he lived. But even more than that, it's about a daughter's struggle to see her father clearly, to know him more deeply, and to tell a more truthful story about her family and herself."--

Thankfully, Camryn Manheim has never played by the rules. Her fierce determination to defy the beauty myth, the naysayers, and casting stereotypes has resulted in one of today's most remarkable and unique Hollywood success stories. Her groundbreaking role as Ellenor Frutt on television's hottest drama, The Practice, has won her an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award--victories that are the culmination of decades of hard work, perseverance, and battles fought with her parents, lovers, the establishment, and herself. In this inspirational memoir, Camryn chronicles her journey from a self-hating, "overweight" teenager who desperately wanted to fit in, to a self-loving, fat activist who is proud to be a misfit. Wake Up, I'm Fat! shares her intelligent, candid, poignant, and often hilarious stories of being fat in a society obsessed with being thin. Camryn takes us from her days as a motorcycle-riding hippie in Santa Cruz to her enrollment at New York University's prestigious school of drama--where Pulitzer Prize-winning Tony Kushner broke the unspoken theater rules of size and cast her in the role of the ingenue--and finally to Hollywood, where she dispelled the fallacy that large women can't be portrayed as sensual, sophisticated, and confident. Camryn's endearing honesty, sass, and razor-sharp wit will appeal to all those who have ever felt like outcasts or yearned to make peace with their bodies.

"Edward Snowden chose three journalists to tell the stories in his Top Secret trove of NSA documents: Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras, all of whom would share the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Poitras went on to direct the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. Greenwald wrote an instant memoir and cast himself as a pugilist on Snowden's behalf. Gellman took his own path. Snowden and his documents were the beginning, not the end, of a story he had prepared his whole life to tell. More than 20 years as a top investigative journalist armed him with deep sources in national security and high technology. New sources reached out from government and industry, making contact on the same kinds of secret, anonymous channels that Snowden had used. Gellman's reporting unlocked new puzzles in the NSA archive. And as Snowden's revelations faded somewhat from the public consciousness, the machinations he exposed continue still, with many policies unaltered despite societal outrage. Dark Mirror is a true-life spy tale that touches us all, told with authority and an inside view of extraordinary events. Within it is a chilling personal account of the obstacles facing the author, beginning with Gellman's discovery of his own name in Snowden's NSA document trove. Google notifies him that a foreign government is trying to compromise his account. A trusted technical adviser finds anomalies on his laptop. Sophisticated impostors approach Gellman with counterfeit documents, attempting to divert or discredit his work. Throughout Dark Mirror, the author wages an escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries who force him to mimic their tradecraft in self-defense. With the vivid and insightful style that marked Gellman's bestselling Angler, Dark Mirror is an inside account of the surveillance-industrial revolution and its discontents, fighting back against state and corporate intrusions into our most private spheres. Along the way, and with the benefit of hindsight, it tells the full story of a government leak unrivaled in drama since All the President's Men"--

Hollywood historian and film reviewer Leonard Maltin invites readers to pull up a chair and listen as he tells stories, many of them hilarious, of 50+ years interacting with legendary movie stars, writers, directors, producers, and cartoonists. Maltin grew up in the first decade of television, immersing himself in TV programs and accessing 1930s and '40s movies hitting the small screen. His fan letters to admired performers led to unexpected correspondences, then to interviews and publication of his own fan magazine. Maltin's career as a free-lance writer and New York Times-bestselling author as well as his 30-year run on Entertainment Tonight, gave him access to Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Connery, Shirley Temple, and Jimmy Stewart among hundreds of other Golden Age stars, his interviews cutting through the Hollywood veneer and revealing the human behind each legend. Starstruck also offers a fascinating glimpse inside the Disney empire, and Maltin's tenure teaching USC's popular film course reveals insights into moviemaking along with access to past, current, and future stars of film, such as George Lucas, Kevin Feige, Quentin Tarantino, and Guillermo del Toro.