Victor S. Navasky is the renowned editor, writer, and teacher who has been at the helm of "The Nation" for almost thirty years. "A Matter of Opinion," a scintillating reflection on his journalistic experiences, is also an extraordinary political document-a spirited, provocative argument for independent journals of opinion as vital to the health of democracy. Whether at the satirical magazine "Monocle" (which he founded when he was in law school), or at "The New York Times," or finally at "The Nation," Navasky's commitment to political engagement and to the social and intellectual values of independent cultural activity has always been front and center. In a wonderfully entertaining narrative, he tells of his innovative efforts to find money to keep "The Nation" afloat and to keep its pages lively, honest, and relevant, and he embellishes it with unforgettable stories-about his colleagues and opponents, from E. L. Doctorow to Bill Buckley; his heroes, from I. F. Stone to Jurgen Habermas; and his precedessors, from Daniel Defoe to Carey McWilliams. Navasky's accomplishments have been legion, despite the threats of revenue-driven multinational media corporations, and despite the sometimes ugly, sometimes hilarious problems that fearless muckrakers face in any culture. "A Matter of Opinion" is a passionately written, irresistibly charming account of a great journalistic tradition.

"A memoir exploring the author's father's love of wine" --

A courageously revealing--and occasionally shocking--autobiography from the founding editor-in-chief of Lear's magazine in which she vividly recounts the love affairs, suicide attempts, substance abuse, and mental illness that she kept hidden behind her dazzling and successful career.

In this beautifully written and almost compulsively readable book - in turn vindictive and joyful, painful and amusing - Mark Matousek writes of his struggle to live an enlightened life in a desacralised and brutal age ‘where God is dead and Madonna rules in crotchless leather panties'.

Dubbed-some would say drubbed-the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" by Vanity Fair, Lee Gutkind takes the opportunity of these essays, and the rich material of his own life, to define, defend, and further expand the genre he has done so much to shape. The result is an explosive and hilarious memoir of Gutkind's colorful life as a motorcyclist, a medical insider, a sailor, a college professor, an over-aged insecure father, and a literary whipping boy. In Forever Fat Gutkind battles his weight, his ex-wives, his father, his rabbi, his psychiatrist, and his critics in a lifelong cross-country, cross-cultural search for stability and identity. And from Gutkind's battles, the reader emerges a winner, treated to a sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, sometimes uproarious, and always engrossing story of the simultaneous awakening of a man and his mission, and of the constant struggle, in literature and in life, to sort out memory and imagination. Here, enacted in technicolor terms, is the universal, symbolic truth that no matter how far you travel, over how many years, you will never completely shed the weighty baggage of adolescence. Yet, as Gutkind proves again and again, he has learned to describe his burden with an ever-lightening brilliance. Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction. The author and editor of a dozen books, including the award-winning Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, he is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College.

The son of the founder of public relations reflects on his unusual life in his father's shadow, chronicling his defiant youth, his escapades with beautiful women and the CIA, and his battle with multiple sclerosis

Book by Marcus, David

Truth Comes in Blows is distinguished editor and critic Ted Solotaroff's richly textured account of a coming-of-age at once quintessentially American and especially vexed. Planted between him and his entry into adulthood, autonomy, and the wider world was Ben Solotaroff - as hard a father to placate, comprehend, and, finally, defy as can be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, shrewd, seductive, and impossibly overbearing, Ben Solotaroff was a self-made man carried to the edge - "almost all ego and almost no conscience." Against this formidable scion of the fierce Solotaroff clan stood Ted's mother, Rose, product of the cultivated Weisses of Cream Ridge, New Jersey, and Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Solotaroff was one of the notable intellectuals of his generation, the founder of the New American Review, editor and friend of Philip Roth, and editor-in-chief at HarperCollins. Solotaroff reveals himself here as a thinking man with a big heart and gaping wounds of love that are not disconnected from the contributions he has made to American culture throughout his career. Solotaroff turns back to the earliest pages of his romance with Lynn, remembering his first sighting of her emerging from the water as if from a dream. Yet the image, as he penetrates the intervening layers of sorrow and disappointment, is almost impossibly distant, fragile. First Loves reenacts the blurring of a perfect conception in the mind of a man who would devote his life to precision of thought and word. This opposition, of romantic and intellectual passion, drives the narrative and eventually brings it to crisis. First Loves could be described as a very private feat of honesty from a public intellectual. Solotaroff’s willingness to admit the failures, personal and professional, alongside the triumphs of his career gives a three-dimensional intensity to the emotions on the page. Working with all of the gritty and romantic elements of his storied life, Solotaroff manages to avoid a tone too heroic or honey-dipped; he manages simply to tell the tale.

Miriam Gross, as a journalist and editor, has worked with some of the most influential figures of the 20th century poets, philosophers, playwrights and politicians. This book offers recollections from 40 years at the heart of English cultural life. Brought up in wartime Jerusalem, she was deposited by her parents, speaking no English, at the bohemian Dartington Hall School; and then continued her education at Oxford where eschewing her quiet, tea-drinking contemporaries at St Anne s she found her way into more glamorous academic circles. From there it was a short hop to pre-spell-check Fleet Street. Her descriptions whether she is having to mend her boss's bra on her first day at work, or rewriting Angus Wilson's slapdash book reviews, or being asked to make the women s pages of the Observer more raunchy show a merciless eye for the bogus and the absurd. Alongside reflections on everything from feminism and motherhood to education and anti-semitism, she recounts her numerous infatuations, both requited and unrequited, with the sort of self-deprecating candour that makes this memoir a classic of its kind.

Literary Nonfiction. FURTHER CONFESSIONS OF A SMALL PRESS RACKETEER is a continuation of the columns and essays that comprised Stuart's 2005 release, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer. Again, equal parts literary memoir, reckless tirade, and unsolicited advice for the aspiring writer, FURTHER CONFESSIONS is drawn largely from Stuart Ross's notorious Hunkamooga column, his blog entries, essays for subTerrain magazine and other online venues. We bring them together here in their collected brilliance: alternately snarky, sincere, touching, honest, and always opinionated, Stuart's confessions are essential reading for any literary confessional. This volume offers its readers a roller-coaster journey into the mind of one of Canada's most committed small press activists. Praise for Stuart Ross: One of North America's most active and fiercely independent literary populists.--Another Chicago Magazine If Stuart Ross was living and working in the United States, and writing the exact same poetry he does now he would be rich and famous. Well, famous, at least.--The Globe and Mail Praise for CONFESSIONS OF A SMALL PRESS RACKETEER: For a quick and dirty breath of fresh air, it's difficult to beat renegade urban poet Stuart Ross's latest effort... Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn't about flowers and meadows, it's about blood and guts.--Steven Knight, Quill & Quire ...a wonderful book--funny, outrageous, and acute. I'll even say it's the best short-essay collection about the writing life that I've read in ages... Every aspiring writer should read CONFESSIONS OF A SMALL PRESS RACKETEER, just to find inspiration. And so should every established writer--just to keep humble.--Lynne Van Luven, Malahat Review

A memoir of Charles Brasch - poet, editor and partron of the arts.