Finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction Jamaica Kincaid’s brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid’s incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother’s life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer’s mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

National Book Award winner Jonathan Kozol is best known for his fifty years of work among our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable children. Now, in the most personal book of his career, he tells the story of his father’s life and work as a nationally noted specialist in disorders of the brain and his astonishing ability, at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, to explain the causes of his sickness and then to narrate, step-by-step, his slow descent into dementia. Dr. Harry Kozol was born in Boston in 1906. Classically trained at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, he was an unusually intuitive clinician with a special gift for diagnosing interwoven elements of neurological and psychiatric illnesses in highly complicated and creative people. “One of the most intense relationships of his career,” his son recalls, “was with Eugene O’Neill, who moved to Boston in the last years of his life so my father could examine him and talk with him almost every day.” At a later stage in his career, he evaluated criminal defendants including Patricia Hearst and the Boston Strangler, Albert H. DeSalvo, who described to him in detail what was going through his mind while he was killing thirteen women. But The Theft of Memory is not primarily about a doctor’s public life. The heart of the book lies in the bond between a father and his son and the ways that bond intensified even as Harry’s verbal skills and cogency progressively abandoned him. “Somehow,” the author says, “all those hours that we spent trying to fathom something that he wanted to express, or summon up a vivid piece of seemingly lost memory that still brought a smile to his eyes, left me with a deeper sense of intimate connection with my father than I’d ever felt before.” Lyrical and stirring, The Theft of Memory is at once a tender tribute to a father from his son and a richly colored portrait of a devoted doctor who lived more than a century.

53 SHORT ESSAYS FOR BUSY PEOPLE . . . BY 49 AMAZING AUTHORS. Too tired to think? No time to read books? Zibby Owens gets it. Award-winning podcaster of Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books and mother of four (ages six to fourteen) compiled fifty-three essays by forty-nine authors to help the rest of us feel understood, inspired, and less alone. The authors, all previous guests on her podcast (go listen!), include fifteen New York Times bestselling authors, five national bestsellers, and twenty-nine award-winning/notable/critically acclaimed writers. The super short essays were inspired by a few other things moms don't have time to do: sleep, get sick, write, lose weight, and see friends. Read one a week and you'll finish the whole book in a year: accomplishment! Topics range from taking care of an aging grandmother, mourning the loss of a family member, battling insomnia, wrestling with body image, coping with chronic illness, navigating writer's block, the power of women's friendship, and more juicy stuff. You'll laugh, cry, think, and feel like you just had coffee with a close friend. If that best friend were a world-renowned author. Contributors include: Aimee Agresti, Esther Amini, Chandler Baker, Adrienne Bankert, Andrea Buchanan, Terri Cheney, Jeanine Cummins, Stephanie Danler, KJ Dell'Antonia, Lydia Fenet, Michael Frank, Elyssa Friedland, Melissa Gould, Nicola Harrison, Kristy Woodson Harvey, Joanna Hershon, Angela Himsel, Richie Jackson, Shelli Johannes, Lily King, Jean Kwok, Heather Land, Brooke Adams Law, Caroline Leavitt, Jenny Lee, Shannon Lee, Elizabeth Lesser, Gigi Levangie, Emily Liebert, Lynda Loigman, Abby Maslin, Sarah McColl, Jeanne McCulloch, Malcolm Mitchell, Arden Myrin, Carla Naumburg, Rex Ogle, Zibby Owens, Camille Pagán, Elizabeth Passarella, Allison Pataki, Lindsay Powers, Susie Orman Schnall, Susan Shapiro, Melissa T. Shultz, Claire Bidwell Smith, Rev. Lydia Sohn, Laura Tremaine, and Cecily von Ziegesar.