Art & Literature

A 60 Minutes correspondent and former anchor of the CBS Evening News, Scott Pelley writes as a witness to events that changed our world....

A Mystery of Mysteries is a brilliant biography of Edgar Allan Poe that examines the renowned author’s life through the prism of his mysterious death and its many possible causes....

Leonardo da Vinci created the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and engineering....

Griffin Dunne’s memoir of growing up among larger-than-life characters in Hollywood and Manhattan finds wicked humor and glimmers of light in even the most painful of circumstances....

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have....

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation....

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern American classic....

She got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world, all alone....

An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with his life and family, and the role of fiction in our times.

Fox News war correspondent Trey Yingst shares his gripping, firsthand account of the events of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war.

David Sedaris' new collection of essays - including live recordings! - tells a most unconventional life story. It begins with a North Carolina childhood filled with speech-therapy classes...

In the vein of The Glass Castle and Wild, Cea Sunrise Person's compelling memoir of a childhood spent with her dysfunctional counterculture family in the Canadian wilderness....

Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work "that reads like a propulsive novel" (Oprah Daily) on the mutual attractions—and mutual antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.

From Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience....

Dan Slepian, a veteran producer for NBC’s Dateline recounts his two-decade journey navigating the broken criminal justice system to help free six innocent men.

In this book, C.S. Lewis tells of his search for joy, a spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity....

A quarter of a century after the plane crash that claimed the lives of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren, the magnitude of this tragedy remains fresh. Yet, Carolyn is still an enigmatic figure, a woman whose life in the spotlight was besieged with misogyny and cruelty.

Thoreau's classic account of the solitary life describes his attempts to simplify his life and sort out his priorities by living alone in a cabin beside Walden Pond for nearly two years....

“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart....

Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race....

This audiobook contains the strange, raw, and epiphany-filled stories that led to Read’s dramatic nine-month conversion from atheism to Catholicism.

If you ever struggle with your connection to God (or whether you even feel connected to a faith at all!), you're not alone. Especially in our modern world, with its relentless, never-ending news cycle, we can all grapple with such questions....

Dream Chasing is a recounting by author Bob Weis of four decades of creating and seeing to completion challenging projects, leading teams from the top secret, high-tech corridors of Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) to the highest levels of The Walt Disney Company.

Across six revealing lectures, Professor Jessica Hooten Wilson will introduce you to one of the 20th century’s most fascinating and divisive writers in Flannery O’Connor and the Scandal of Faith. Beginning with an overview of her brief but remarkable life, Professor Wilson will then take you through an exploration of themes in O’Connor’s work and the hallmarks of her literary style. You’ll get a clearer picture of O’Connor’s historical and geographical context while digging into how her stories can transcend time and place.

Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.

Disney experiences enthrall millions of guests around the world. How does it all become a reality? Find out in this action-packed narrative journey! Dream Chasing is a recounting by author Bob Weis of four decades of creating and seeing to completion challenging projects, leading teams from the top secret, high-tech corridors of Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) to the highest levels of The Walt Disney Company.

In January 2022, Bruce Eric Kaplan found himself confused and upset by the state of the world and the state of his life as a television writer in Los Angeles. He started a journal to keep from going mad, which eventually became They Went Another Way. The book’s through line traces his attempt to get a television project set up in the increasingly Byzantine world of Hollywood.

In Roman Year, André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other.

What kind of mother abandons her child? During the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who overcame both society’s condemnation and their own maternal guilt to leave their children—at will or due to economic or other circumstances. The Abandoners is sharp, at times slyly humorous, and always deeply empathetic.

In the early 1920s, surrounded by the roaring streets of avant-garde Paris, Piet Mondrian began creating what would become some of the most recognizable abstract paintings of the 20th century. With rectangles of primary colors against a dazzling white background, this was geometric abstraction in its purest form. These revolutionary compositions exhilarated, intoxicated, confused, and enraged the international public—and changed the course of modern art forever. Now, for the first time, Mondrian emerges alongside his thrilling art.

Drawing on deep archival research and decades of scholarship, Ann Schmiesing tells the affecting story of how the Grimms’ ambitious projects gave the brothers a sense of self-preservation through the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses.

Go behind the scenes of broadcasting in New York! It's a fascinating look at the big personalities and even bigger egos who delivered the news each night. Here Now the News comes alive with exciting stories about Jim Jensen and Rolland Smith, Roger Grimsby and Bill Beutel, and Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons. Learn about the anchors who commanded respect and ratings during the 1970s and 1980s. It's the time that the "anchorman" would pave the way for other females and Black journalists to join the desk, as viewers would finally get to see diversity.

Charles M. Blow’s mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their segregated Louisiana town, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to “love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel.” Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his “do-right” mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After—the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy.

You might not know the name Tyrus Wong, but you probably know many of the images he shaped, including scenes from the beloved Disney classic Bambi. Yet when he came to this country as a child, Tyrus was an illegal immigrant locked up in an offshore detention center. How did he go on to a long and prosperous career drawing animation cels, storyboards, and greeting cards that shaped the American imagination?

Follow Ruth through a rip-roaring, hilarious decade of not quite making it as a supermodel. Fueled by little more than cigarettes and the stress of her spiraling debt she crisscrosses the world in pursuit of fame and fortune. But how far is she willing to go for this wildly unrealistic dream?

Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things. On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Michael Gerson possessed one of the most important consciences of his generation. As the chief speech writer for George W. Bush, he wrote the words that rallied and ennobled the nation after September 11th. He helped design and champion Bush’s PEPFAR program, which saved upwards of 20 million lives as HIV ravaged Africa. Defiant Hope is his writings about the things he loved—humanity, God, his dog, and his boys.

¿Cómo contar la historia de uno mismo? Y, en ese ejercicio, ¿hasta qué punto se construye o se reconstruye la identidad? En este libro autobiográfico, Piedad Bonnett parte de sus vivencias para reflexionar sobre los factores que definen nuestra cotidianidad. Nos habla, con sensibilidad y lucidez, de aquello que determina la experiencia de las mujeres -la educación, el matrimonio, la maternidad, los tabúes asociados al cuerpo y la violencia de género- y también de la ansiedad, el miedo, la rebeldía, las ansias de libertad y las obsesiones que impulsan el proceso de la escritura.

Written between 2015-16, with color images of well-known old masters and contemporary art as well as some of the Bergers’ own drawings and watercolors, Over to You is an informal back and forth not unlike the ping-pong games father and son used to play in the barn of their house. It begins when John—who is in a Parisian suburb—sends Yves—who is in Haute Savoie—an envelope of reproductions of art that have moved him. And so they begin to reveal their thoughts looking at a Goya, Watteau, Twombly, Joan Mitchell, Durer, Caravaggio, Manet, and Euan Uglow, among many others.

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin.

Fern had recently entered her 60s when a series of life-altering events threw her into the eye of the storm. Both her parents passed away, her 20-year marriage ended, and the pandemic was looming. Faced with an uncertain future, Fern decided that if she wanted to start over, now was the time. In The Older I Get, join Fern as she candidly shares her experiences of grief and loss, rebuilding confidence and exploring new passions, as well as the importance of finding friends you can put the world to rights with over a couple of Cosmos.

Confessions by Leo Tolstoy, narrated by Gary Middleton, is a deeply introspective and philosophical work that chronicles Tolstoy’s spiritual journey and existential search for meaning. In this profound and honest memoir, Tolstoy confronts life's most difficult questions—regarding faith, purpose, and the human condition. This timeless work captures his struggle to reconcile the reality of life and death, eventually leading to a spiritual awakening.

A profoundly personal, warmly nostalgic and deliciously funny memoir by the legendary Sky Sports anchorman Jeff Stelling, chronicling a life spent obsessing about 'The Beautiful Game' ever since he was a little boy, and underpinned by a deeply rooted love of football and of people. Saturday Afternoon Fever is Stelling's moving and fascinating memoir: a love letter to the game that has shaped and defined him, as it has millions of other football fans across the UK.

In October of 1949, a few months after publication of George Orwell‘s masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley, a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published in the form of the classic, Brave New World. What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two novels, and an explanation as to why Huxley believes his own earlier work to be a more realistic prediction

Sus lágrimas han sido pepitas de oro para la audiencia. Pero ella es mucho más que Sálvame, mucho más que la creadora del chuminero o la periodista que siempre llora frente a las cámaras. Lydia Lozano forma parte de la historia de nuestra televisión y de la prensa del corazón. Su currículum atesora años de exclusivas y de anécdotas. Tras décadas de experiencia, la periodista, lejos de los focos y sin interrupciones, nos cuenta su versión de la historia. Ha llegado la hora de escribir negro sobre blanco todas esas cosas que nunca pude decir en un plató.

Lew Wallace, a fascinating and multitalented historical figure, has consistently been overlooked and lost in academia, articles, and modern books. When he has been discussed, he has often been misrepresented and misunderstood. This is partly due to the sordid and profoundly controversial period in the United States during his lifetime. Yet, Lew wrote one of the most successful and influential novels of the 19th Century. The story he created, and the high-profile controversies he was intimately involved in, have lived on in numerous movies and television programs.

Esta biografia traça o percurso de uma personalidade única da cultura portuguesa, debruçando-se tanto sobre a sua intensa atividade criativa como sobre a sua atribulada vida privada.

Herzzerreißend, mutmachend, witzig und zärtlich: ein autobiografischer Kurztext von Bestsellerautorin Sophie Kinsella Als Eve eines Morgens im Krankenhaus aufwacht, hat sie keinerlei Erinnerung, wie sie dort hingekommen ist. Ihr Mann Nick, der stets an ihrer Seite wacht, erklärt ihr, dass ihr ein bösartiger Hirntumor entfernt wurde. Von nun an muss Eve, eine gefeierte Bestsellerautorin, alles neu lernen – das Laufen, das Sprechen, das Schreiben. Und sie muss sich mit der Diagnose auseinandersetzen, womöglich nie wieder gesund zu werden.