Collection: Biography & Memoir

The only complete career retrospective of this visionary painter, including all her most iconic works, which are prized for their exquisite visual poetry, together with personal letters and facsimiles, reprinted in Martin's own hand, adding intimacy to this classic book

Agnes Martin's career spanned over seven decades, with a profile that has skyrocketed since the 2015-17 major exhibition at Tate Modern, London that travelled globally to great acclaim. Though a major influence on Minimalist painters, Martin saw her own work more closely related to Abstract Expressionism, her paintings being 'meditations on innocence, beauty, happiness and love.' This much-anticipated reissue of Martin's exhibition manager and close friend Arne Glimcher's highly-acclaimed book presents 130 of her paintings and drawings alongside her previously unpublished writings and lecture notes. Glimcher's illuminating introduction, his personal memories of visits to Martin at her studio, and their correspondence throughout her career, reveal many insights into the artist's life and work.

Help kids ages 6 to 9 discover the life of George Washington--a story about fighting for independence and building a country

George Washington became the first president of the United States of America and is known as the father of our country. He won the fight for American independence from England, but before that, he was a hardworking kid who enjoyed challenging himself in school and sports. He learned that overcoming challenges in his life would help make him a great leader.

Explore how George went from being an ambitious farm boy in Virginia to the most well-known founding father in American history. How will his revolutionary spirit inspire you?

This book about George Washington for kids includes:

• See George's progress--Unlike other books about George Washington for kids, this one has a visual timeline of his life so you can get a picture of his important milestones.
• Helpful definitions--Discover a glossary with easy-to-understand definitions for the more advanced words and ideas in this book about George Washington for kids.
• A lasting legacy--This unique book about George Washington for kids explains how he changed the world for future generations and you.

If you've been searching for fun, colorful books about George Washington for kids, look no further--this one has it all!

Uprooted from her childhood in Germany and set adrift in the American Midwest, Maureen was raised by a kind but neglectful mother who loved Jesus more than her own child and a stern, disinterested grandmother who waxed nostalgic about Nazi Germany. Growing up queer and isolated, Maureen often felt unmoored and unloved.

Years later, Maureen reflects upon her complicated past. Queen of Snails follows Maureen through time and memory in her quest to untangle the trauma passed down to her over three generations of women. Part memoir and part family history, Queen of Snails is a beautifully drawn, powerful story that examines and transmutes the emotional baggage of violence, abandonment, and displacement.

"I have read a lot of books in my life, but never one like this... this captivating memoir will take you places you might never have gone on your own: into the elemental mysteries of life, death, creatureliness, and divinity with someone who has turned from the orderliness of religion to find salvation in the God of the Wild. I'm glad I went." --Barbara Brown Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of Leaving Church and Learning to Walk in the Dark

A pastor walks out of the church and into the woods, in pursuit of the God he's lost.

Millions of Americans, disillusioned with organized religion, yearn for meaning and transcendence in their lives, and many of them are finding that in nature. When pastor and theologian Tony Jones, Ph.D., had his crisis of faith, brought on by personal trauma and broken relationships, he sought solace in the outdoors - paddling a canoe, hunting with his dog, butchering deer.

When he walked out of the church and into the woods, he left the orderly pews and numbered hymns for chaotic spaces and untamed wilderness. And he re-discovered God -- a God who brings peace in the midst of storms, a God who lives in the community of our fellow creatures, a God who's acquainted with death. This is the God of wild places.

In The God of Wild Places, Tony mines his own experiences, recent research in evolutionary psychology, and ancient wisdom from various spiritual and philosophical traditions to fashion lessons about solitude, the predator-prey relationship, the importance of place, risk, failure, and death, and the chaotic presence of God.

Tony's guidance in The God of Wild Places promises to introduce a generation of Americans to the transcendence available only in untamed spaces; his writing draws on wisdom from Christianity to Buddhism, Kant to Cioran, Jim Harrison to Annie Dillard. This is a journey of loss and discovery through forests and fields, lakes and streams, from knowing to unknowing, from finding to losing -- from life to death, and then back to life.

A memoir of one young man's coming-of-age on a cross-country trek--told through the stories of the people of all ages, races, and inclinations he meets along the highways of America.

At twenty-three, Andrew Forsthoefel walked out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read walking to listen. He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn't know how. So he decided he'd walk. And listen. It would be a cross-country quest for guidance, and everyone he met would be his guide.

Walking toward the Pacific, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn't know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself.

Ultimately, it's the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself at the most human level.

Jeremy Ivester is a transgender man. Thirty years ago, his parents welcomed him into the world as what they thought was their daughter. As a child, he preferred the toys and games our society views as masculine. He kept his hair short and wore boys' clothing. They called him a tomboy. That's what he called himself.

By high school, when he showed no interest in flirting, his parents thought he might be lesbian. At twenty, he wondered if he was asexual. At twenty-three, he surgically removed his breasts. A year later, he began taking the hormones that would lower his voice and give him a beard--and he announced his new name and pronouns.

Never a Girl, Always a Boy is Jeremy's journey from childhood through coming out as transgender and eventually emerging as an advocate for the transgender community. This is not only Jeremy's story but also that of his family, told from multiple perspectives--those of the siblings who struggled to understand the brother they once saw as a sister, and of the parents who ultimately joined him in the battle against discrimination. This is a story of acceptance in a world not quite ready to accept.

"Beautiful . . . Compelling . . . Cusk [is] an extraordinary writer of the female experience." --Financial Times

In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk's marriage of ten years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the author redefines herself and creates a new version of family life for her daughters. She discovers previously unknown strengths and freedoms but also finds herself suddenly vulnerable to outsiders, unwelcome advice, social displacement, and the absence of a clear authority. The pressure to reconstruct a "normal" life for her daughters competes with the sense that nothing feels normal at all.

Aftermath is a classic: a masterly work in which the author, at her most ruthless and rigorous, charts the largely unwritten journey back to order from the chaos that is left when a family breaks apart.

An insightful memoir from a figure skating champion about her life as a bisexual professional athlete, perfect for readers of Fierce by Aly Reisman and Forward by Abby Wambach.

Karina Manta has had a busy few years: Not only did she capture the hearts of many with her fan-favorite performance at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, she also became the first female figure skater on Team USA to come out as queer. Her Modern Love essay "I Can't Hate My Body if I Love Hers" was published, and then she joined the circus--Cirque du Soleil's on-ice show, AXEL.

Karina's memoir covers these experiences and much more. Attending a high school with 4,000 students, you'd expect to know more than two openly gay students, but Karina didn't meet an out-lesbian until she was nearly seventeen--let alone any other kind of queer woman. But this isn't just a story about her queerness. It's also a story about her struggle with body image in a sport that prizes delicate femininity. It's a story about panic attacks, and first crushes, and all the crushes that followed, and it's a story about growing up, feeling different than everybody around her and then realizing that everyone else felt different too.

A raw and masterful memoir about becoming a woman and going mad--and doing both at once.

When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother--feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain--she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

After nearly three years and countless experimental treatments, Suzanne left the ward on shaky legs. In the decades it took her to recover from the experience, Suzanne came to understand her suffering as part of something larger: a long tradition of women whose complicated and compromised stories of self-actualization are reduced to "crazy chick" and "madwoman" narratives. It was a thrilling discovery, and she searched for more books, more woman writers, as the journey of her life converged with her journey through the literature that shaped her.

Transporting, honest, and graceful, Committed is a story of discovery and recovery, reclaiming the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence through the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, and others.

Elvis was connected to Nashville throughout his career. He recorded approximately 260 songs at RCA Studio B in Nashville and performed in several concerts in the area. During his early years, he often visited his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who lived in Nashville.

From award-winning poet Vanessa Angélica Villarreal comes a brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by the forces of migration and colonialism.

In Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal offers us an intimate mosaic of migration, violence, and colonial erasure through the lens of her marriage and her experiences navigating American monoculture. As she attempts to recover the truth from the absences and silences within her life, her relationships, and those of her ancestors, Vanessa pieces together her story from the fragments of music, memory, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.

The trauma of remembering gives the collection its unique structure: Each chapter is an attempt to reimagine and re-world what has been lost. In one essay, Vanessa examines the gender performativity of Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can provide healing when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember--her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce--and finds a new way to archive her history and map her future(s), one infused with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.

By engaging readers in her project of rebuilding narrative, Vanessa broadens our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be. Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review).

Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.

Winner - Best Transgender Nonfiction - 2015 Lambda Literary Awards

Best Books of 2014 - Publishers Weekly

Best Books of 2014 - NPR Books

Best Nonficton Books of 2014 - Kirkus Reviews

10 Best Transgender Non-Fiction Books - Advocate

"Thomas Page McBee's Man Alive hurtled through my life. I read it in a matter of hours. It's a confession, it's a poem, it's a time warp, it's a brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee--his humility, his sense of humor, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated."--Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers and The Uses of Enchantment

What does it really mean to be a man?

In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life&mash;one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

Man Alive engages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one--how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, Man Alive grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.

Praise for Man Alive:

"Man Alive is a sweet, tender hurt of a memoir ... about forgiveness and self-discovery, but mostly it's about love, so much love. McBee takes us in his capable hands and shows us what it takes to become a man who is gloriously, gloriously alive."--Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State

"Thomas Page McBee's story of how he came to claim both his past and his future is by turns despairing and hopeful, exceptional and relatable. To read it is to witness the birth of a fuller, truer self. I loved this book."--Ann Friedman, columnist, New York Magazine

"'Whoever's child I am, my body belongs to me, ' McBee writes, and his book is an elegant, generous transcription of the journey toward this incandescent, non-aggrandized, life-sustaining form of self-possession--the kind that emanates from dispossession, rather than running from it."--Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

"Well aware that memory and identity rarely follow a linear path, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer the question, 'What does it really mean to be a man?' Weaving past and present to do so, the book's journey connects violence, masculinity and forgiveness. McBee has an intelligent heart, and it beats in every sentence of this gorgeous book."--Saeed Jones, author of Prelude to Bruise

"Exquisitely written and bristling with emotion, this important book reminds us of how much vulnerability and violence inheres to any identity. A real achievement of form and narrative."--Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure

Why is less than 1% of rural land in the U.S. owned by Black people? An acclaimed writer and activist explores the impact of land theft and violent displacement on racial wealth gaps, arguing that justice stems from the literal roots of the earth.

To understand the contemporary racial wealth gap, we must first unpack the historic attacks on Indigenous and Black land ownership. From the moment that colonizers set foot on Virginian soil, a centuries-long war was waged, resulting in an existential dilemma: Who owns what on stolen land? Who owns what with stolen labor? To answer these questions, we must confront one of this nation's first sins: stealing, hoarding, and commodifying the land.

Research suggests that between 1910 and 1997, Black Americans lost about 90% of their farmland. Land theft widened the racial wealth gap, privatized natural resources, and created a permanent barrier to access that should be a birthright for Black and Indigenous communities. Rooted traces the experiences of Brea Baker's family history of devastating land loss in Kentucky and North Carolina, identifying such violence as the root of persistent inequality in this country. Ultimately, her grandparents' commitment to Black land ownership resulted in the Bakers Acres--a haven for the family where they are sustained by the land, surrounded by love, and wholly free.

A testament to the Black farmers who dreamed of feeding, housing, and tending to their communities, Rooted bears witness to their commitment to freedom and reciprocal care for the land. By returning equity to a dispossessed people, we can heal both the land and our nation's soul.

An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey

In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a pasture: a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.

In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit "so that my story would not be determined for me." She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her youth: the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother's collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.

An insightful new biography of the central figure in the Dreyfus Affair, focused on the man himself and based on newly accessible documents

On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus's cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting "Death to Judas!" In this book, Maurice Samuels gives readers new insight into Dreyfus himself--the man at the center of the affair. He tells the story of Dreyfus's early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment on Devil's Island, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I.

Samuels's striking perspective is enriched by a newly available archive of more than three thousand documents and objects donated by the Dreyfus family. Unlike many historians, Samuels argues that Dreyfus was not an "assimilated" Jew. Rather, he epitomized a new model of Jewish identity made possible by the French Revolution, when France became the first European nation to grant Jews full legal equality. This book analyzes Dreyfus's complex relationship to Judaism and to antisemitism over the course of his life--a story that, as global antisemitism rises, echoes still. It also shows the profound effect of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of Jews around the world.