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The novelist, critic, and essayist shares why he thinks writers are "predatory in a benevolent way" and how he met his inspiration for Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade (Liveright, 2014), a memoir of his friendship with a con man and convicted murderer.
"Still I miss those frightening times, those ugly moods, that mix of irrational up and devastating low. I miss them because they were mine." Elissa Washuta's memoir, My Body Is a Book of Rules, will be published by Red Hen Press in August.
“Even people who don’t read poems have poetry in their heads.” Filmed as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, this video features poets Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Tracy K. Smith, who discuss the nature of poetry and their creative processes. Smith's memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.
New York Times illustrator, artist, chef, and author of Mumbai New York Scranton, published by Scribner in March, discusses her memoir about her adventures abroad with author and humorist John Hodgman at New York City's Strand Book Store.
The author talks about her memoir, Wave (Knopf), in which she writes about losing her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the devastating tsunami that struck Southeast Asia in 2004.
Will Schwalbe's memoir, the story of a son and his dying mother who form a book club that brings them together in her final days, is published this month by Knopf.
Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live and Portlandia plays Penny Marshall in this hilarious trailer for Marshall's new memoir, published by Amazon this month.
Matthew Batt's memoir, Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home, which tells the the story of how the purchase and restoration of a disasterous fixer-upper saves a young marriage, was published last month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
"I ended up being the one that fell through the cracks," says poet, novelist, and journalist Luis J. Rodriguez, whose memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Curbstone Press, 1993) elevated him as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature. In this video from Open Road Media, Rodriguez tells his story and explains how books helped him escape a dangerous life on the streets of Los Angeles.
Vaddey Ratner discusses In the Shadow of Banyan, a debut novel depicting her family's experience during the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. "I didn't want to write a memoir," she says. "What I wanted was to honor the lives lost, those who perished, and I wanted to do so through my endeavor to transorm personal pain with art." In the Shadow of Banyan will be published by Simon & Schuster in July.
