The essays in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing are funny, profane and deceptively loose, as if Lauren Hough is talking to you late at night in a quiet bar.
Solnit’s astute observations of the literary life and the San Francisco art scene make for fascinating reading.
Phair skillfully explores the female experience in the music industry and riot grrrl-era feminism.
Theo Padnos recounts being kidnapped and imprisoned by operatives of al-Qaida in his gripping memoir, Blindfold.
Elizabeth Miki Brina searches for whether love can heal a family traumatized by racism and colonization in her moving memoir, Speak, Okinawa.
Matthew Gavin Frank’s Flight of the Diamond Smugglers is a fascinating exploration of the history of mining in South Africa, born of personal tragedy.
Georgina Lawton was born to a white mother and father. And yet, as we learn in the first pages of her eloquent memoir, Lawton is not white.
In The Soul of a Woman, Isabel Allende describes the experiences that imbued her with the feminist grit and tenacity that define her today.
Throughout Spilt Milk, Courtney Zoffness uses layered storytelling to plait her life experiences with larger observations about society.
Jo Ann Beard’s essays shimmer with emotional intensity, especially when evoking the flashes of memory that come on the threshold between life and death.
As Menachem Kaiser searches for the story of his Polish Holocaust survivor relatives, he wanders deep into the shadowy realm of Nazi treasure hunters.
In his totally original memoir, Louis Chude-Sokei captures the prejudices and tensions, pain and promise of being African in Jamaica and the United States.
When Harry Met Minnie is often a heart-rending read—humans and animals suffer, die and grieve—but it’s also studded with wit and musings on friendship.
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