Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
10 best books like Heaven's Coast: A Memoir (Mark Doty): The Book of Delights, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, The Tradition, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, Waiting for Eden, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit
| Author | Ross Gay |
| ISBN | 1616207922 |
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed...
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
| Author | Ocean Vuong |
| ISBN | 0525562028 |
Poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's...
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
| Author | T Kira Madden |
| ISBN | 1635571855 |
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant...
Make it Scream, Make it Burn
| Author | Leslie Jamison |
| ISBN | 0316259632 |
A new collection of essays about obsession and longing from Leslie Jamison, the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams. A combination of memoir, criticism, and journalism, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is Leslie Jamison's profound exploration of the oceanic depths...
| Author | Jericho Brown |
| ISBN | 1556594860 |
Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
| Author | Carolyn Forché |
| ISBN | 0525560378 |
The powerful story of a young poet who becomes an activist through a trial by fire
What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation,...
Eden Malcom lies in a bed, unable to move or to speak, imprisoned in his own mind. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his hospital room. He has never even met their young daughter. And he will never again see the friend and fellow soldier who didn't make it back home--and who narrates the novel. But...
| Author | Kaveh Akbar |
| ISBN | 1938584678 |
"The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection." —Fanny Howe
This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous...
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
| Author | Rebecca Solnit |
| ISBN | 0143037242 |
Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past two hundred years (Wanderlust), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America (River of Shadows),...
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit
| Author | Leslie Marmon Silko |
| ISBN | 0684827077 |
Bold and impassioned, sharp and defiant, Leslie Marmon Silko's essays evoke the spirit and voice of Native Americans. Whether she is exploring the vital importance literature and language play in Native American heritage, illuminating the inseparability of the land and the Native American people,...
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
Set against the harsh reality of an unforgiving landscape and culture, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon provides a vision of the Old West unlike anything seen before. The narrator, Shed, is one of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction: a half-Indian bisexual boy who lives and works...
Why Karen Carpenter Matters
| Author | Karen Tongson |
| ISBN | 1477318844 |
In the '60s and '70s, America's music scene was marked by raucous excess, reflected in the tragic overdoses of young superstars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. At the same time, the uplifting harmonies and sunny lyrics that propelled Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, to international...
| Author | Lucie Brock-Broido |
| ISBN | 0394758528 |
"Brock-Broido's talismanic words open into a magical territory of 'Domestic Mysticism' . . . A violently skewed portrait of the female poet and her Muse, a hyped-up version of Stevens and his interior paramour, locked in a soliloquy 'in which being there together is enough' . . . Something in Brock-Broido...
In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a critically acclaimed National Book Award finalist shares inspiration and practical advice for writing a memoir.
Writing memoir is a deeply personal, and consequential, undertaking. As the acclaimed author of five memoirs spanning significant...
| Author | Wilton Barnhardt |
| ISBN | 1250020832 |
One of Slate's and Kirkus Review's Best Books of 2013 and The New York Times, National Public Radio, and Indie Bound bestseller: "Lookaway, Lookaway is a wild romp through the South, and therefore the history of our nation, written by an absolute ringmaster of fiction." —Alice Sebold, New York Times...
| Author | Donald Hall |
| ISBN | 0395957656 |
You might expect the fact of dying--the dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet--to make for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors...
Congratulations, Who Are You Again?
A Good Housekeeping Book of the Month
This funny and wise new memoir from Harrison Scott Key, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, will inspire laughter and hope for anyone who’s ever been possessed by a dream of what they want to be when they grow up.Little-known author Mark Twain once...
| Author | Harrison Scott Key |
| ISBN | 0062351494 |
Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis, but he grew up in Mississippi, among pious Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father—a hunter, a fighter, a football coach, "a man better suited to living in a remote frontier...
Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher
| Author | William Zinsser |
| ISBN | 0061729027 |
“William Zinsser turns his zest, warmth and curiosity—his sharp but forgiving eye—on his own story. The result is lively, funny and moving, especially for anyone who cares about art and the business of writing well.”
—Evan Thomas, Newsweek
In Writing Places,...
Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect
Running on Empty is the first self-help book about Emotional Neglect: an invisible force from your childhood which you can't see, but may be affecting you profoundly to this day. It is about what didn't happen in your childhood, what wasn't said, and what cannot be remembered.
Do you sometimes...
| Author | Meghan O'Gieblyn |
| ISBN | 0525562702 |
"Meghan O'Gieblyn's deep and searching essays are written with a precise sort of skepticism and a slight ache in the heart. A first-rate and riveting collection."
--Lorrie Moore
A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American...
The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890
| Author | Robert M. Utley |
| ISBN | 0826307167 |
The dramatic events of the final half-century of conflict between Indians and whites in the American West are presented here as a history of two peoples seemingly destined never to understand each other. Utley interprets this conflict from a dual perspective: re-creating events from the Indian viewpoint...
| Author | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson s 1841 essay Circles reflects on the endless circles found in nature, and the fluidity of the universe. He encourages the embracing of new thoughts and ideas: No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled;...
| Author | Alexander Chee |
| ISBN | 0312305036 |
Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but...
| Author | Noel Crook |
| ISBN | 0809333872 |
Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize
Co-Winner, Julie Suk Prize
Finalist, INDIEFAB Book fo the Year
Throughout Salt Moon, Noel Crook forges the kind of tragic vision Howard Nemerov described as the mark of our finest poets: drawing on myth and memory, Crook’s fierce lyrics reveal...
| Author | Joseph Millar |
| ISBN | 1597660264 |
Only someone who has a deep capacity to love and enjoy the music of life could have written these wonderful, troubling poems. There's a tenderness at the core of Fortune, where the commonplace becomes atypical and fantastical, a nd eazch poem possesses a voice that summons and reveals. Joseph Millar...
| Author | Gerald Stern |
| ISBN | 0887482074 |
This Lamont Prize-winning book offers all the joy, sadness, humor, beauty, and song that typically characterizes the work of the well-respected but unfortunately lesser-known American poet Gerald Stern. Stern, who has been writing since the 1960s, made a name for himself in 1977 with the publication...
| Author | Marianne Boruch |
| ISBN | 1556594658 |
Honored by Library Journal as an "Amazing Poetry Title"
“Extraordinary how in a single poem from 2013 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner Boruch slides 1800s London barber-surgeons and the dissection of murderers only (condemned to hell anyway) to the observation, ‘Future or past,...
| Author | Dara Wier |
| ISBN | 1933517387 |
Praise for Dara Wier’s previous work:
"Wier's poems explode with variety, particularity, whirlwinds of detail and mystery . . . memoirs, dialogues, choral performances witnessing scenes both weird and familiar."—Rain Taxi
"Dara Wier's Reverse Rapture is a mosaic whose...
Rick Nagano is a graduate student in the history department at USC, struggling to make rent on his South Los Angeles apartment near the neighborhood where his family once lived. When he lands a job as a research assistant for the elderly Mrs. W—, the heir to an oil fortune, he sees it at first simply as...
