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This Boy's Life

10 best books like This Boy's Life (Tobias Wolff): Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Stop-Time, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life, A Fan's Notes, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir, Going Native, The Contours of American History, The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial, The Blessing: A Memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
AuthorNick Flynn
ISBN0393329402
Nick Flynn met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory...
Stop-Time
AuthorFrank Conroy
ISBN0140044469
First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy's passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy's wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships,...
Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life
AuthorAbigail Thomas
ISBN0385720556
A beautifully crafted and inviting account of one woman’s life, Safekeeping offers a sublimely different kind of autobiography. Setting aside a straightforward narrative in favor of brief passages of vivid prose, Abigail Thomas revisits the pivotal moments and the tiny incidents that have shaped...
A Fan's Notes
AuthorFrederick Exley
ISBN0679720766


Fredrick Exley (1929-1992) – Photo of the writer as a vulnerable, sensitive young man. In many ways, much too vulnerable and sensitive for mid-20th century American society, a society where a man’s prime virtue is being tough.

A Fan's Notes is the odyssey of one man’s unending...
Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
AuthorVivian Gornick
ISBN0374529965
In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking...
Going Native
AuthorStephen Wright
Going Native is Stephen Wright’s darkly comic take on the road novel, in which one man’s headlong escape from the American Dream becomes everybody’s worst nightmare. Wylie Jones is set: lovely wife, beautiful kids, barbecues in the backyard of his tastefully decorated suburban Chicago house...
The Contours of American History
AuthorWilliam Appleman Williams
ISBN0393305619
William Appleman Williams was one of America’s greatest critics of US imperialism. The Contours of American History, first published in 1961, reached back to seventeenth-century British history to argue that the relationship between liberalism and empire was in effect a grand compromise, with...
The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial
AuthorPeter Goodchild
ISBN1580810578
I love the film Inherit the Wind (the 1960 version with Spencer Tracy) so I was pleased to find this play about the Scopes trial as one of the 2016 SYNC audiobook offerings. While I enjoyed this audiobook, it didn't come across as a play but more as a full cast recording of a book due to the exposition of a "narrator"...
The Blessing: A Memoir
AuthorGregory Orr
ISBN1571781412
I once read that memoirs are testimonies of survival, or something to that effect. If the author can live through that, we can survive our sufferings, too. And so, I can't help but think of my favorite memoirs as gifts, as blessings.

At Glen Workshop East in South Hadley, MA, this summer, I perused...
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
AuthorElizabeth McCracken
ISBN0316027677
"This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," writes Elizabeth McCracken in her powerful, inspiring memoir. A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married,...
The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order
AuthorJoan Wickersham
ISBN0151014906
When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You’re saying “I’m gone and you can’t even be sure who it is that’s gone, because you never knew me.†Sixteen years ago, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father...
In the American Grain
AuthorWilliam Carlos Williams
ISBN0811202305
Prose essays ranging in theme from Erik the Red and Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln about what it means to be an American.

William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. He found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning,...
Samuel Johnson
AuthorWalter Jackson Bate
ISBN1887178767
W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson has been hailed as a supreme example of the biographer's art and the first great modern life of Johnson. Bate's work is literary biography at its finest, delving into the character that formed Johnson's awesome intellect and fueled his prodigious output. When first...
Vermeer
AuthorLawrence Gowing
ISBN0520212762
I simply adore Vermeer.

Many years ago I saw The Astronomer, at the Louvre, and I have never looked back. Since then I have seen both Lady Standing at a Virginal and Lady Seated at a Virginal [National Gallery], The Allegory of Faith, Portrait of a Young Womand, Woman with a Water Jug and A Girl Asleep...
Florence Nightingale
AuthorCecil Woodham-Smith
ISBN0689706529
I don't usually write reviews because I feel I can never do the book justice. But for this one I'm going to try.
If I could give this book 10 stars, I would. Incredibly well-written, well organized, and obviously well researched.
I love reading biographies but I've often found the biographer...
A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton
AuthorJohn McPhee
ISBN0374526893
When John McPhee met Bill Bradley, both were at the beginning of their careers. A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee's first book, is about Bradley when he was the best basketball player Princeton had ever seen. McPhee delineates for the reader the training and techniques that made Bradley the extraordinary...
The Duke of Deception
AuthorGeoffrey Wolff
ISBN0679727523
Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman—a product of Yale and the OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer. Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military service, and supported himself with desperately...
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
AuthorMary McCarthy
Overall, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood presents interesting snapshots of a child, then young adult's life being raised by relatives after the death of her parents. An odd upbringing, but obviously, the only one she has to compare to in her life. Mary McCarthy was only six years old when her parents...
Firebird
AuthorMark Doty
ISBN0060931973
In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!"

Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite...
My Brother
AuthorJamaica Kincaid
ISBN0374525625
Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes...
In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country
AuthorKim Barnes
ISBN0385478216
Poet Kim Barnes grew up in northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a modest but comfortable home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friendship, and the great sheltering power...
Broken Vessels
AuthorAndre Dubus
ISBN0879239484
Written between 1977 and 1990, universally acclaimed when they appeared in Godine hardcover, and exploring subjects close to home and close to the bone, these twenty-two diverse essays reveal the spiritual strength and shrewdly lyrical prose for which Andre Dubus has been recognized worldwide.

Personal...
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
AuthorPatricia Hampl
ISBN0393320316
In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or bedeviled her. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention...
The Boys of My Youth
AuthorJo Ann Beard
ISBN0316085251
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention & acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting...
Sex and Death to the Age 14
AuthorSpalding Gray
ISBN0394742575
This is a collection of some of Gray’s early (and best) monologues. These are the yarns that made his reputation as a story-teller in the 1980s: Sex and Death to the Age 14; Booze, Cars, and College Girls; 47 Beds, Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk, Travels through New England, and Terrors of Pleasure:...
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