Nonfiction Authors (page 4)

In 2013, as the feminist nonprofit VIDA: Women in Literary Arts released its tally of gender byline counts, cultural debate raged over whether literary criticism was too mean. Michelle Dean hosted an event in New York City in May of that year with the same title as her new book: Sharp. The event brought together a who’s who of literary female opinion, including names like Miriam Markowitz, Michelle Orange, and Kate Bolick. And the evening was packed to the rafters ...

If addiction memoir is a brooding genre, Laura Jean Baker’s debut may be the mother of them all.

“I wasn’t just imagining it or willing it into existence,” Baker writes in The Motherhood Affidavits: A Memoir of Childbearing, Addiction, and Questionable Innocence. “Babies had rewired the pleasure center of my brain. Like my aunt who was addicted to eating and QVC, one brother to drugs, another two to booze, all I could fixate upon was landing more pleasure.” ...

If Sloane Crosley republished her 2008 New York Times–bestselling debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, in 2018, it would still be dark and rich.

“There’d just be more layers to it,” Crosley says by phone from New York City. “Let’s not ruin something that’s beloved, but I think it would be even better, have a little more dimension...that comes with the realization that you don’t have to be the dancing monkey all the time ...

For Georgina Hernández, the harassment started pretty much her first day on the job cleaning the lobby of a Los Angeles hotel on the night shift. It was verbal at first, nonstop advances, unwanted flirting, but it escalated: On the upper deck of the parking garage, he raped her. He told her not to tell anyone, so she didn’t. He raped her again. “When you need the job,” she tells journalist Bernice Yeung in the opening chapter of In ...

Country music songwriters have made modest fortunes penning tales about the bottle, and intoxication in all its sensual forms, and the consequences—mostly negative. Sunny Sweeney’s “Pass the Pain” (woman tells the bartender, “Slide some more hurtin’ my way/Just pass the pain”) might even serve as an epigraph for Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, a riveting account, researched and personal, of addiction.

This book, whose origins reside in Jamison’s doctoral thesis, acknowledges the allure of intoxicants, from ...

Irish writer John Banville’s skills as a novelist and, more recently, a mystery writer under the name of Benjamin Black, are well established. He’s won a slew of literary awards, including the Booker Prize for The Sea. He can now add Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir to his long list of books.      

Kirkus caught Banville over the phone while he was in a Dublin restaurant and pub; the sound of gentle tinkling and hushed talk could be heard in ...

Mark Eisner has been chasing Pablo Neruda for decades.

“It is a camino, a trail, a path,” Eisner says. “One thing has led to another and eventually to this book.”

Neruda: The Poet’s Calling is Eisner’s first biography, yet he paints a large, complicated picture that enhances our understanding of not only Neruda, but also large swaths of the 20th century’s political and cultural landscape. Eisner also includes his own translations of Neruda’s work and manages to ...

Facing persecution by the Chinese government, democracy activist Zhuang Liehong made plans to flee his seaside village and seek asylum.

“The moment he decided to leave Wukan Village, he thought of the United States,” Lauren Hilgers writes in Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown. “It had an allure no other country could match. It was a country of justice and freedom, a place with values that paralleled his own. He had to whisper when he said it: America ...