Just Kids by Patti Smith (Illustrated Edition)
★★★★☆ On a sunny summer Monday in 1967, Patti Smith arrived via Greyhound in New York City. She took the subway from Port Authority in Manhattan to Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn, where friends she...
Category: Biography & Memoir
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
★★★★★ How do you understand abuse if it is not named, told, and shown? The telling of abuse in queer relationships is missing in society and history. Carmen Maria Machado breaks this “archival silence”...
Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn
★★★★★ As a creator and lover of story, I have always idolized Paul Simon, a man’s whose songs often have sweeping narratives crammed into four elegant lines. In addition to being musically brilliant, his...
A Course Called Scotland by Tom Coyne
★★★☆☆ Tom Coyne’s goal was to play “107 practice rounds,” the number of golf courses in Scotland, in 56 days in hopes of refining his game so that he could qualify for the Open....
Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz
★★★★★ Tony Horwitz’s final book, Spying on the South, follows two “routes.” The first is a fascinating look at a young Frederick Law Olmstead, a mini biography if you will, as Horwitz follows his...
Sir Christopher Wren by Paul Rabbitts
★★★★☆ Those who know Christopher Wren usually think of him solely as a remarkable architect whose glorious designs still shine some 350 years later. But, as this very brief biography reveals, Wren was so...
Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin
★★★★★ Welcome Home is one piece of a two-part follow-up to the celebrated posthumous 2015 publication of Lucia Berlin’s collection A Manual for Cleaning Women. Unlike the occasionally impressive but overreaching Evening in Paradise,...
Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard
★★★★☆ Last autumn, as if to give Karl Ove Knausgaard fans something to read while the sixth volume of My Struggle was being translated, a quick series of four books emerged from Penguin Press....
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
★★★★☆ What is the cost of living? How do our choices affect us? What compromises must we make in order to have a fulfilling life? By what metrics do we measure the days of...
