Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud
Sensing that she was losing the argument, Lowell rushed at Colcord, winding up to throw a punch before stopping short a few feet away from him. “If you weren’t so old,” she said, according…
Tag
memoirs
What Can Conversion Memoirs Tell Us?
Eventually, Ash finds in herself a gradual attraction, not only to religious practice but to the wild disharmonies of belief. Her mother is sliding into late-stage dementia, and Ash yearns…
Does Olivia Nuzzi Make Good Copy?
In addition to not being a tell-all, “American Canto” is not a book about Trump, nor is it about politics, as Nuzzi establishes in an author’s note. Rather, “it is a book about life in…
Life at the Edge of a Famous Family
This comparatively reduced terrain has often served as complement to her husband’s much grander vistas. “I am the observer, the audience watching the action as if in a theater,” she…
Malala’s Favorite Mother-Daughter Memoirs
When the Nobel Peace Prize–winning activist Malala Yousafzai was fifteen, she was shot by a member of the Taliban for advocating for girls’ education—an event that, as she writes in…
How the Supreme Court Defines Liberty
Barrett, like most originalists, insists that the Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education can be defended on originalist grounds—the alternative is unthinkable. The “drafters…
How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen The celebrity memoir is a form of which I’m reflexively skeptical. Some books lean solely on name recognition, without…
The Strange, Cinematic Life of Charlie Sheen
“I think there’s so many stories and images ingrained in people’s minds about the concept of me,” the actor Charlie Sheen tells the camera in the new two-part Netflix documentary about his…
Coming of Age in Panic Mode
The books of Michael Clune, or at least the ones written for a nonacademic audience, have focussed on very particular chapters of his life. “White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin” is a…
Sigrid Nunez on the Beauty of Narrative Restraint
“Plot, shmot,” the writer and editor William Maxwell once said to John Updike. Sigrid Nunez couldn’t agree more. She used to tell her students, “You don’t need a plot, but you do need a…
The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker
In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out what exactly he meant to create. The same is true,…
Amazon Unveils Its Book Sale, With Up to 70% off Celebrity Memoirs, Book-To-Screen Titles and Beach Reads
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Amazon has kicked off their annual book sale,…