Biographies & True Stories

This amazingly wise and nimble collection investigates the horrors inflicted on so-called 'witches' of the pastThe Witch of Eye unearths salves, potions, and spells meant to heal, yet interpreted by inquisitors as evidence of evil. The author describes...

Including 2022 Caine Prize winning story "Five Years Next Sunday" by Idza Luhumyo, 2022 Nommo Award shortlisted story "Shelter" by Mzobi Haimbe and 2023 O'Henry Prize for Short Fiction winner "Mother" by Jacob M'hangoThis genre-spanning anthology...

A collection of twelve of J.S. Breukelaar's darkest, finest stories with four new works, including the uncanny new novella Ripples on a Blank Shore. Introduction by award winning author, Angela Slatter. Relish the Gothic strangeness of Union Falls,...

Age range 12+In this collection of evocative, unnerving slice-of-life horror, five stories explore what happens when one is desperate enough to seek solace in the unnatural, and what might be waiting for us at the Crossroads at Midnight.An old woman...

"Embraces death as a concept with due complexity." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review Death - the one aspect of life we all have in common - is waiting for everyone, yet our practices, beliefs, myths, and stories about it are as diverse as we are. YOU...

"Emotive, thoughtful, and revealing." - SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL (Starred Review)A comics anthology about an Earth where anyone and everyone has access to the stars!Six months from now, detailed schematics anonymously uploaded to the Internet will...

Co-founder of Rhino Records, Harold Bronson, tells his story. As a passionate music fan who explored the British music scene and met many of the performers whose music he loved, and in some cases got to know them as a music journalist, music executive,...

A child survivor of the Holocaust, Trudie Strobel settled in California, raising a family and never discussing the horrors she witnessed. After her children grew up, the trauma of her youth caught up with her, triggering a paralyzing depression. A...

A colorful, lively, and informed celebration of all things bookish in L.A. past and present, including interviews with current L.A. writers; day trips in search of favorite fictional characters, from Marlowe to Weetzie Bat; author quotes galore; curated...

Life is never peaceful in Chris Erskine's house, what with the four kids, 300-pound beagle, chronically leaky roof, and long-suffering wife, Posh. And that's exactly the way he likes it, except when he doesn't. Every week in the Los Angeles Times and...

Winner of the PEN Translation Prize"Pondering revolutionary Cuba, the Berlin Wall, and the caves of Cappadocia, these essays explore themes of memory, war, movement, and home."-The New Yorker"A thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and...

One of The Smithsonian Magazine's Best Science Books of the Year The future is here and, frankly, it sucks. Without doubt, our culture is at a crossroads. Political strife and economic crises are byproducts of a larger looming challenge, one in which we...

Take a trip down memory lane to witness 22 years (1976-1998) of Mortimer's, one of the most notable restaurant hotspots that ever existed for an international celebrity clientele. Found in these pages is a feast of ephemera, including menus, recipes,...

Set within the resilient Great Plains, these stories are marked by the region's people and landscape, and the distinctive way it is both regressive in its politics yet also stumbling toward something better. While not all stories are explicitly set in...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST NPR "BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR" SELECTION NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE A virtuosic debut from a gifted violinist searching for a new mode of artistic becomingHow does time shape consciousness and consciousness, time? Do we...

With the tragic and bloody ending to the optimistic 1960s in Los Angeles's fabled hills, the 1970s became a defining decade in the city. Marked by the Manson murders, rampant inflation, and recession, the decade seemed to usher in a gritty and unsightly...

Beth Kephart is a writing teacher and the award-winning author of more than thirty books; her many fans and students will embrace this intimate and beautiful memoir in essays The author's books on how to write memoir as well as previous memoirs have...

In this searing, honest memoir, a Black queer emergency-room nurse works the front lines of care during COVID-19.Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been...

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Anna Salton Eisen's memoir, Pillar of Salt: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, breaks down the barrier of silence that was intended as a protective shield for her parents and their children. From...

For almost two decades, Julia Wertz has been documenting her life's most intimate, absurd, and amusing moments through a whimsical and hilarious diary comic book called The Fart Party. Wertz retells childhood antics that end in scars and swears. She...

Nicholas Ray was cinema. The legendary director of such classic films as Rebel Without a Cause was an innovative force who dramatically changed the Hollywood landscape. He was also Nicca Ray's dad, Nick. After he disappeared from her life in...

Two seminal figures of the Beat movement, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, discuss literary influences and personal history in a never-before-published three-day conversation following the release of the David Cronenberg film of Burroughs'...

Noir meets diverse voices and transforms the genre into an over-the-top, transcendental psychedelic thriller ride of pulpy goodness in THE OBAMA INHERITANCE, a collection of fifteen stories of conspiracy noir curated by editor and award-winning...

Tolkien For Beginners will introduce the reader to the multilayered depth and breadth of Tolkien's tales of Middle-earth, what critics, following Tolkien's lead, refer to collectively as his legendarium.J.R.R. Tolkien sweeps us away to a distant time and...

C.S. Lewis For Beginners is a thorough examination of C. S. Lewis, the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, throughout his career as an author and as a professor at Oxford University.A Christian apologist defends Christianity as a...

"Engrossing ... The book reads like a detective story."-The Washington PostIt all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather,...

This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre's native Latvia during the 1920s and 30s, and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and...

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg's great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, hides in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique...

New book by National Geographic photographer Paul Chesley. This memoir of an artist's life will highlight the best images of his career, from a geisha on a phone in a limousine, to the chromatic lifestyles of Havana, the forbidding ranks of the Chinese...

Without a map, nineteen-year-old Jake Ducey leaves behind a drug-filled life and college basketball scholarship to wander the world and prove we can find our dreams by following our heart. On the outskirts of civilization, often uncertain, without money...

When Jennifer Risher joined Microsoft in 1991, she met her husband, and with him became an extra-lucky beneficiary of the dot-com boom. By their early thirties, they had tens of millions of dollars. Today, there are millions of people like her...

Go Simple, Go Solo, Go NowIn 1958, while flying from one island to another, Audrey Sutherland sees the remote and roadless northeast side of Molokai, with its spectacular sea cliffs and waterfalls. Always an adventurer, she decides that she must find a...

From editors David Joy and Eric Rickstad comesGather at the River, an anthology of twenty-five remarkable essays on fishing from an ensemble of contemporary authors. Their experiences explore the ways we come to water, for renewal and reverie, or to...

This long overdue anthology of New Narrative includes both classic New Narrative texts and rare supplementary materials, allowing the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to bound back to life, ripe with dramatic...

The Estrangement Principle argues for a wider range of possible associations with art made by queer people by unraveling the difficulties of the queer art label. Goldberg invokes the lives and works of artists Renee Gladman, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Jack...

I Always Wanted To Be Somebody is the intimate and candid story of a girl who grew up in the asphalt environs of Harlem, skipping school, drinking hard liquor, stealing and fist-fighting, but went on to break the color barrier in tennis and achieving the...

Frankenstein was first released in 1818 anonymously.The credit for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's authorship first occurred in 1823 when a French edition was published. A year earlier, Mary's revolutionary husband, the influential poet, dramatist,...

This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West is the second entry in the Divide anthology series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality, and sense of transience alive in the American West. In this collection legends, myths,...

A charming little instant classic for all ages. For the first time ever, years of comic-book and MAD magazine creator, Wally Wood's never-published personal Christmas card art plus Wood's rare Christmas cartoons and comicstrips collected into one...

"Louis Sahagun's gripping biography is an insightful look at the life and times of one of the last century's most important mystical thinkers."-The Fortean TimesIn 1919, a Canadian teenager with a sixth grade education arrived by train to the wilds of...

"Intense and bravely uncompromising. An adult study of pain, thwarted affection, and guarded privacies in a world at the edge of violent public breakdown. An impressive achievement." -DAVID MALOUF, author of Ransom: A Novel and The Happy Life: The Search...

"Evocative images, eloquent testimony-a frank and often inspiring exploration of the experience of mental illness."-Peter D. Kramer, author of Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind and Listening to ProzacA tree's bare limbs against a grey sky, a young...

A fearless and uproarious litany of contentions and revelations on poetry and the poetic mind, continuing the charge against the sacred in contemporary poetry. Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular, and the outrageous.If...

"Punchy, spiky, and flush with a young writer's love of language, the collection often deglamourizes the acting business. A great find."-Library JournalWith insightful poetry that is quite serious yet has fun with metaphor, imagery, and language, Amber...

In 2017, Australians made it clear that their understanding of equality included formal recognition of the most intimate relationships. The parliament responded to the voice of the people and passed legislation to allow same-sex marriage. A year...

Good girls do what they're told.Good girls please.Good girls make everyone else happy.Good girls do not cause trouble.Good girls keep their legs open and their mouths shut.Good girls smile and hide their true feelings.Good girls are silent.Good girls...

A child discovers the terrible secret of the garden shed. New housing estates become battlefields. A werewolf returns to the loving arms of their family. Australia's colonial history is recast with zombie penguins and contemporary life is haunted by...

Cri Fi, Sci Fi, Noir, Rom Com, Lit Fic, Western, Horror, Gothic, Fantasy, Fairytale... In Spineless Wonders' latest anthology of microlit, writers were invited to play with genre.  Here you will find some of the well-worn tropes from...