Biographies & True Stories

A celebration of achievement, accomplishments, and courage!Native American Medal of Honor recipients, Heisman Trophy recipients, U.S. Olympians, a U.S. vice president, Congressional representatives, NASA astronauts, Pulitzer Prize recipients, U.S. poet...

A celebration of people and pride! Explore the achievements and contributions of Latinos in the United States with this illuminating history.Latinos in the United States are a vibrant mix of people and multiple identities, each unique, varied, and...

The public's appetite for all things Oprah Winfrey has waned little since her Chicago TV debut in 1983. Known as a self-help guru and the 'Queen of All Media', Oprah has been shining light on social issues and encouraging fans...

From National Book Award-nominee Iliana Regan, a new memoir of her life and heritage as a forager, spanning her ancestry in Eastern Europe, her childhood in rural Indiana, and her new life set in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula...

Get inside the head of Jane Fonda: actress, political activist, environmentalist, philanthropist, and creator of an unlikely fitness empire that captivated the country beginning in the 1980s.This collection of quotes has been curated from Jane Fonda's...

Age range 13 to 18Get inside the head of Michelle Obama: author, lawyer, humanitarian, and the trailblazing first Black woman to serve as the First Lady of the United States. This collection of quotes has been carefully curated from Michelle...

Get inside the head of one of the most beloved musicians of our time, a longtime country music phenomenon turned titan of industry and cultural icon: Dolly PartonThis collection of quotes has been carefully curated from Parton's numerous public...

A collection of over 300 quotes from Bill Gates, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and tech iconGet inside the head of one of the most important leaders of our time with this collection of quotes from-global business icon and philanthropist Bill Gates, the...

A collection of 500 quotes from RuPaul, actor, singer, producer and host of RuPaul's Drag Race, and the most influential drag queen of our time. Part of the In Their Own Words series.Get inside the head of RuPaul: award-winning TV personality, musician,...

Get inside the head of one of the most influential musicians of our time, a pop music phenomenon turned titan of industry and cultural icon: Taylor Swift.This collection of quotes has been carefully curated from Swift's numerous public statements -...

Beulah Annan. Belva Gaertner. Kitty Malm. Sabella Nitti. These are the real women of Chicago.You probably know Roxie and Velma, the good-time gals of the 1926 satirical play Chicago and its wildly successful musical and movie adaptations. You might not...

LONGLISTED for the National Book Award 2019Michelin-starred chef Iliana Regan's (Elizabeth, Kitsune) culinary memoir, chronicling this intensely driven chef's upbringing in rural Northwest Indiana, her battle with addiction, and the development of her...

Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore based out of his garage. Since then, the ever-expanding enterprise has revolutionized shopping and, in many important ways, invented e-commerce as we know it. Today, Amazon is the third-most...

Age range 13 to 18A collection of 300 quotes from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Part of theIn Their Own Wordsseries.As one of only nine women in a class of 500 at Harvard Law School when she enrolled in 1956 and one of only four female...

A capturing of basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain's personality and thoughts-known by relatively few people other than family and close friends-is made available to all in this intimate biography. The author, a native of Philadelphia and an alumnus of...

Philip Pullman, author of 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, has remarked that "after nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world." This new collection of Rumi stories fills that need.This fresh prose translation...

The only psychic ever to lecture at the FBI Academy, Noreen Renier has assisted law-enforcement officials all over the world, working on more than 400 criminal cases. From the discovery and development of her unique talents to becoming a respected figure...

A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.For poet...

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 Recommended Read for 2023 A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book of 2023A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.What are the politics...

"I was in the car the first time music seemed strange: the instruments less distinct, the vocals less crisp." John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came...

As the Amazon burns, Fbio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.In 2007, a seven-ton minke whale was found stranded on the banks of the Tapajs River, hundreds of miles into the Amazon rainforest. For days,...

Like a long, funny letter from an old friend, an album of drawings by the legendary singer and activist for social justice, Joan Baez.Since retiring from active performing, Baez has focused her formidable talents on painting and drawing. This collection...

"One of the Year's Best," Times Literary SupplementWhen a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he's famous...

The first book by highly respected contemporary artist, Lincoln Perry. For readers of What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art, the classic Ways of Seeing, How to See: Looking, Talking,...

"Old Poets is an indispensable jewel." -Washington Post"An astonishing array of encounters...Hall's observations are shrewd and generous." -Boston GlobeIntimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and...

The first book on a fascinating mysterious death with art as big business at the center. Indiana's work is loved even by those unfamiliar with his name. Expect major review attention from mainstream and art news media. Robert Indiana's life, work and...

An intimate portrait of an extended Jewish family in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, who, when faced with imminent deportation and death, refused to comply.As the Nazis tightened their grip on the Netherlands' Jewish population, Daphne Geismar's family...

A meditation on in vitro fertilization that expands and complicates the stories we tell about pregnancy.Medical interventions become an exercise in patience, desire, and delirium in this intimate account of bodily transformation and disruption. In...

A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders. Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutirrez's debut essay...

Praise for Karen Tei Yamashita:"It's a stylistically wild ride, but it's smart, funny and entrancing." -NPR"Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." -New York Times Book ReviewWith delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an...

As time has proven, Theory of Prose still remains one of the twentieth century's most significant works of literary theory. It not only anticipates structuralism and poststructuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as...

Audition monologues from recent works by American playwrights.

Foreword by Bishop Karen Oliveto. Oliveto is the first openly lesbian bishop to be elected in the United Methodist Church. Resonates with young people as it is both a memoir of coming of age and of coming out. Readers looking for queer stories-Cultural...

"It deserves prominent placement on LGBTQ history bookshelves. . . . An indelible collection of wise voices resonating with experience, pride, resilience, and revolution." -Kirkus starred reviewForeword by Kate Bornstein and Barbara CarrellasIn The...

"Through the spaces between people in these beguiling fictions, love wanders like a ghost, offering whispered hints of solace against a backdrop of isolating divisions. In the spirit of the enigmatic stories of Lydia Davis, Isak Dinesen, Yasunari...

In this courageous memoir, Elizabeth Heineman "illuminates the complex emotional landscape of stillbirth-putting into frank and poetic words the unspeakable experience of simultaneously grieving and mothering a baby who has died" (Deborah L. Davis)...

In this evocative account of navigating pregnancy loss, Jessica Zucker confronts the cultural silence around miscarriages and illuminates how she built a movement from her experience, transforming trauma into human connection.Sixteen weeks into her...

A consummate insider as the girlfriend of Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac singer and guitarist, Carol Ann Harris leads fans into the very heart of the band's storms between 1976 and 1984. From interactions between the band and other stars-Mick Jagger,...

A reconsideration of Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking A Room of One's Own through a very modern lens, revisiting Woolf's now archaic politics and mining the text for lessons on how to be a writer. The central message of A Room of One's Own is that, to...

For fans of Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

The fiction and poetry of Queer Little Nightmares reimagines monsters old and new through a queer lens, subverting the horror gaze to celebrate ideas and identities canonically feared in monster lit. Throughout history, monsters have appeared in popular...

Capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our personal, social, economic, and sexual lives. By examining the politics of gender, environment and sexuality, we can see the ways straight, cis, white, and especially male upper-class people control and...

The frank and bracing memoir of a woman who spent ten years as a stripper.This Is My Real Name is the memoir of Cid V Brunet, who spent ten years working as a dancer at strip clubs, using the name Michelle. From her very first lap dance in a small-town...

At the age of twenty-five, Kimiko Tobimatsu was a young, queer,mixed-race woman with no history of health problems whose world was turnedupside down when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In an instant, shebecame immersed in a new and complicated...

In this intimate and movinggraphic memoir, Teresa Wong writes and illustrates the story of her strugglewith postpartum depression in the form of a letter to her daughter Scarlet.Equal parts heartbreaking and funny, DearScarlet perfectly captures the...

Inthis jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in adysfunctional Asian family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons when theyshould really be on anti-psychotic meds. Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoidschizophrenic...

A life-affirming graphic novel about two women - one a widow, the other recovering from a horrible breakup - neither of whom knows a way to move forward.Still smarting years after ahorrible breakup, Rayanne diligently buries herself in her work. Aside...

Alan Turing, subject of the Oscar-winning 2014 film The Imitation Game, was the brilliant mathematician solicited by the British government to help decipher messages sent by Germany's Enigma machines during World War II. The work of...