An uproarious and frank memoir of illness and recovery, No Laughing Matter is a story of friendship and recuperation from the author of the classic Catch-22.It all began one typical day in the life of Joe Heller. He was jogging four miles at a clip these days, working on his novel God Knows, coping with the complications of an unpleasant divorce, and pigging out once or twice a week on Chinese food with cronies like Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo...

An unforgettable and unpredictable debut novel of guilt, punishment, and the stories we tell ourselves to surviveNoa P. Singleton never spoke a word in her own defense throughout a brief trial that ended with a jury finding her guilty of first-degree murder. Ten years later, having accepted her fate, she sits on death row in a maximum-security penitentiary, just six months away from her execution date.Meanwhile, Marlene Dixon, a high-powered Philadelphia att...

“I had more or less resolved not to write a book about my parents. But I’m a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, not writing about it amounts either to waste or a conscious act of evasion.”So begins award-winning satirist Christopher Buckley in the most personal and transcendent work of his life, the tragicomic true story of the year in which both of his parents died.In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Buckley coped with the passing of his father...

One morning, prolific and bestselling crime novelist Howard Engel awoke to discover he had lost the ability to read. He had experienced a stroke that left him with the rare condition known as alexia sine agraphia—he could write, but as soon as he committed his thoughts to the page, he no longer knew what they were. Other effects of the stroke emerged over time, but none were as dramatic and devastating as this one for a man who made his living working with words.The Ma...

Memoir, biography, and outrageous comedy make for a perfect blend in the debut book from acclaimed writer Steve Burgess. Telling the tale of his mother's life and death, and along the way laying bare his own life and struggles, Burgess renders a memorable and deeply moving meditation on life and family.The author's mother, Joan, barely survived her thirteenth birthday: a rare disorder had made it almost impossible for her to swallow food. Her battle to survive this...

One of These Things First is a wry and poignant reminiscence of a 15 year old gay Jewish boy in Brooklyn in the early sixties, and his unexpected trajectory from a life behind a rack of dresses in his grandmother’s bra and girdle store, to Manhattan’s fabled Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, a fashionable Charenton for wealthy neurotics and Ivy League alcoholics, whose famous alumni include writers, poets, madmen, Marilyn Monroe, and bestselling author Steven Gaines.

“[Art Buchwald] has given his friends, their families, and his audiences so many laughs and so much joy through the years that that alone would be an enduring legacy. But Art has never been just about the quick laugh. His humor is a road map to essential truths and insights that might otherwise have eluded us.”—Tom BrokawWhen doctors told Art Buchwald that his kidneys were kaput, the renowned humorist declined dialysis and checked into a Washington, D.C., hospice t...

In 1957, when a young Midwestern woman landed a job at The New Yorker, she didn’t expect to stay long at the reception desk. But stay she did, and for twenty-one years she had the best seat in the house. In addition to taking messages, she ran interference for jealous wives checking on adulterous husbands, drank with famous writers at famous watering holes throughout bohemian Greenwich Village, and was seduced, two-timed, and proposed to by a few of the magazine’s eccentric luminaries. Thi...

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Sinatra’s birth, a startling, compelling, yet affectionate portrait of an American entertainment legend by his youngest daughter, who writes about the man, his life, the accusations, and about the many people who surrounded him—wives, friends, lovers, users, and sycophants—from his Hoboken childhood through the notorious “Rat Pack,” and beyond.Frank Sinatra seemed to have it all: genius, wealth, the love of beautiful women, glam...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"Thank you to Sheila Nevins for putting all this down for posterity. Women need this kind of honest excavation of the process of living." —Meryl StreepAn astonishingly frank, funny, poignant book for any woman who wishes they had someone who would say to them, "This happened to me, learn from my mistakes and my successes. Because you don't get smarter as you get older, you get braver...

This collection of true stories champions the daily contributions, commitments and sacrifices of nurses.

The story of a daughter coming to know her father at last—a deeply personal literary memoir about William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and Darkness Visible—“ardent, sophisticated, and entirely winning…this is a grown-up memoir…taut and true” (The New York Times).Part memoir and part elegy, Reading My Father is Alexandra Styron’s intimate portrait of her father, William Styron, one of the defining American novelists of the 20...