When a mystery writer cries bloody murder, everyone blames her overactive imagination...
Thriller scribe Sophie Katz is as hard-boiled as a woman who drinks Grande Caramel Brownie Frappuccinos can be. So Sophie knows it's not paranoia or post-divorce, living-alone-again jitters, when she becomes convinced that a crazed reader is sneaking into her apartment to reenact scenes from her books. The police, however, can't tell a good plot from an unmarked...

V. S. Pritchett called her "a genius." Gore Vidal described her as a "beloved novelist of singular brilliance... Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure..." And Tennessee Williams said, "The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson." She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she'd been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout...

"In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA, Dani Shapiro received the astonishing news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. In just a few hours of Internet sleuthing, she was able to piece together the story of her conception and, remarkably, find a YouTube video of her...

The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery.
For Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of Highsmith, British journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks,...

A look into the daily life of one of America's great memoirists At seventy-seven Doris Grumbach is as sharp as ever, and in Life in a Day she examines the experiences of her later years, from the dreaded writer's block to the many hours she has spent reading to the effects of an increasingly modern and interconnected world. Imbued with Grumbach's characteristic candor and verve, Life in a Day is a celebration of the meaning to be found in the quotidian....

From childhood, acclaimed novelist A. Manette Ansay trained to become a concert pianist. But when she was nineteen, a mysterious muscle disorder forced her to give up the piano, and by twenty-one, she couldn't grip a pen or walk across a room. She entered a world of limbo, one in which no one could explain what was happening to her or predict what the future would hold. At twenty-three, beginning a whole new life in a motorized wheelchair, Ansay made...

A New York Times Notable Book: To truly understand herself, Doris Grumbach embraces solitude. With a busy career as a novelist, essayist, reviewer, and bookstore owner, Doris Grumbach has little opportunity to be alone. However, after seventy-five years on the planet, she finally has her chance: Her partner has departed for an extended book-buying trip, and Grumbach has been given fifty days to relax, think, and write about her experience. In this...

The captivating biography of the trailblazing New Yorker journalist and feminist who traveled the world reporting on the tumultuous cultural and political currents of the twentieth century Emily Hahn first challenged traditional gender roles in 1922 when she enrolled in the University of Wisconsin's all-male College of Engineering, wearing trousers, smoking cigars, and adopting the nickname "Mickey." Her love of writing led her to Manhattan, where...

An extraordinary memoir on facing death . . . and choosing life Where there's a will . . . Given a death sentence after being diagnosed with cancer, Marilyn French fought back . . . and won. A Season in Hell is the story of her battle to survive against overwhelming odds. A smoker for almost half a century, French was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the summer of 1992. She was given a year to live, but five years later, she was, incredibly,...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Bird by Bird comes a personal, wise, very funny, and “life-affirming” book (People) that shows us how to find meaning and hope through shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life. 
"Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." —San Francisco...