"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices." In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman's personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist...

Beaten and Bruised, But Not Broken Terrah Hancock suffered a childhood of pain, manipulation, and abuse at the hands of her parents and uncle. Refusing to submit to their cruelty, Terrah rebels as a teenager, puts herself in dangerous situations, and is raped. At seventeen she leaves home, gets pregnant, and makes the impossible choice to give her baby up for adoption. Barraged by relentless challenges, tumultuous relationships, and another pregnancy,...

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. “I was in ‘the void,’” she writes, “a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.” Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born...

Patti Smith tells real and imagined stories from her childhood

Have you ever spoken unkindly to yourself? Do you even realize when you do? Are you ready to make changes but find yourself completely paralyzed by the choices in front of you? We live in a hyper-connected, “always-on” world, and frankly? It's exhausting. Let’s make time to disconnect from the distractions and reconnect with yourself. Hiking My Feelings: Stepping into the Healing Power of Nature is more than a collection of trail tales - it’s...

Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet’s rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy’s life continually intersects with and is informed by the creatures she meets. This restorative memoir reflects on the personalities and quirks...

"Traces one woman's lifelong quest for love, connection, and peace of mind. A heartbreakingly vulnerable and tragically funny memoir in remedies, Megan Griswold's narrative spans four decades and six continents--from the glaciers of Patagonia and the psychotropics of Brazil to academia, the IVy League, and the study of Eastern medicine"--Jacket.

Four years before Nina Totenberg started working at NPR, where she cemented her legacy as a prize-wining reporter, and nearly twenty-two years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Nina called Ruth. A reporter for The National Observer, Nina was curious about Ruth's legal brief asking the supereme Court to do something revolutionary: declare a law that discriminated "on the bases of sex" to be unconstitutional. In a time when...

In 2014, the landmarks of Victoria Belim's personal geography were plunged into tumult at the hands of Russia. Her hometown Kyiv was gripped by protests and violent suppression. Crimea, where she'd once been sent to school to avoid radiation from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, was invaded. Kharkiv, where her grandmother Valentina studied economics and fell in love; Donetsk, where her father once worked; and Mariupol, where she and her mother bought...

"A memoir of the author's journey from an office job to restoring a cabin in the Pacific Northwest, based on his Outside Magazine piece. Wit's End isn't just a state of mind. It's an address, for a run-down off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim in the mossy woods of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. To say Hutchison didn't know what he was getting into is no more an exaggeration than...