Biography and Memoir
August 2025
In this Issue
New & Upcoming Releases
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New & Upcoming Releases
And Then Came the Blues: My Story of Survival on Both Sides of the Badge
by Katrina Brownlee

After being shot ten times by her fiancé and left for dead, Katrina Brownlee miraculously survived and became a decorated NYPD detective, a mentor, and founder of a nonprofit support group for at-risk women.
Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs

Tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran's Memoir
by Khadijah Queen

Yanked out of college and torn from her sunny hometown of Los Angeles in the early 1990s, Khadijah Queen finds herself sharing a basement apartment with her mother and sister and working two retail jobs in snowy, tiny Inkster, Michigan. Longing to escape the cycle of her family's poverty, incarceration, and addiction, she joins the US Navy, determined to earn money to finish college and make it back to L.A. on her own terms. But soon after Queen completes her grueling training and boards a doomed destroyer, she finds herself faced with near-constant sexual harassment, demeaning labor assignments, and overt racism. Stuck on a ship with nowhere to hide, she looks to poetry, literature, and letters from home to get through the long days and maintain her dignity. She keeps her head down until the workplace hostility against women spills over into her dating life and threatens to derail everything she has worked for. In trying to break through the unspoken code of silence between sailors, Queen must decide where her loyalties lie: with the Navy or within herself. Unflinching and masterfully penned, this memoir questions the promises of service to reveal the true price of being a woman at sea.
Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together
by Ilana Kurshan

Kurshan, a mother of five living in Jerusalem, struggles to balance her passion for books with her responsibilities as a parent. Gradually she learns how to relate to reading not as a solitary pursuit and an escape from the messiness of life, but rather as a way of forging connection and teaching independence. Introducing her children to sacred and secular literature-including the beloved classics of her childhood-she becomes both a better mother and a more compassionate reader. Chief among the books Kurshan reads with her children is the Torah, whose ancient wisdom illuminates her family's path. Structured in five parts corresponding to the first five books of the Bible, this memoir traces the profound parallels between the biblical narrative and the daily rhythms of parenthood - from the first picture books that create the world through language for little babies, to the bittersweet moment our children begin reading on their own, leaving us behind, atop the mountain, as they enter new lands without us.
Hotshot: A Life on Fire
by River Selby

Former firefighter Selby debuts with a fierce examination of identity, climate change, and the shortcomings of U.S. fire policy.
The Invention of Charlotte Bronte: A New Life
by Graham Watson

A profoundly moving, ground-breaking biography that challenges the established narrative to reveal the Brontèe family as they've never been seen before. 
Iron Will: An Amputee's Journey to Athletic Excellence
by Roderick Sewell

The story of the first bilateral above-the-knee amputee to become and IRONMAN champion. 
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
by Susana M. Morris

A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.
Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything: A Memoir
by Alyson Stoner

Alyson Stoner details their life as a Disney Channel child star, along with their family issues, an eating disorder, and religious trauma, and their subsequent path of self-discovery and advocacy
A Truce That Is Not Peace
by Miriam Toews

Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.  A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it. 
The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound: A Memoir
by Raymond Antrobus

Award-winning poet Antrobus writes a memoir about his deaf identity and his formation of and relationship with language-spoken, written, and signed.
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