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Biography & Memoir August 2026 |
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Relegated: One American's Pints-And-Pies Journey from the Top to the Bottom of English Football by Todd SmithRelegation, the devastating consequence English football teams face when they underperform, is something Todd Smith kept seeing in his own life. He grew up surrounded by soccer: his father was the head athletic trainer for the Minnesota Kicks of the 70s-era North American Soccer League, and Todd played into college. But while his family life was happy after that, his professional life didn’t go the way of his dreams. He spent two decades working tirelessly in blue-collar jobs while trying to break through as a writer. He often felt discouraged, like he’d never really made it, like he himself had been demoted to a lower league. In Relegated, Todd embarks on a trip of personal and professional discovery. Looking for a change and a chance to write about something that really matters to him, he takes off for a multi-month, immersive expedition through the world and culture of English football. He visits not only the best clubs but also the most out of the way and forgotten ones. In these places, like the Old Spotted Dog Ground in East London, the port town of Grimsby (once voted the worst city in England), and Arbroath on the north coast of Scotland, he begins to understand what it means to be a “true” supporter of this historic and cherished game. He meets pub owners, groundskeepers, fan club organizers, and professional and amateur players who show him a deeper love of the sport. He learns how communities rally around a club, how much joy and suffering they can take, and how football clubs—even the lesser-known ones—can bond people together in memories that last a lifetime. A heartwarming account featuring pints, meat pies, a rainbow of team scarves and banners, and some very colorful slang, Relegated is the story of a man looking to transform himself while discovering the true meaning of English football.
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Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His parents were fugitives after a decade fighting the US government; his mother was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. All his life, Dohrn's parents said his birth marked a clean break with violent revolutionary struggle, but in this explosive memoir, he discovers that story wasn't entirely true. This masterpiece of personal and social history brings us inside an infamous family and their lives underground. Drawing on exclusive interviews, declassified FBI files, and long-hidden letters, photos, and diaries, Dohrn tells a new story of radical resistance, including revelations about the Weathermen's bombing campaign, their secret alliance with the Black Liberation Army, and the dramatic prison break of Assata Shakur. Reckoning with the emotional damage the Weathermen inflicted on their victims, their children, and themselves, Dohrn's unflinching memoir explores the roots of radicalism and asks how a young person survives when the place they feel safest―with their family―also puts them in danger.
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Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is an audiobook for James, but it is not an audiobook about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
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Cancel Me If You Can by Dave PortnoyDave Portnoy is a gambler. From his days playing Little League baseball, he has always bet on himself and his future, which is exactly how he built his digital media empire, Barstool Sports. It all started in 2004, when Dave wrote what he knew and passed out a four-page broadsheet newspaper all over Boston. The idea was simple but revolutionary: not everyone wanted their sports takes from SportsCenter anchors in suits. Fans wanted something local, raw, and unapologetic—written in the same language and tone you might hear at your local sports bar. So, Dave gave it to them. More than twenty years later, Barstool has grown into a nine-figure company with over 300 employees and 150 active brands. But the story doesn’t end there. Dave continues to expand Barstool and his personal brand, launching into the world of sports betting, giving honest pizza reviews, building generational media stars, and giving back to dog shelters and small businesses with the help of his own famous rescue dog, Miss Peaches. Though he didn’t set out to be a political lightning rod, it happened—and he’s fully aware that half the internet hates him while the other half loves him. The truth? He doesn’t care, as long as people take interest. He’s always been brutally honest, and he always will be. Dave’s journey hasn’t been perfect. He’s failed—publicly and personally—and he’s constantly willing to risk it all. Why? Because he already knows what it’s like to lose everything and start over, time and time again. So why not?
In Cancel Me If You Can, Dave lays it all out: the hard work, the timing, the luck, the poisonous relationships behind the curtain, and the balls it took to get to where he is today. This isn’t a memoir or a business book—it’s another bet on himself. But honestly, would you really want to bet against him? The odds are against it.
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My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction by Deborah LevyOur narrator has a lot going on. Her friend Eva’s cat is missing―also, she wonders, where is Eva’s husband. Their other friend Fanny is barely around, and not because of her job in finance; she is tangled up with no less than three lovers. And Gertrude Stein is ruining the narrator’s life. She is trying to write an essay about Stein but it seems impossible. She knows too much and nothing at all about the leading avant-garde thinker of the early twentieth century. There are the facts: Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Harvard and medicine at Johns Hopkins, then quit; curated modern art in her rented apartment that would shake the world; wrote novels, plays, poetry, and libretti that are incoherent and brilliant; felt love at first sight for her daring wife, the subject of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. But so much is out of reach. How do we put ourselves together? What do we lose to become modern? What do we find beyond the limits of language? Only a book like this, only a book by Deborah Levy, “an indelible writer [and] elliptical genius” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review), could attempt such an investigation. It crashes through genre to form something distinctively, utterly new―an imaginative, entertaining, and scholarly manifestation befitting the genius at its center. This is My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein.
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24 Hours in Shogun's Japan: A Day in the Life of the People Who Lived There by Mark Hudson In 1614, Japan stood at a crossroads. As the Tokugawa shogunate tightened its grip on power, samurai prepared for war, Christians faced persecution, and foreign merchants navigated a rapidly shifting political landscape. In 24 Hours in Shogun’s Japan, Mark Hudson brings this pivotal moment to life through the eyes of 24 individuals – nobles and farmers, merchants and monks, pirates and poets – each living through one dramatic hour of a single day. From the streets of Kyoto to the slopes of Mount Fuji, this book offers an immersive portrait of this fascinating era of Japanese history.
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Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind by Thomas MeyerDrawing on newly discovered archival materials and previously overlooked documents—from both Germany, where Hannah Arendt was born to a Jewish family in 1906, and the United States, where she was a citizen from 1950—Thomas Meyer tells the story of an intellectual icon whose character and ideas continue to captivate and challenge us to this day. Tracing anew Arendt’s journey from Königsberg to Paris, where she fled after being imprisoned in 1933, and finally to New York in 1941, Meyer illuminates her formative years and the development of her radical and brilliant books, as well as her lifelong philosophical debate with Martin Heidegger, whose Nazism was a permanent challenge for her. Meyer’s account centers on two pivotal phases—Arendt’s years in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany and her time in the United States leading up to the landmark publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951—providing not only a meticulous reconstruction of her life but also a compelling invitation to rethink her legacy for our times. At a time of acute political polarization, with liberalism in crisis and urgent debates about freedom, responsibility, and truth unfolding all around, Arendt’s writings and ideas resonate more powerfully than ever. Meyer’s account of her extraordinary life is groundbreaking and sensational, not just for his illuminating and peerless research, but also for his incisive exploration of what Arendt’s work has meant over the decades—and continues to mean for us today.
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Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail by Earl SwiftIn 1990, a youthful Earl Swift backpacked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, a transformative experience that colored every aspect of his later life. He emerged from his hike across the rugged, sky-high roof of fourteen eastern states a sharper and more organized thinker, a better problem solver, and a committed outdoorsman. But he also left the AT with baggage: Early in his odyssey, he spent time with a couple of other southbounders, who were friendly, capable, and doing everything right, but who were nonetheless murdered weeks later at a mountaintop campsite in Pennsylvania—a fit of violence that the killer never explained. Half a lifetime later, Swift returned to the trail to find out whether he was still, in his sixties, equal to the AT’s roller-coaster terrain. Driving him, too, was a quest for answers that had nagged at him since that first hike: What had happened at that campsite to turn two smart, bighearted people into prey? Why had fate chosen them, when other hikers—Swift included—seemed more likely candidates? And how could such a grisly episode have unfolded in the backcountry’s sylvan loveliness, not to mention one of the safest places around? Up on Cove Mountain is the arresting account of Swift’s 2024 trek through the AT’s enduring wonders and the ghosts of its past, a chronicle of swashbuckling adventure coupled with a meditation on the nature of risk and the risks of nature.
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Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech by Claire Stapleton When Claire Stapleton joined Google in 2007, it felt like stepping into a worldview as much as a job. The company offered not just a career, but a moral project. In the heady early years of Big Tech and when Google’s in-house slogan was “Don’t be evil,” it was easy to believe that technology wasn’t just changing the world—it was going to fix it. Stapleton quickly became known as the “Bard of Google,” pulled into the rooms where the company narrated itself—writing speeches, blog posts, and executive communications for leaders including Larry Page. As she rose through increasingly rarefied roles, from the storied Creative Lab to YouTube marketing, she helped shape the myth from the inside. But as the gap between Google’s ideals and its reality widened, the dissonance became impossible to ignore. In 2018, amid outrage over the company’s handling of sexual harassment, Stapleton helped organize the 20,000-employee Google Walkout—a defining rupture in Silicon Valley’s self-image that The New York Times called a “watershed moment in tech.” Overnight, she became a public face of employee revolt—and no longer someone the company could neatly fold back into its story. Sharp, witty, and unsparing, Don’t Be Evil is an insider’s account of how power actually works—and a deeper reckoning with the stories we tell about work, purpose, and ourselves. In a culture that collapses identity into work, and as tech elites blur the line between private authority and public life, it asks: how much can you change from within—and when is it time to walk away?
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The Solo Honeymoon: A Brief Beautiful True Love Story by Laura MurphyWhen Laura and Devon sat down to plan their honeymoon, Castellina in Chianti, Italy, was the obvious destination. Four months later, Laura found herself standing in a secret spot at the edge of the village watching the sunset. It would have been perfect, if Devon had been there with her. But Laura’s fiancé, the love of her life, had died in her arms a month before their wedding. The Solo Honeymoon follows Laura as she faces her fears and heartbreak by going alone on the honeymoon she had planned with Devon. From screaming from the mountaintops in Ireland to wandering the busy streets of London to dining on the French Riviera and watching the sun set over Castellina, Laura travels across Europe to find solid ground. Along the way, readers learn her unique love story and come to know Devon and what made their relationship so special. The result is a beautiful exploration of what it means to choose life in the face of unimaginable pain. The Solo Honeymoon shines a light on the joy of love, the depths of grief, and all the beauty there is in the world.
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