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Biography & Memoir May 2026 |
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Homesick Nomad: Settling Into an Untethered Life by Brianna Madia Brianna Madia is renowned for her honest and enthralling accounts of life in the wilderness, finding her own way by rejecting society’s expectations, so what happens when she falls in love and has to reset the boundaries of her fierce independence? Homesick Nomad finds Bri splitting her time between her beloved wild desert in Utah and her boyfriend’s cozy suburban home in the Pacific Northwest, reckoning with: - a new urge to soften into the embrace of the comforts of home
- defining her purpose and direction in life, including the big decision facing women, the question of motherhood, and
- the fear that committing to others means sacrificing independence.
She’s not only defying convention to prove something to herself or to others—a simpler way of life out in the desert actually brings her peace, as she realizes when resisting “upgrades” to her trailer like running water. Balancing the liberation of the wilderness with the natural compromises of love, Bri navigates these familiar tensions by embracing her life in its wholeness, richer for both the stability of home and the profundity of wide open spaces.
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Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found by Andrew Graham-Dixon One spring day in 1683, a notary’s clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled upon one of the wonders of the seventeenth-century world: twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Rather than dispel the mysteries of Vermeer’s life, this discovery merely gave rise to more questions: How had this one Dutchwoman come to possess the majority of the master’s work? And why have these images―among the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art―defied explanation for so long? Following new leads and drawing on freshly uncovered evidence from Dutch archives, acclaimed art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon fills these long-standing gaps in art history, presenting a dramatic and transformative new interpretation of Vermeer’s life and work. Dixon considers Vermeer holistically, placing him in his complex historical, social, religious, political, and artistic context in order to understand what spaces he occupied in his life and how the texture of these spaces inspired his paintings and distinguished him from his artistic contemporaries. Dixon also interrogates the nature of Vermeer’s relationship with the Van Ruijven family, which was unlike any other known relationship in that time period, and discusses how this dynamic shaped his artistic practice. Rich with piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer’s paintings, Graham-Dixon’s biography is full of revelations. It upends the master’s enigmatic reputation and depicts him instead as a pioneer of the early Enlightenment, a pacifist who was deeply affected by the wars and religious conflicts of the Dutch Republic and allied to a radical movement driven underground by persecution. In Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, Dixon does what countless art historians and scholars before him failed to: he brings Johannes Vermeer, renowned for his use of chiaroscuro, out of the shadows and into the light.
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Famesick: A Memoir by Lena DunhamFor the last decade, as she’s spent countless hours in doctor’s waiting rooms searching for diagnoses, treatments, and relief, being the owner and operator of Lena Dunham’s body has felt, as she puts it, “like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.” It’s not easy dragging a wrecked car anywhere, much less to the Met Gala while sewn into a gold lamé corset. Or to the set of the hit show that you—as a twenty-five-year-old—are writing, directing, producing, and starring in. Or to the White House, the Golden Globes, or your publicist’s office to discuss the latest internet disaster. But Dunham does it—even if it means interminable hospital stays, vomiting in the bathroom when she’s meant to be meeting Oprah, or terrifying those closest to her—because she can no longer tell the difference between fighting to do what she loves and being a servant to her own ambition. All the while, she is holding out for a love that can withstand her personal and public challenges and, more than anything, yearning to feel like herself again—if only she could remember who that self was.
As Dunham takes us through her journey, tracking her rise to fame—from selling the pilot of Girls to the present—in three acts, it becomes clear that the spotlight casts long shadows, distorting the relationships she once held dear and isolating everyone in its glare. When an endless supply of drugs can’t protect you from pain—and begins to control your every move—being famous doesn’t stand a chance against the darker corners of the human experience. In Famesick, Dunham asks herself what the cost of fulfilling her dreams has really been, and whether it was worth it. What she finds is deeper than physical relief, and more lasting, as she learns to live with what she can’t change and turn her regrets into wisdom that can carry her forward, as she reconnects to what, and who, she loves.
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The Violence: My Family's Colombian War by Adriana E. RamírezWhen presumed president-elect Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, champion of the working class and harbinger of a new era of progressive social change, is assassinated on the eve of Colombia’s 1948 presidential election, the capital is plunged into bloodshed. So begins a singularly brutal period of Colombia’s history known simply as la violencia—a bloody civil war that spawned decades of turmoil and splintered the country into ever-shifting factions. The Violence is an intimate history of this conflict—told not from the political center of the war but from the mountainous finca that Adriana E. Ramírez’s family tended to for generations, and through the eyes of her formidable grandmother, Esther. With startling lyricism, Ramírez illuminates the specter of violence—from guerilla warfare to the brutalities found so often in romantic relationships to the spontaneous and senseless violence steeped into everyday Colombian life during this period—and the threat that it poses to a country, and a family, that is trying to stay whole. Gracefully braiding together macrohistory, family history, and personal narrative, Adriana E. Ramírez traces these parallel stories of upheaval in a sweeping portrait of a country and family in flux.
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The Original by Priya ParmarWhen young Katharine Hepburn loses her beloved brother, she makes two decisions: she will become famous, and she will never let anyone hurt her again. Leaving home at twenty-one to pursue an acting career Kate is lured to Hollywood, accompanied by her lover, Laura. Los Angeles in the early 1930s is a town full of secrets and Kate has plenty to hide. Soon she is scooped into the studio system and launched as a star—but stars must play by the rules and Kate, brilliant, bisexual, and strong-willed, refuses to conform. Surrounded by a legendary circle of intimates, including the powerful David and Irene Selznick, charming and romantically conflicted actor Cary Grant, ambitious director John Ford, and millionaire tycoon Howard Hughes, Kate navigates a web of sex, ambition, and betrayal. As her career ascends, she faces an agonizing choice: be the star everyone wants her to be, or risk everything to become the woman she always was. The author of New York Times Notable Book Vanessa and Her Sister has created a propulsive, emotionally charged novel exploring the cost of fame. With sharp prose and unforgettable characters, The Original is a story of love, aspiration, and the price of living authentically.
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Kate!: The Courage, Grace, and Power of the Woman Who Will Be Queen by Christopher AndersenKate is one of the most photographed, most talked about, most written about women in the world—heiress to Princess Diana’s glamour and mystique, both wife of one future monarch and mother of another. But as the daughter of an airline attendant who grew up in public housing, Kate was not destined for this fate. She had to fight for it—and for the love of the future king. In this illuminating portrait, master biographer Christopher Andersen chronicles Kate’s life, beginning with her humble upbringing; her off-again, on-again love story with William that catapulted her to global fame; and the 2011 “Wedding of the Century.” Throughout their marriage, Kate has proven that she is more than just a prince’s wife—she is a leader in humanitarian work, the devoted mother of three children in the media spotlight, an unparalleled fashion icon, and the universally adored face of Britain’s monarchy. Yet her story is more complex than the public knows. With startling new details from his inside sources, Andersen reveals the full picture: including Kate’s fight to repair William and Harry’s rift, the disintegration of her relationship with Meghan, her work to refute charges of racism leveled at the monarchy, and her bravery in the face of cancer—her diagnosis and treatment, and the bizarre theories that swirled around her public disappearance. Kate! is an against-all-odds romance, a glittering fairy tale, and a heart-tugging family drama within the modern monarchy—but most of all, an inspiring saga of one woman’s grace and grit in the face of adversity.
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This Dark Night: Emily Bronte, a Life by Deborah Lutz Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was only twenty-seven-years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. Two years later in 1847, she completed Wuthering Heights. It took the world almost a century to catch up to Brontë’s masterpiece, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë―an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death and the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers. Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, This Dark Night constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the effect of their sisters’ and mother’s tragic deaths. In the first full-length biography in over twenty years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father’s parsonage: writing interweaving with household work, daydreaming, and exploring the rough-hewn outdoors. As she traces the influence of Brontë’s life and work, Lutz follows how Brontë’s fantastical early poems of the night sky, women rulers, and outsiders and rebels grew into the stormy, transcendent Wuthering Heights. Lutz also illuminates the overlooked ways that the legendary writer addressed debates of her time that still resonate today, including questions of gender and sexuality, race and class, and rapid industrialization set against the natural world. From her menagerie of dogs and birds to the beloved moors that Brontë wandered and later emblazoned in her novel, Lutz depicts the passions of an author at odds with convention. Uniting the domestic and the cosmic, This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.
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American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac FitzgeraldAs a child, Isaac Fitzgerald was captivated by Johnny Appleseed, drawn to the legend by family ties, his father’s larger-than-life stories, and a shared restlessness to leave home and discover what lay beyond. In American Rambler, he sets out on a year-long journey to follow Appleseed’s path, walking (okay, sometimes driving, and at one point, even floating downstream) from Massachusetts to Indiana. On this journey, Fitzgerald turns a childhood fascination into a profound reckoning of loss and grief, ritual and faith, grimy gas station bathrooms and scenic apple picking. He is followed by a mysterious creature, camps in hostile environments, trespasses more than once, and is warmed by the generosity of strangers at every turn. A moving blend of memoir, history, and travelogue, American Rambler is at once an ode to the American heartland, a meditation on escaping the breakneck pace of modern life, and a clear-eyed look at the myths—often violent, sometimes hopeful, frequently romanticized—at the very core of American identity and history.
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Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician by Dan ChiassonIn this symphonic origin story of an era-defining politician, Dan Chiasson, a Burlington native who had a ringside seat to Bernie Sanders’s development, reconstructs the rise of an American icon. With in-depth reporting and remarkable remembered scenes, Chiasson tracks a faint political signal that traveled from the Vermont communes, hardluck neighborhoods, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the town meetings and ballot boxes of his home state, and finally to Washington, D.C., to transform our national political landscape. Sanders, insisting on a socialist platform that hasn’t changed to this day, defied a corrupt Democratic machine to find his coalition among Burlington’s often feuding communities: the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose grandparents and great-grandparents—including Chiasson’s own—had worked in the mills; the puppeteers, hippies, and NYC transplants who’d moved to Vermont to find land and authenticity; the anti-nukers, activist nuns, baseball fans, developers, cops, and small businessmen like Ben and Jerry, who became Ben & Jerry’s right there in town. Bernie captivated them all, running on the slogan “Burlington Is Not for Sale” to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, one who got the streets plowed but also boasted a foreign policy and a bullhorn to speak directly to Ronald Reagan.
In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, this people’s epic shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee and one neighborhood door-knock at a time, even as the analog era wanes and a new digital politics appears on the horizon. Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, Bernie for Burlington is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.
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The Royal Insider: My Life with the Queen, the King and Princess Diana by Paul Burrell'For twenty-one years I was in a privileged position and shared the lives of the Queen and Princess Diana. Now that neither of these two wonderful women are here, that duty continues for me in the need to protect their legacy.' For over two decades, Paul Burrell was a silent witness to the making of history - first as footman to Queen Elizabeth II, then as butler to King Charles III (then Prince of Wales), and, most famously, as a confidante of the late Princess Diana. Now, with a unique perspective shaped by time and change, he's ready to share his own story alongside theirs. His bestselling memoir, A Royal Duty, about his friendship with Diana, sent shockwaves around the world, selling over two million copies. But it is only, in the wake of the Queen's passing and the commencement of a new royal era, Burrell feels he can finally tell his story in full.
In this deeply personal and intimate memoir, Burrell shares many untold stories of his life at home and abroad with the Royals. With warmth, candour, and rare insight, he recounts unexpected moments of intimacy with the Queen, who gently guided a fresh-faced, 18-year-old Burrell through palace life. He speaks candidly about the tensions that simmered during those years - including the breakdown of Charles and Diana's marriage and his own complex relationship with Princes William and Harry. He also reveals his heartache at parting with three of the most significant women in his life - the Queen, Diana and his wife Maria - all while navigating his own personal journey to happiness as well as a battle with prostate cancer. Heartfelt, sincere and rich in detail, this is the memoir of a man who has lived and learned in the most extraordinary of ways.
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