Biography and Memoir
June 2026

Recent Releases
Labor: One Woman's Work
by Dr. Mary Fariba Afsari

A powerful memoir of medicine, identity, and family secrets from an esteemed ob-gyn as she unravels her grandmother's mysterious death while reimagining women's health care from a mobile clinic--for readers of The Beauty in Breaking and The In-Between. In Labor: One Woman's Work, Dr. Mary Afsari takes us on a deeply personal and transformative journey through her life as an ob-gyn. Set against the vivid backdrops of Portland, Oregon, and Shiraz, Iran, this powerful memoir intertwines the complexities of her professional life with the hidden truths of her family's past, exploring the intersection of medicine, identity, and the enduring search for agency. The story begins in the bustling corridors of an Oregon hospital, where Mary dedicates herself wholeheartedly to her patients-often at great personal cost. At the same time, Mary uncovers a long-buried family secret: the tragic story of her grandmother Mehry's death in 1950s Iran. This revelation propels her on a quest to untangle the threads of her family's history while confronting the forces that have shaped her identity and her professional mission. As Mary struggles with the oppressive realities of the medical-industrial complex and the growing attacks on women's reproductive rights, she chooses a path of bold defiance. Inspired by her grandmother's legacy and her own commitment to compassionate care, she decides to take her work out of the hospital and on the road: she converts an RV into a mobile women's health clinic. This innovative act allows her to deliver personalized, critical reproductive health care services across the Pacific Northwest, creating community and enduring friendships along the way. 'When women don't have a choice, bad things happen,' Mary writes. Labor is an intimate, immersive personal story, a rallying cry in a post-Roe world, and an inspiring example of what women can do when they do have a choice. Rich with the voices of her patients and the vibrant cultural threads of her Iranian heritage, Mary's story challenges us to rethink the boundaries of health care and reclaim the autonomy of women's bodies and lives. With warmth, insight, and humor, Labor ultimately offers a vision of transformation, resilience, and the power of reclaiming one's path and saving other people's lives in the process.
Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest by James Martin
Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest
by James Martin

In this memoir, James Martin recounts his experiences working in a variety of entry-level jobs during his youth, including positions as a busboy, dishwasher, caddy, usher, factory worker, bank teller, and corporate employee, before entering the Jesuit order. Set primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, the narrative describes his lack of prior experience in these roles and the challenges he encountered while learning workplace responsibilities. The work presents a coming-of-age account that reflects on employment, personal development, and the formative impact of early work experiences. Through these episodes, the author considers themes such as responsibility, maturity, interpersonal relationships, and ethical conduct. Photographs from the author's early life are included.
American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed
by Isaac Fitzgerald

As a child, Isaac Fitzgerald was always captivated by Johnny Appleseed, drawn by family ties to the legend, his father’s larger-than-life stories, and a shared restlessness to leave home and discover what lies beyond. In American Rambler, he sets out, walking from Massachusetts to Indiana on a year-long journey to follow Appleseed’s path, turning a childhood fascination into a profound reckoning of loss and grief, ritual and faith, grimy gas-station bathrooms and scenic apple picking. A moving blend of memoir, history, and travelogue, American Rambler is at once an ode to the American heartland and an antidote to the breakneck pace of modern life.
Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay
by Mary Lisa Gavenas

Growing up in Depression-era Texas, Mary Kathlyn Wagner is a dutiful daughter and diligent student with ambition aplenty and no place to use it. Married at sixteen, she is a grandmother at thirty-four. When she is not cooking or cleaning or taking care of the kids, she peddles cleaning products to other housewives. The work has no salary and no security but she sticks with it, sure that direct selling will make her dreams come true. In 1963, after she has been divorced three times and widowed twice, she sets up her own company, selling second chance and self-invention for the price of a skin care showcase. Soon millions know her as the little lady in the big wig who gives away pink Cadillacs. From its unpromising start in a 500-square-foot Dallas storefront, Mary Kay Inc. grows into a global phenomenon with 3.5 million reps in over 35 countries. She becomes the most famous saleswoman in the world. Maybe the most famous ever. Based on fifteen years of research, Selling Opportunity gives us a page-turning rags-to-riches story set against the background of direct selling in all its overstated, over-the-top glory. Here, for the first time, is the definitive history of a peculiarly American industry and a mid-century mindset that ennobled extreme self-reliance, sticking to your guns, and blind faith in the American dream.
This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, a Life
by Deborah Lutz

Emily Brontë was only twenty-seven-years old when she started work on one of the most important novels in the English language. In two years, she completed Wuthering Heights in 1847, while the world took almost a hundred years to catch up. It has taken the world even longer to know Brontë--enigmatic, less initially renowned than sister Charlotte of Jane Eyre fame, and with a legacy marred by the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers. This Dark Night is a portrait of Emily Brontë, her writing sisters, and the material and cultural world they lived in, tracing Brontë's passions from the incomparable moors outside her home to the storm, strife, and longing that populates her poetry and novel. Deborah Lutz reconstructs the texture of Emily's days as masterful writer and woman tending to a household in Victorian England. She places Brontë in the history of modern thought and emerges with a mythic figure: consummate artist, deeply idiosyncratic person, and creator of a cherished and extraordinarily influential work.
Say It in Letters
While collections of personal letters aren’t technically biographies, letters written by (and to) famous people can be a wellspring of primary source material that biographers use to study their subjects. Indeed, people often reveal sides of themselves in the letters they write that they wouldn’t to the rest of the world! Enjoy these titles that feature interesting people’s collections of correspondence.
 
 
Notes to John
by Joan Didion

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood—misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe—and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, “what it’s been worth.” The analysis would continue for more than a decade. Didion’s journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedently intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers—questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.
Abigail Adams: Letters (Loa #275) by Abigail Adams
Abigail Adams: Letters
by Abigail Adams

Abigail Adams was an unusually accomplished letter writer. Spirited and insightful, her correspondence offers a unique vantage on historical events in which her family played so prominent a role, while bringing vividly to life the everyday experience of American women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here are 430 letters - more than a hundred published for the first time - to John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Mercy Otis Warren, James and Dolley Madison, and Martha Washington, among many others. Including her famous call to "Remember the Ladies, " letters from the 1760s and 1770s offer an unrivalled portrait of the American Revolution on the home front. Travel to Europe in the 1780s opens a grand new field for her talents as social commentator and political advisor while her roles as vice presidential and presidential wife place her at the very heart of the nation's founding. Also included are a chronology of Adams's life, detailed notes, and extensively researched family trees.
Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov
Letters to Véra
by Vladimir Nabokov

No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer is quite as beguiling as that of Vladimir Nabokov's to Véra Slonim. She shared his delight at the enchantment of life's trifles and literature's treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humor of any woman he had met. From their first encounter in 1923, Vladimir's letters to Véra chronicle a half-century-long love story, one that is playful, romantic, and memorable. At the same time, the letters reveal much about their author. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everything--animals, people, speech, landscapes and cityscapes--and glimpse his ceaseless work on his poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays, and translations. This delightful volume is enhanced by twenty-one photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters and the puzzles and drawings Vladimir often sent to Véra. With 8 pages of photographs and 47 illustrations in text
The Letters of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
The Letters of Emily Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson

The Letters of Emily Dickinson collects, redates, and recontextualizes all of the poet's extant letters, including dozens newly discovered or never before anthologized. Insightful annotations emphasize not the reclusive poet of myth but rather an artist firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time.
Care of: Letters, Connections, and Cures by Ivan Coyote
Care of: Letters, Connections, and Cures
by Ivan Coyote

In the early days of the coronavirus lockdown, like every artist and creator, writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote was faced with a calendar full of cancelled shows and a heart full of questions that all rhymed with what now? To keep busy while figuring out what to write about next, Ivan began to answer the backlog of mail and correspondences that had come in while they were on the pre-pandemic road: emails, letters, direct messages on social media, soggy handwritten notes found tucked under the windshield wiper of their car after a gig, all of it. In Care Of, Coyote combines the most moving and powerful of these letters with the responses they've sent in the months since the lockdown. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes and ideas central to Coyote's beloved work as an author and storyteller--a giant love letter to the idea of human connection and the power of truly listening to each other.
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