"In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA, Dani Shapiro received the astonishing news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. In just a few hours of Internet sleuthing, she was able to piece together the story of her conception and, remarkably, find a YouTube video of her...

"A brief and tender biography of one of the greatest authors of the 20th century and an elegant exploration of artistic endurance, as told by a life-long lover of Willa Cather's work"--

The Newbery Honor-winning author of Genesis Begins Again offers a picture book rendering of Zora Neale Hurston's childhood to illuminate the rich natural-world and cultural experiences that shaped her education and career as a storyteller.

"This celebration of the woman who took us to the heights of a secluded attic and the depths of our own dark psyches reveals an intimate portrait of the famously private V.C. Andrews. Best known for her internationally, multi-million-copy bestselling novel Flowers in the Attic, Cleo Virginia Andrews lived a fascinating life. Born to modest means, she came of age in the American South during the Great Depression and faced a series of increasingly challenging...

"The best-selling novelist and memoirist delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds, and about the accretion, over time, of both sorrow and love. Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage...

Six glamorous women: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Born into privilege, the Mitford sisters were the "bright young things" of high society London in the 1920s and 1930s. Born into country-house privilege in the early years of the 20th century, they became prominent as "bright young things" in the high society of interwar London. But as the shadow of Fascism crept over Europe, the stark--and very public--differences in their outlooks...

"A gripping group portrait of six revolutionary women writers during World War II "I am going to Spain with the boys," Martha Gellhorn wrote. "I don't know who the boys are but I am going with them." On the front lines of the Second World War, the lives of six remarkable women intertwined: Lee Miller, the Vogue cover model and photographer who lived in Paris as Man Ray's lover before becoming a war correspondent for the magazine; Martha Gellhorn,...

Gene Stratton-Porter was a farm girl who fell in love with birds, from the chickens whose eggs she collected to the hawks that preyed on them. When she grew up, Gene wanted nothing more than to share her love of birds with the world. She wrote stories about birds, but when a magazine wanted to publish them next to awkward photos of stuffed birds, she knew she had to take matters into her own hands. Teaching herself photography, Gene began to take...

"From the universally acclaimed, best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: ten pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous;...

"A narrative history of the unlikely Maoist rebellion that terrorized Peru long after the fall of global communism. The tale of the Shining Path may be the most gripping saga in modern Latin American history, but its full story has never been told. Described by a U.S. State Department cable as 'cold-blooded and bestial, ' this band of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionaries mounted a guerrilla war in the 1980s that led to more than 60,000 deaths or...