"When my brother was in high school he attempted to build a perpetual motion machine, a machine that can do work indefinitely, to save the world. That machine was my brother's experiment; this book is mine. It is in the text where I dissect our relationship and try to understand myself. Writing down my experiences metamorphosizes them in an attempt to keep them close, to always be surrounded by the memories that I often feel so distant from. My research...

"Leonard S. Marcus... has masterfully written about a fascinating woman who in her short life changed literature for the very young. I was throroughly enchanted."--Eric Carle Nearly fifty years after her sudden death at the age of forty-two, Margaret Wise Brown remains a legend and an enigma. Author of Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, and dozens of other children's classics, Brown all but invented the picture book as we know it today. Combining...

"Describes the life and times of author Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known for her book Uncle Tom's Cabin"--

"How much can you judge another woman's choices? What if that woman is your mother? Maya Lang grew up idolizing her brilliant mother, an accomplished psychologist who immigrated to the United States from India, completed her residency and earned an American medical degree--all while nurturing young children and keeping a traditional Indian home. Maya grew up with her mother's stories ringing in her ears, motivating her, encouraging her, offering solace...

A memoir of spiritualism and self-discovery from the acclaimed, award-winning author At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the celebrated feminist novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, left a city life dense with political activism, family and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine. On a windswept beach, in a cabin with no plumbing, power, or telephone, she found that she was learning to live all over again....

The author argues that Louisa's "Marmee," Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter's world--exploding the myth that her outspoken idealist father was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence.

"Unoccupied and unsupervised while mother is working, the children of widowed crime writer Marion Carstairs find diversion wherever they can. So when the kids hear gunshots at the house next door, they jump at the chance to launch their own amateur investigation--and after all, why shouldn't they? They know everything the cops do about crime scenes, having read about them in mother's novels. They know what her literary detectives would do in such...

The mother of best-selling memoirists Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, Margaret Robison offers her own version of the events so famously chronicled in her sons' much-talked about works. From one view, Margaret and her husband John's life together began with a sheen of normality: he a successful academic and she an artist, poet, and mother. But when John turns to the bottle, and Margaret sinks farther and farther into mental illness, the...

"From the author of the best-selling Sweetbitter comes an intimate, searingly honest memoir of growing up the child of addicts, of how that turbulent, often harrowing experience has affected her at every stage of her life, and of how she has struggled to transcend this unwanted legacy. When Sweetbitter was published to great success, the author knew she should be happy, but she felt incapable of it, emotionally shut down. She knew too that the roots...

"A fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body." --