Novelist Attenberg meditates on the virtues and vices of an unscripted life. In vivid essays, Attenberg recalls her couch-surfing years in her 20s, an assault she survived in college, and teaching fiction in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a "newly moderately successful writer" in 2013. She writes of her decision to eschew tradition in pursuit of art and adventure, but how, at age 40, she began to envy her more grounded, married friends. The tension between...

The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and grace, Mayes explores the power of landscape, the idea of home, and the lasting force of a chaotic and loving family. Under Magnolia is an honest, humorous, and thoughtful meditation on the ways that family and place define us, or cause us to define ourselves.

Discovered as a typewritten manuscript only after her death in 2006, Family of Earth allows us to see into the young mind of author and Appalachian native Wilma Dykeman (1920–2006), who would become one of the American South's most prolific and storied writers. Focusing on her childhood in Buncombe County, Dykeman reveals a perceptive and sophisticated understanding of human nature, the environment, and social justice. And yet, for her...

"You fall down. You get hurt. You get up again. You know Jennifer Weiner as many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and "an unlikely feminist enforcer" (The New Yorker). She's also a mom, a daughter, and a sister; a former rower and current runner; a best friend and a reality TV junkie. Here, in her first foray into nonfiction, she takes the raw stuff of her personal life and spins it into a collection of essays on womanhood as uproariously...

"In this searing meditation on the bonds of family and the danger of extremist faith, one of today's most celebrated Christian writers recounts his unexpected journey from a strict fundamentalist upbringing to a life of compassion and grace-a revelatory memoir in the tradition of Educated and Hillbilly Elegy. Raised by an impoverished widow who earned room and board as a Bible teacher in 1950s Atlanta, Philip Yancey and his brother, Marshall, found...