Purchase a copy for yourself here! In her most recent essay collection, The Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour begins with her family’s riches to rags stories. Having immigrated to California after the 1979 revolution, her parents, who worked at the prestigious Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, left their comfortable life in Tehran for relative poverty in… Continue reading The Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour
Category: Nonfiction
Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Recollections of My Nonexistence begins as a meditation on place—specifically the small but elegant apartment that Solnit moved into in her early 20s, where she began the academic and artistic research that would come to define her work in the following decades. Solnit was a resident of a mostly… Continue reading Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
The Memoir Edit
Disclaimer: This is not meant to be any sort of authoritative list of the ten best memoirs ever, but rather an edit of ten memoirs that I feel embody the best of the genre. I wanted to capture the diversity of the memoir space, and thus I’ve included lighthearted celebrity memoirs, deeply moving activist memoirs,… Continue reading The Memoir Edit
Hunger by Roxane Gay
Purchase a copy for yourself here! “When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress,” writes Roxane Gay in her 2017 bestseller, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. From the very first pages, it is clear that Hunger is an… Continue reading Hunger by Roxane Gay
Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Samantha Irby’s third collection of essays, Wow, No Thank You, is the perfect read for those of us entering into a new level of comfortability with ourselves during this time of social isolation. Irby’s previous essay collections, Meaty and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, take more of… Continue reading Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Caroline Criado-Perez has devoted her activist career to amplifying the voices of marginalized females in the public space. She was an instrumental part of campaigns to rework Twitter’s online abuse policies, to get a female historical figure on the back of British banknotes, and to install a statue of… Continue reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez
In the Land of Men by Adrienne Miller
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In 1997, Adrienne Miller became the first female literary editor of the venerable Esquire magazine at the early age of 25. By this time Esquire had published fiction from some of America’s most distinguished literary voices, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Norman Mailer. In her new memoir,… Continue reading In the Land of Men by Adrienne Miller
Super Pumped by Mike Isaac
Purchase a copy for yourself here! The “cult of the founder” is a widely discussed Silicon Valley phenomenon that has circulated in recent years is an integral part of understanding various missteps made by tech corporations. The “cult of the founder” describes a company culture in which the founder (usually also serving as CEO), is… Continue reading Super Pumped by Mike Isaac
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In this current era of burgeoning global populist movements, it can feel like democracy is threatened under attack like never before. But for the nations torn apart by colonial occupation, radical populist movements and militaristic governments have been the norm for decades. Occupying governments and local freedom fighting groups… Continue reading Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Perhaps no geographic area in the United States holds as much cultural cache as the northern California region, Silicon Valley. The Valley has become more than just a place, but a signifier of the big tech movement, where college dropouts who can’t legally drink can become billionaires overnight. On… Continue reading Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener