Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Brought to you by Penguin. The hilarious and piercing memoir about growing up gay in a not-so-gay world. I’m just a man, standing in front of a salad, asking it to be a cake. What do you do when you’re too gay for Pakistan, too Pakistani to be gay in America and you’re ashamed of your body...

“A moving chronicle of trans resilience and joy” (Vogue) from one of Out100’s Most Impactful and Influential LGBTQ+ Storytellers “Groundbreaking . . . [Rocero] quite literally models what triumph can look like.”—Glamour (Women of the Year) WINNER OF THEM’S AWARD FOR LITERATURE ...

Father Shannon Kearns is familiar with liminal spaces. He’s lived in them his whole life. And while his experience as a transgender man has often made it difficult for him to fit in—especially in the context of Christianity—it has also shaped his perspective in important ways on complicated, gender-transgressing aspects of theology and Scripture.

Includes an audiobook exclusive interview of Cody Alan with Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles! Read by the author. We live in a world of noise where everyone is so quick to speak. When we slow down and give someone our full attention, we offer them a safe place to be fully heard and accepted...

Robert O’Brien loves cars. Growing up in Dublin, they provided a welcome refuge from the human interaction he found so difficult. His father’s race car, a BMW E30 M3 Sport Evolution he named the Beast, became his alter ego—powerful, admired, confident—and Robert began a quest to become a worthy owner. He completed a university degree, took courses to conquer his stutter and tried to come to terms with his sexuality. But still he remained more comfortable in the fantasy worlds of video games and television.

Death isn't the end. Marie didn't expect to be given the opportunity to go to a new universe when she died, but when it was offered she held to the offer with all her might. Taking the name of Talyn, she was accompanied to the new world by the goddess Melody as her assistant, as she seeks out a more rewarding life for herself, no matter what challenges may stand before her. Even if the introduction of some game mechanics and a goddess to her life has unanticipated consequences.

When it was finally released, Heaven's Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven's Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. 

Finding self-acceptance both on and off the mat. In Sanskrit, yoga means to “yoke.” To yoke mind and body, movement and breath, light and dark, the good and the bad. This larger idea of “yoke” is what Jessamyn Stanley calls the yoga of the everyday—a yoga that is not just about...

TMI is the story of how Mario Lavandeira became Perez Hilton, a celebrity blogger with millions of readers around the globe who was sometimes called the Most Hated Man in Hollywood.

One winter's night in 1976, over 20 million people in Britain watched John Curry skate to Olympic glory on an ice rink in Austria. Many millions more watched around the world. Overnight he became one of the most famous men on the planet. He was awarded the OBE. He was chosen as BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Curry had changed ice skating from marginal sport to high art. And yet the man was - and would always remain - an absolute mystery to a world that had been dazzled by his gift.

Peggy Caserta, founder of the famous Haight-Ashbury hippie boutique Mnasidika and lover and girlfriend of Janis Joplin, was a Louisiana homecoming queen turned airsick stewardess who eventually landed in 1960s San Francisco and set up shop. Her store was a hang-out for The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company; it was where Wes Wilson’s posters hung, where Bill Graham sold concert tickets, and where Owsley’s LSD was enjoyed. 

Jazz could not contain Fred Hersch. Hersch’s prodigious talent as a sideman—a pianist who played with the giants of the twentieth century in the autumn of their careers, including Art Farmer and Joe Henderson—blossomed further in the eighties and beyond into a compositional genius that...

Combining the soul-baring confessional of Brain on Fire and the addictive storytelling of The Queen’s Gambit, a renowned puzzle creator’s compulsively readable memoir and history of the crossword puzzle as an unexpected site of women’s work and feminist protest. The indisputable “queen...

As a journalist in London, William discovered the Eurovision Song Contest—an annual competition known for its extravagant performers and cutthroat politics. Initially just a fan, he started blogging about the contest, ultimately becoming the most sought-after expert on the subject. William was soon jetting across the continent to meet divas, drag queens, and aspiring singers, who welcomed him to their beautiful, if dysfunctional, family of choice.

Kodo Nishimura rose to fame following his appearance in Queer Eye: We're in Japan. Now this celebrity makeup artist and ordained Buddhist monk shares his unique and practical guide to positivity and self-acceptance. Listeners will learn from the author's path to self-love and resilience and modern take on Buddhist teachings.

Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd on Sackville Street (est. 1761) to interview for their bookselling apprenticeship, a decision which has bedevilled him ever since. He'd intended to stay for a year before launching into some less dusty, better remunerated career. Unfortunately for him, the alluring smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap proved irresistible. Soon he was balancing stacks of first editions, fending off nonagenarian widows with and trying not to upset the store's resident ghost.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The irreverent and candid coming-of-age memoir of Nicole Maines, trailblazing trans actress, activist—and sometimes someone who’s just existing, which is actually pretty hard! Nicole Maines knows a little something about “happily ever after”—not just because...

Some of us found ourselves in rooms with sticky floors. Dollar drinks. Music loud enough to feel in your sternum. Strangers who became your people before you even knew their names. A world that existed before the apps, before the algorithms, before you had to optimize yourself for someone else's checklist. We are human first. Gay second. And this is a book about the human underneath. Boys Bars Becoming is a collection of essays about gay men of a certain age — who we were in those rooms, who we became outside of them, and who we are still trying to figure out how to be.

Derek, a distinguished designer and J, his husband, a pioneering entrepreneur and creator of both The Embassy Club, London's answer to Studio 54, and iconic Heaven, Europe's largest gay discotheque, met and fell in love more than 40 years ago. Their lives were high-octane, full of adventure, fun and fearless creativity. Suddenly, their friends began to get sick and die - AIDS had arrived in their lives.

In the Shadow of the American Dream is a stunning collection of riveting and revealing chapters from Wojnarowicz's extensive personal diaries - 30 volumes' worth of memories and lucid observations, some bitter, some sweet - that the author began writing when he was 17 and continued until his death two decades later. Here is a brilliant chronicle of an artist's emergence - a young man's still achingly fresh memories of his unhappy adolescence and his glorious discovery of self.