"I packed a blue Samsonite suitcase with my belongings -- a couple of pairs of jeans and shirts, UB40 tapes, the Swiss army knife I had stolen from my mother, my Tibetan prayer book, and a red plastic...

"I packed a blue Samsonite suitcase with my belongings -- a couple of pairs of jeans and shirts, UB40 tapes, the Swiss army knife I had stolen from my mother, my Tibetan prayer book, and a red plastic...

Although the traditional Sioux nation was in its last days when Luther Standing Bear was born in the 1860s, he was raised in the ancestral manner to be a successful hunter and warrior and a respectful and productive member of...

Mimi Schwartz grew up on milkshakes and hamburgers—and her father’s boyhood stories. She rarely took the stories seriously. What was a modern American teenager supposed to make of these accounts of a village in Germany where, according to her father,...

In 1942, YIVO held a contest for the best autobiography by a Jewish immigrant on the theme "Why I Left the Old Country and What I Have Accomplished in America." Chosen from over two hundred entries, and translated from Yiddish,...

In a masterly act of literary transformation, celebrated novelist Hanan al-Shaykh re-creates the dramatic life and times of her mother, Kamila.   Married at a young age against her will, Kamila soon fell head-over-heels in love with another man—and was...

When Clyde Edgerton was four years old, his mother took him to the local airport to see the planes. For Edgerton, it was love at first sight. Eighteen years later, she would take him to the same airport to...

PAT CONROY—AMERICA’S MOST BELOVED STORYTELLER—IS BACK! “I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one. . . .There was a time in my life when I walked through the world known to myself and...

A brilliant father, a complicated legacy, and a son's hard-won journey of self-discovery. The New Yorker When the poet William Matthews died, in 1997, his son Sebastian was left with the patchwork legacy of a father who was lovable but...

“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.” —Stevie Wonder, “Sir Duke”In 2003, young professor Ferentz LaFargue traveled to Paris, where his fiancée, Tricia, declared she wasn’t happy with their relationship, ending what he thought was...