Memoir Archives - Page 3 of 26

Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi [in Booklist]

21 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Memoir, Nigerian, Nigerian American, Nonfiction, Repost

Just as only Akwaeke Emezi could have narrated their Freshwater debut, no other voice could have manifested their first nonfiction title. Presented as an epistolary mosaic addressed to family, friends, lovers, betrayers, and heroes, Emezi’s raw voice lays bare their unadorned writing. Although the vulnerability, arrogance, and...

House of Sticks by Ly Tran [in Booklist]

17 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese American

In 1993, 3-year-old Ly Tran arrived in Queens with her parents and three older brothers from South Vietnam. Their new apartment was not the nhà là – “a house made of sticks and dried leaves” – that had been their former home; stability, however, was...

Mixed Plate: Chronicles of an All-American Combo by Jo Koy [in Booklist]

16 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Filipina/o, Filipina/o American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Southeast Asian American

That Jo Koy has created a sold-out, standing-ovation-earning stand-up career making people laugh while mining intimate family stories means no one else could possibly narrate his memoir. His hard-earned superstardom translates seamlessly into an audiobook, giving him a double-debut credit as author and narrator, presenting...

Author Interview: Kei Miller [in Shelf Awareness]

08 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Caribbean, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

Kei Miller: Many Different Writers Kei Miller commands genres – poetry, fiction, essays – as adroitly as he navigates identities as a Jamaican native son, a British academic, a global award-winning writer, and, most recently, a Miami professor. As poet, he's been shortlisted for the Costa...

Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller [in Shelf Awareness]

07 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Caribbean, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

Literary chameleon Kei Miller (The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion) has produced award-winning short stories, novels, poetry, and essays. Things I Have Withheld is arguably his most stupendous title to date. These 14 exquisitely vulnerable essays explore his Jamaican heritage, his British...

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner [in Booklist]

16 Aug, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Hapa/Mixed-race, Korean American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Michelle Zauner’s mother Chongmi died in 2014 – she was just 56, Zauner 25. Her grief inspired her first album as Japanese Breakfast in 2016. Her viral 2018 New Yorker essay, “Crying in H Mart,” morphed into the first chapter of this, her dual author/narrator...

Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor by Anna Qu [in Shelf Awareness]

06 Aug, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

For most of her first seven years, Anna Qu was "the girl without parents; a father dead, a mother who left to start a new life." And yet those years held the "love" Qu names in the subtitle of her bittersweet debut, Made in China:...

Two-Week Wait: An I.V.F. Story by Luke C. Jackson, Kelly Jackson, illustrated by Mara Wild

04 Aug, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

The intimate struggles of a husband and wife desperate to become parents might not be universal literary fare, but with millions of couples worldwide attempting conception via IVF, Two-Week Wait will surely, deservedly find sympathetic audiences. Luke C. Jackson and Kelly Jackson "began their own IVF...

Let’s Not Talk Anymore by Weng Pixin [in Shelf Awareness]

30 Jul, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Chinese, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Repost, Singaporean, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Singaporean creator Weng Pixin's vibrant Let's Not Talk Anymore began with a "big 'f*ck this, f*ck you!' kind of attitude" after one of her "many disputes and disagreements with [her] Mom." The work made her think more deeply about not just her mother, but her...

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke [in Shelf Awareness]

20 Jul, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW When Kristen Radtke (Imagine Wanting Only This) began writing Seek You in 2016, the world was rather different. "Loneliness is one of the most universal things any person can feel," her author's note posits, but still-looming, pandemic-mandated isolation imbues her spectacular graphic memoir with...

Factory Summers by Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall [in Shelf Awareness]

18 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Canadian, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Renowned for his international travelogues – Pyongyang; Shenzhen; Jerusalem – Guy Delisle now mines his adolescence for a magnetic Factory Summers. Before he became an award-winning graphic auteur, Delisle at 16 worked in a Quebec City pulp and paper mill where his father was an...

Little Victories: Autism Through a Father’s Eyes by Yvon Roy [in Shelf Awareness]

28 May, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Canadian, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Yvon Roy's autobiographical Little Victories opens with what must be one of the most charming visual depictions of conception. Mark (Roy's alter-ego) and Chloe's union proves "magnificent": their relationship is joyous, their newborn son the wished-for "mini-me." But 18 months later, Oliver "still hasn't said a...

Asian American #OwnVoices: Artfully Narrated Middle Grade, YA, and Crossover Audiobooks [in School Library Journal]

17 May, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Chinese American, Fiction, Filipina/o American, Hapa/Mixed-race, Indian American, Iranian American, Japanese American, Korean American, Lists, Memoir, Middle Grade Readers, Nonfiction, Pakistani American, Persian American, Repost, South Asian American, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese American, Young Adult Readers

Welcome to Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. The year remains somber, as the APA community combats dramatically increasing anti-Asian violence around the country and continues to mourn the eight people, including six women of Asian descent, killed in a Georgia mass shooting. Despite a U.S....

Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho [in Booklist]

26 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Hapa/Mixed-race, Korean, Korean American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW “In my lifetime, I’ve had at least three mothers,” Grace M. Cho writes. After surviving the Korean War, Cho’s mother worked as a bar girl at a U.S. naval base during the U.S. occupation of South Korea. In 1971, she married Cho’s father, a...

Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina [in Shelf Awareness]

10 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Hapa/Mixed-race, Japanese, Japanese American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Elizabeth Miki Brina claims her voice with resounding clarity in her memoir, Speak, Okinawa. As the daughter of a U.S. soldier with Jamestown ancestry and an Okinawan immigrant mother, Brina's identity was always a negotiation of race, class, privilege. By opening her stupendous book...

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: A Memoir by Louis Chude-Sokei [in Shelf Awareness]

24 Feb, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, African, Black/African American, Caribbean, Caribbean American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Louis Chude-Sokei's parents were known as "the JFK and Jackie O of Biafra," a former West African nation "that had disappeared or been 'killed.'" Half a century later, Chude-Sokei examines what it meant to be "the first son of the...

The Parakeet by Espé, translated by Hannah Chute [in Booklist]

28 Jan, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, European, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Penn State University Press, already a publisher of award-winning graphic titles, launches a new imprint, Graphic Mundi, showcasing comics intent on “drawing our worlds together.” Among its inaugural line-up is French comics artist Espé’s spectacular, autobiographically inspired homage to a childhood haunted by mental...

Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller [in Shelf Awareness]

26 Jan, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Memoir, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Nonfiction, Repost

That Danielle Geller survived to write Dog Flowers seems miraculous. Her raw debut might need a content warning: abandonment, alcoholism, attempted suicide, domestic violence, parental incarcerations, family deaths – much of which is intrinsically linked to her enigmatic, missing mother. In bearing elegiac witness to...

Parenthesis by Élodie Durand, translated by Edward Gauvin [in Booklist]

22 Jan, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, European, French, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation

At 24, “in 1994, or maybe 1995 already,” French artist Élodie Durand first began experiencing symptoms – what her family would later call her “spells” – that included abrupt memory loss and erratic behavior, such as baseless rage and violent outbursts. Her diagnosis of epilepsy...

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami [in Booklist]

31 Dec, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Arab American, Audio, Memoir, Moroccan American, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Laila Lalami dovetails her own journey as a Morocco-born, UK-and US-educated, naturalized Muslim American, expanding into a socio-historical examination of what it means to be a “conditional citizen” in the United States. Conditional citizens, she explains, “are Americans who cannot enjoy the full rights,...

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