Memoirs, Diaries & Correspondence

If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head....

Seeing self-possession as the key to an existence lived 'in accordance with nature', the Stoic philosophy called for the restraint of animal instincts and the importance of upright ethical ideals and virtuous living....

James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....

Seneca's Letters from a Stoic is considered one of the thought-leaders of philosophy in the history of classical literature. The compilation offers a comprehensive introduction to the stoic philosophy....

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies....

At long last, millions of Dune fans can now hear the unpublished chapters and scenes from Dune and Dune Messiah....

A radio broadcaster and journalist for Edward R. Murrow at CBS, William L. Shirer was new to the world of broadcast journalism when he began keeping a diary while on assignment in Europe during the 1930s....

At the start of the 20th century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself....

As Assistant Private Secretary to four monarchs, 'Tommy' Lascelles had a ringside seat from which to observe the workings of the royal household and Downing Street during the first half of the 20th century.... 

The definitive anthology of Jim Morrison's writings with rare photographs and numerous handwritten excerpts of unpublished and published poetry and lyrics from his 28 privately held notebooks....

"To Build a Fire" is a short story by American author Jack London. There are two versions of this story, one published in 1902 and...

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875-1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured for nearly a century. Rilke’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom....

In this book I have attempted to solve each and every one of life's problems. And I have succeeded....

New York Times best-selling author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses presents a revelatory glimpse into the mind and soul of our 16th president through his private notes to himself, explored together here for the first time....

The candid, poignant, unforgettable writing of the young girl whose own life story has become an everlasting source of courage and inspiration. Hiding from the Nazis in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building in Amsterdam, a 13-year-old girl named Anne Frank became a writer....

This edition of Seneca's Epistles includes all 124 of the letters in a single volume, with explanatory notes, an appendix, and an index of the names occurring in the text....

Amelia - 1942: The inside of my closet held the last bit of my freedom before I was torn from my home and shoved onto a dark train. Our destination was even darker....

Every day, President Obama reads ten representative letters among the thousands he receives from citizens across the land....

"I first began to appreciate fully all we owed the World War II generation when I was covering the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of D-Day for NBC News. When I wrote in The Greatest Generation...

Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks....

Verdi writes to his publisher about a man who hated Aida so much that he wants his money back. Keith Richards tells his aunt about bumping into a former schoolmate named Mick Jagger, who also loves Chuck Berry. Yo-Yo Ma wonders whether Leonard Bernstein remembers introducing him onstage....

A groundbreaking historical contribution, The Devil's Diary is a chilling window into the mind of Adolf Hitler's "chief social philosopher", Alfred Rosenberg....

At the start of the 20th century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself.....

A meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature....

Ranier Maria Rilke challenges you, "...to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then..."

This second volume of the best-selling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the prime minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: 'The war must be more than half over.'

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring, and unusual letters updated with 14 riveting new missives and a new introduction from curator Shaun Usher.   

Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks - posthumously discovered behind Highsmith’s linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta - traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who “[worked] like mad to be something”.

Patricia Highsmith's first novel was picked up by Hitchcock and was a world-wide success. Her second novel was meant to tell everything about her true inside and dare what no-one had dared to write before: a lesbian love-story with a happy ending. But when she eventually relented to publish it under a pseudonym, it was a decision that would shape her life more than she could have guessed at the time. Henceforth she would vent her inner life either encoded in her future novels or - unbeknownst to most - in the 18 diaries and 38 notebooks she kept throughout her life.

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game". Part autobiography, part writer's workshop, these letters offer an illuminating perspective on Steinbeck's creative process, and a fascinating glimpse of Steinbeck, the private man.

When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam Houston and Amy Irvine — who had never met — began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on each side of the Continental Divide. As the numbers of infected and dead rose and the nation split dangerously over the crisis, Houston and Irvine found their letters to one another as necessary as breath.

 Shamba Shenanigans is a collection of riveting true-life experiences. Some of the stories are hilarious, others are thought-provoking, while others are likely to evoke different emotions as the story unfolds. Each story has one or more life lessons. 

World War II rises in its vastness and complexity over the rest of human history. A number of victims difficult to conceive, never surpassed by any other conflict - this is an insurmountable encyclopedia on war. This diary of the Second World War has been able to cover all facets of the conflict, and it is a fundamentally empirical work that narrates events as they occurred. This episode contains, day by day, the month of October 1941.  

World War II rises in its vastness and complexity over the rest of human history. A number of victims difficult to conceive, never surpassed by any other conflict - this is an insurmountable encyclopedia on war. This diary of the Second World War has been able to cover all facets of the conflict, and it is a fundamentally empirical work that narrates events as they occurred. This episode contains, day by day, the month of October 1941. 

World War II rises in its vastness and complexity over the rest of human history. A number of victims difficult to conceive, never surpassed by any other conflict - this is an insurmountable encyclopedia on war. This diary of the Second World War has been able to cover all facets of the conflict, and it is a fundamentally empirical work that narrates events as they occurred. This episode contains, day by day, the month of October 1941.  

World War II rises in its vastness and complexity over the rest of human history. A number of victims difficult to conceive, never surpassed by any other conflict - this is an insurmountable encyclopedia on war. This diary of the Second World War has been able to cover all facets of the conflict, and it is a fundamentally empirical work that narrates events as they occurred. This episode contains, day by day, the month of October 1941.  

World War II rises in its vastness and complexity over the rest of human history. A number of victims difficult to conceive, never surpassed by any other conflict - this is an insurmountable encyclopedia on war. This diary of the Second World War has been able to cover all facets of the conflict, and it is a fundamentally empirical work that narrates events as they occurred. This episode contains, day by day, the month of October 1941.