When she was 17 years old, Leah Vincent, a young Orthodox woman from Pittsburgh, found herself living alone in a tiny basement apartment in Brooklyn. She was estranged from her parents and 10 siblings, socially isolated, and living on a low-wage diet of grilled cheese sandwiches and ketchup. Desperate for company, she sought the friendship…
You might suppose, should you have any familiarity with the writings of Gary Shteyngart, which are widely (and not inaccurately) assumed to be autobiographical, that the author has a bit of a self-loathing problem. Many people do: Papa Shteyngart, for example, frequently exhorts his “Little Son,” “Don’t write like a self-hating Jew.” Papa and Mama…
Little Failure By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 368 pages, $27 It was perhaps inevitable that Gary Shteyngart would one day write a memoir. Like other authors who traffic in fiction that is thinly-veiled autobiography — or, as in Shtyengart’s case, that appears as shadow puppet projections of his own Russian Jewish immigrant story — the…
Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid By Joshua Safran Hyperion, 288 pages, $24.99 Among the American contributions to world literature, perhaps least appreciated is the genre of automotive horror. To be sure, we are acknowledged to have invented the road trip, which was prophesied by Huck Finn and Lewis and…
● I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary By Marianne Szegedy-Maszák Spiegel & Grau, 370 pages, $27 World War II and the Holocaust extinguished so many millions of lives, so many hopes, that each reclaimed story seems like a precious work of salvage. In “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times:…
Rokeby is an estate along the Hudson River that was built nearly 200 years ago by relatives of John Jacob Astor, America’s first multimillionaire. About two dozen people currently live in various buildings spread out along the 400-plus acres of rolling hills. But the 43-room stucco mansion at Rokeby) is occupied by a handful of…
● Drinking With Men: A Memoir By Rosie Schaap Riverhead Books, 272 pages, $26.95 As Rosie Schaap remembers it, in 1987, at the age of 16, she took the advice of her guidance counselor and dropped out of high school to follow the Grateful Dead. She sold beads and tie-dyed T-shirts to support herself, went…
Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is writing a memoir about her years at the social network website where she was once director of marketing, publisher HarperCollins said on Thursday. Zuckerberg, 30, signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins that will include her memoir “Dot Complicated,” and a children’s picture book, scheduled to be…
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