Recommendations based on "Self-consciousness Memoirs"

A New York Times bestseller—over one million copies sold!A National Book Award winnerA Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winnerBestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.With a forward by Markus Zusak, interviews with Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney, and black-and-white interior art throughout, this edition is perfect for fans and collectors alike.

In this rare peak into the personal life of the author of numerous bestselling novels, gain an understanding of David Foster Wallace and how he became the man that he was.Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in This is Water. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.

This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish followsan immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews)."Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman RushdieA deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearOne of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionA Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly

***The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!*** A smart, funny, and refreshing memoir from Mark Hoppus, the vocalist, bassist, and founding member of pop-punk band blink-182. This is the story of an angst-filled kid from the desert, navigating the chaos of his parents' bitter divorce and searching for his place in the world. Each move across the country was a chance to reinvent himself, switching identities from dork to goth to skate punk, and eventually meeting his best friend who just so happens to be his musical soulmate. With sharp humor and raw honesty, Fahrenheit-182 takes readers through Mark's formative years as a latchkey kid in the 1980s, hooked on punk rock, skateboards, and MTV. Along the way, Mark reflects on his lifelong battle with anxiety, his celebrated career with blink-182, and his public fight with cancer, in a voice that’s both relatable and unmistakably his own. Threaded with sharp humor and heartfelt grit, Fahrenheit-182 is more than just a memoir for blink-182 fans. It’s a funny, smart, and deeply human story for anyone who’s struggled, reinvented themselves, wanted to quit but kept going.

The #1 New York Times Bestseller One-half of the celebrated Men in Blazers duo, longtime culture and soccer commentator Roger Bennett traces the origins of his love affair with America, and how he went from a depraved, pimply faced Jewish boy in 1980’s Liverpool to become the quintessential Englishman in New York. A memoir for fans of Jon Ronson and Chuck Klosterman, but with Roger Bennett’s signature pop culture flair and humor. Being a teenager isn’t easy, no matter where in the world you live or how much it does or doesn’t rain in your hometown. As an outsider—a private-schooled Jewish kid in working-class, heavily Catholic Liverpool—Roger Bennett wasn’t winning any popu­larity contests. But there was one idea, or ideal, that burned bright in Roger’s heart. That was America— with its sunny skies, beautiful women, and cool kids with flipped collars who ate at McDonald’s. When he embraced American popular culture, the dull gray world he lived in turned to neon teal—a color which had not even been invented in England yet. Intro­duced first through the gateway drug of The Love Boat, then to Rolling Stone, the NFL, John Hughes movies, Run-DMC, and Tracy Chapman, Roger embraced everything that would capture the imagination of a teenager growing up Stateside. When he made a real, in-the-flesh American friend who invited him over for the summer, he got to visit the promised land. A month in Chicago, and a life-changing night spent in the company of the Chicago Bears, was the first hit of freedom, of independence, of the Roger Bennett he knew he could be. (Re)Born in the USA captures the universality of growing pains, growing up, and growing out of where you come from. Drenched in the culture of the late ’80s and ’90s from the UK and the USA, and the heartfelt, hilarious sense of humor that has made Roger Bennett so beloved by his listeners, here is both a truly unique coming-of-age story and the love letter to America that the country needs right now.

When Pittsburgh Dad debuted on YouTube, creators Chris Preksta and Curt Wootton little suspected their sitcom would receive more than sixteen million views and turn their blue-collar everyman into a nationally known figure. Illustrated with hilarious black-and-white photos, Pittsburgh Dad shares the best of the best, from rants about swimming pool rules to reflections on coaching little league to curmudgeonly movie reviews. With its heavy dose of nostalgia and pitch-perfect sensibility, Pittsburgh Dad will have readers laughing in recognition, especially those who love recent blockbusters like Sh*t My Dad Says and Dad Is Fat.

NAACP Image Award Nominee · NPR Best Book of 2022A searing memoir of American racism from a Somalian-American who survived hardships in his birth country only to experience firsthand the dehumanization of Blacks in his adopted land, the United States.“No one told me about America.”Born in Somalia and raised in a valley among nomads, Boyah Farah grew up with a code of male bravado that helped him survive deprivation, disease, and civil war. Arriving in America, he believed that the code that had saved him would help him succeed in this new country. But instead of safety and freedom, Boyah found systemic racism, police brutality, and intense prejudice in all areas of life, including the workplace. He learned firsthand not only what it meant to be an African in America, but what it means to be African American. The code of masculinity that shaped generations of men in his family could not prepare Farah for the painful realities of life in the United States.Lyrical yet unsparing, America Made Me a Black Man is the first book-length examination of American racism from an African outsider’s perspective. With a singular poetic voice brimming with imagery, Boyah challenges us to face difficult truths about the destructive forces that threaten Black lives and attempts to heal a fracture in Black men’s identity.

A Zibby Mag "Most Anticipated Book" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book to Cozy Up With" * A Publishers Weekly "Memoirs & Biographies: Top 10" * The Millions "Most Anticipated" * An Electric Lit “Books By Women of Color to Read"“We have more Native stories now, but we have not heard one like this. Whiskey Tender is unexpected and propulsive, indeed tender, but also bold, and beautifully told, like a drink you didn’t know you were thirsty for. This book, never anything less than mesmerizing, is full of family stories and vital Native history. It pulses and it aches, and it lifts, consistently. It threads together so much truth by the time we are done, what has been woven together equals a kind of completeness from brokenness, and a hope from knowing love and loss and love again by naming it so.” — Tommy Orange, National Bestselling Author of There ThereReminiscent of the works of Mary Karr and Terese Marie Mailhot, a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition.Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.”Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot” of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER“This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American.”  —Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow“l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured.” —Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins“This book couldn’t be more timely and more necessary.” —Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of MokhaPulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms.“This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.”—Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America

David Sedaris, the "champion storyteller," (Los Angeles Times) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask--or not--was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he's stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine. As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger's teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone's son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter. In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.