In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Avram who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: I love you and I need five hundred dollars. His body was covered in hair as thick as wool, but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left the house without Afrin nasal [...]

Chapter One
1953: Amherst, Massachusetts
Read an in-depth interview with Leslie Garis here. Buy the book here.
In those years I spent a lot of time in the dumbwaiter, moving up and down behind the walls, listening to voices. I sat with my knees up: sometimes I clasped my arms around my legs, sometimes I kept my hands [...]

“He shot out of the womb angry. And then he left that same way. “

How do you tell the tale of Hunter S. Thompson? Arguably, no one has told the story of the Louisville, Kentucky-born rebel who went on to change journalism (and inspire hordes of awful imitators) better than the man himself, via his [...]

After reading Matt Tanner’s interview with Ann Marie Fleming, check out the excerpt below. It’s a little tough to read, but after you see how beautifully and originally it blends storytelling forms, you’ll want your own copy anyway.

Even more than practitioners of other genres, erotica writers invite readers into a fantasy world. So what happens when we throw back the covers and peer between their real-life sheets? In her new book, Marilyn Jaye Lewis asks seven of the hottest erotic voices to bare all, sharing intimate stories from their very private lives. [...]

After meeting through a now-defunct writing program at California’s notorious Pelican Bay State Prison, journalist Bridget Kinsella began a correspondence with, and eventually visited, Rory Mehan, a 30-year-old man serving life without parole for a revenge murder. Their first visit was followed by many more, and through letters, phone calls, and their time together in [...]

Like most of my favorite memoirists, Kristen Buckley is nobody too famous, but her extraordinary ordinary life is a story too amazing to keep to herself. She tells it with (too much?) honesty, tons of humor, and piles of pop-culture panache. Here, Buckley talks to Memoirville about rats, the mob, woman writers, honesty, meanness, bookstore [...]

Songs John Sellers recommends you listen to while reading this excerpt (in order):
1. Joy Division, “Disorder”
2. The Smiths, “The Headmaster Ritual”
3. The Pixies, “Gouge Away”
4. Pavement, “Fillmore Jive”
5. Guided By Voices, “I Am a Scientist”
Listen to an audio interview with John Sellers.
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Joy Division > Manchester, England > The Smiths > Morrissey > Oscar Wilde [...]

With its drug-crazed paranoids and criminals, scenes of anonymous sex and endless searches for a better high, Leaving Dirty Jersey is James Salant’s remarkably unglamorous account of the meth-fueled year he spent in motel rooms and trailers—-and a breakup letter to the tough kid he so desperately needed to be. Read an interview with Salant [...]

In 1945, Marjorie Hart and Marty Garrett arrived by train to experience a summer of glamour in The Big City, their pert blond heads filled with Café society, Gershwin, handsome midshipmen and dream jobs in swank Fifth Avenue department stores. Hart, now 83, has just published her memoir, Summer at Tiffany. Read an interview with [...]