My Father Is A Book

Bernard Malamud was one of the most accomplished American novelists of the postwar years. From the Pulitzer Prize winner The Fixer as well as The Assistant, named one of the best "100 All–Time Novels" by Time Magazine—to mention only two of the more than a dozen published books—he not only established himself in the first rank of American writers but also took the country's literature in new and important directions. In her signature memoir, Smith explores her renowned father's life and literary legacy. Malamud was among the most brilliant novelists of his era, and counted among his friends Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, and Shirley Jackson. Yet Malamud was also very private. Only his family has had full access to his personal papers, including letters and journals that offer unique insight into the man and his work. In her candid, evocative, and loving memoir, his daughter brings Malamud to vivid life.

"Reading My Father" is an intimate, moving, and beautifully written portrait of the novelist William Styron by his daughter, Alexandra.

In this companion to Urs Widmer's novel My Mother's Lover, the narrator is again the son who pieces together the fragments of his parents' stories. Since the age of twelve, Karl, the father, has observed the family tradition of recording his life in a single notebook, but when his book is lost soon after his death, his son resolves to rewrite it. Here, we get to know Karl's friends--a collection of anti-fascist painters and architects known as Group 33. We learn of the early years of Karl's marriage and follow his military service as the Swiss fear a German invasion during World War II, his political activity for the Communist Party, and his brief career as a teacher. ​ Widmer brilliantly combines family history and historical events to tell the story of a man more at home in the world of the imagination than in the real world, a father who grows on the reader, just as he grows on his son.

One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year New York Times bestselling author Danielle Trussoni's unforgettable memoir of her wild and haunted father, a man whose war never really ended. From her charismatic father, Danielle Trussoni learned how to rock and roll, outrun the police, and never shy away from a fight. Spending hour upon hour trailing him around the bars and honky-tonks of La Crosse, Wisconsin, young Danielle grew up fascinated by stories of her dad's adventures as a tunnel rat in Vietnam, where he'd risked his life crawling head first into narrow passageways to search for American POWs. A vivid and poignant portrait of a daughter's relationship with her father, this funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully written memoir, Falling Through the Earth, "makes plain that the horror of war doesn't end in the trenches" (Vanity Fair).

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman

This heartfelt gay memoir about an adult son uncovering his father’s secrets is “a cross between Dickens’s David Copperfield, Rousseau’s Confessions, and the new pornography” (Donald Windham). When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own—this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley’s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self—making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.

A GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLER As a child, Murray Howe wanted to be like his father. He was an adult before he realized that didn't necessarily mean playing hockey. Gordie Howe may have been the greatest player in the history of hockey, but greatness was never defined by goals or assists in the Howe household. Greatness meant being the best person you could be, not the best player on the ice. Unlike his two brother, Murray Howe failed in his attempt to follow in his father's footsteps to become a professional athlete. Yet his failure brought him to the realization that his dream wasn't really to be a pro hockey player. His dream was to be his father. To be amazing at something, but humble and gracious. To be courageous, and stand up for the little guy. To be a hero. You don't need to be a hockey player to do that. What he learned was that it was a waste of time wishing you were like someone else. When Gordie Howe passed away in 2016, it was Murray who was asked to deliver the eulogy. Nine Lessons I Learned from My Father takes the reader through the hours Murray spent writing the words that would give shape to his father's leagcy--the hours immediately after his hero's death, as he gathers his thoughts and memories, and makes sense of what his remarkable father meant to him. The result is nine pieces of wisdom, built out of hundreds of stories, that show us the man behind the legend and give us a glimpse of what we can learn from this incredible life.

By turns heart-tugging and hilarious, Myron Uhlberg’s memoir tells the story of growing up as the hearing son of deaf parents—and his life in a world that he found unaccountably beautiful, even as he longed to escape it. “Does sound have rhythm?” my father asked. “Does it rise and fall like the ocean? Does it come and go like the wind?” Such were the kinds of questions that Myron Uhlberg’s deaf father asked him from earliest childhood, in his eternal quest to decipher, and to understand, the elusive nature of sound. Quite a challenge for a young boy, and one of many he would face. Uhlberg’s first language was American Sign Language, the first sign he learned: “I love you.” But his second language was spoken English—and no sooner did he learn it than he was called upon to act as his father’s ears and mouth in the stores and streets of the neighborhood beyond their silent apartment in Brooklyn. Resentful as he sometimes was of the heavy burdens heaped on his small shoulders, he nonetheless adored his parents, who passed on to him their own passionate engagement with life. These two remarkable people married and had children at the absolute bottom of the Great Depression—an expression of extraordinary optimism, and typical of the joy and resilience they were able to summon at even the darkest of times. From the beaches of Coney Island to Ebbets Field, where he watches his father’s hero Jackie Robinson play ball, from the branch library above the local Chinese restaurant where the odor of chow mein rose from the pages of the books he devoured to the hospital ward where he visits his polio-afflicted friend, this is a memoir filled with stories about growing up not just as the child of two deaf people but as a book-loving, mischief-making, tree-climbing kid during the remarkably eventful period that spanned the Depression, the War, and the early fifties. From the Hardcover edition.