Memoir & Essays
True stories, essays and poetry from new voices, and the choices it took to tell them.
How One Book Club Turned a Self-Published Memoir Into a Regional Bestseller
Delia Montrose printed 300 copies of What the River Kept, a memoir about retracing her late father's route down the Mississippi. Fourteen readers in Alton, Illinois, made sure it didn't stop there.
By Marcus Bell · 4 min read
Delia Montrose on Writing About Her Father Without Writing Him Off
Memoir5MBefore What the River Kept went to print, Delia Montrose drove a manuscript to her uncle's house and waited while he read it. Her rules for memoir start there.
Hannah Birch Walked 900 Miles of Field Margins to Write Fieldwork
Essays★4MA former agricultural surveyor spent 97 days walking the edges of farms in England and Wales. Her linked essays are about the strips of land most people never look at twice.
Grief, Birdsong and the Sonnet. Tomasz Wren's Debut Is a Winter Worth Staying In
ReviewREV4MWritten outside a hospital window over one Milwaukee winter, A Grammar of Small Birds is a collection about fear that never mistakes itself for despair.
Poet Tomasz Wren Kept 212 Drafts of a Single Sonnet. We Read Every One
Poetry4MThe fourteen lines that close A Grammar of Small Birds took a full winter and 212 attempts. The drafts show a poet learning, one word at a time, what the poem was actually about.
Latest in Memoir & Essays
J.C. Ruffier Wrote International Delinquent About the Nearly Nine Years He Lost With His Son. His Lawsuit Against the United States Is Now Headed to Argentina's Supreme Court
A professional pilot who says he never wanted to be a writer has turned a custody fight that crossed four countries into a memoir in six languages, an audiobook due January 2027 and an album. The lawsuit at its center is still open.
By RedSquibble Staff · October 23, 2026 · 8 min read
Two Debuts Survive the National Book Award Cut. Six Others Fall Away
Morgan Thomas's novel Mad Eden and Sara Nović's memoir Mother Tongue are among the 25 finalists announced Tuesday. The winners will be named in New York on November 18.
By RedSquibble Staff · October 6, 2026 · 5 min read
The First Books on This Year's National Book Award Longlists, Two Days Before the Finalists
A bathroom that turns into a Turkish prison cell, a trans health worker in a Florida cabin, Joan of Arc reimagined. These are the debuts on the National Book Foundation's longlists in all five categories, ahead of Tuesday's finalist announcement.
By RedSquibble Staff · October 4, 2026 · 5 min read
Five Poetry Debuts Worth Reading Slowly
A hospital window in Milwaukee, a night at a 911 dispatch desk, a grandmother's unsent letters and two more first collections that reward the reader who refuses to hurry.
By Elena Voss · September 19, 2026 · 5 min read
How Memoirists Fact Check the People They Love
Memory is the memoirist's raw material, and it is famously unreliable. Two memoirists and an archivist explain how they test family stories against letters, records and the relatives who were there.
By Julian Hart · September 17, 2026 · 5 min read
Why Debut Essay Collections Are Finding Readers Again
For years the first essay collection was the book nobody wanted to buy. Now booksellers are hand-selling them to readers who say they want something true, short and made to be read one piece at a time.
By Marcus Bell · September 15, 2026 · 5 min read
Fieldwork Finds a Whole Country in the Margins
Hannah Birch's nineteen linked essays follow 900 miles of hedgerow and field edge from Wales to the Norfolk coast. The book is exact, humane and, in its middle stretch, a little too content to keep walking.
By Elena Voss · September 13, 2026 · 4 min read
What the River Kept Reads a Father Through His Weather Reports
Delia Montrose's self-published memoir braids her late father's 1982 river log with her own run down the Mississippi. It is patient, generous and occasionally too careful with the people it loves.
By Noor Haddad · September 11, 2026 · 4 min readMemoir, Essays and Poetry on the Shelf
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