Happily Author Sabrina Orah Mark on the Enduring Power of Fairy Tales

Contributed by Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir. In this memoir-in-essays, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so

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Breaking Through Author Katalin Karikó Awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Long before the search for a COVID-19 vaccine, the visionary, Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Karikó knew that an ephemeral and underappreciated molecule called messenger RNA could change the world. Karikó worked for more than three decades at her lab bench, in the single-minded pursuit of a breakthrough that would confirm her hunch: that mRNA could transform ordinary cells into tiny factories

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Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, Publishing November 15, 2022

We’re delighted to announce that Penguin Random House will publish former First Lady Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, available November 15, 2022. In an inspiring follow-up to her critically acclaimed, #1 bestselling memoir Becoming, Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today’s highly

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Carmen Rita Wong, author of Why Didn’t You Tell Me?, on Identity, Race, Culture & Belonging

In her memoir, Why Didn’t You Tell Me?, Carmen Rita Wong contends with questions of culture, race, family, and belonging, from the Harlem and Chinatown of her childhood to the almost exclusively white playgrounds of New Hampshire following her mother’s remarriage. Following Carmen from her coming of age through adulthood, when her mother’s long-held secrets

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Memoir as Medicine: Mallory Smith’s Salt in My Soul

Contributed by Diane Shader Smith, mother of Mallory Smith, author of Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life Literature and medicine have long been intertwined. In the early 2000s, Dr. Rita Charon helped formalize this intersection as a discipline through her work at Columbia University and her book, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness

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Celebrating Gabriel García Márquez (Celebrando Gabriel García Márquez)

Journalist, novelist, and short story writer—no matter the medium, master storyteller Gabriel García Márquez knew how to transport readers from around the world to Latin America. With his signature mix of realism and the fantastic, García Márquez’s words brought to life the history and culture of an entire continent. As a way to celebrate the

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Immigration and the American Idea: Abdi Nor Iftin shares his journey from Somalia to America

Immigration Heritage Month serves as a reminder to  celebrate individual stories of immigration, and the shared diversity that makes up the United States. This year at the 38th annual conference on The First-Year Experience, author Abdi Nor Iftin shared his journey from war-torn Somalia to the United States—first by way of American movies, and years later

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Hiding the Truth for Community’s Sake: The Danger of Small Town Dynamics

Cinderland exposes the real danger lay in covering the truth in order to prop up our notions of being a wholesome, safe place to live. The need to be “good” seems especially potent in small communities, likely due to a false nostalgic notion that small towns are quaint, protected, and silent. But silence does not a safe place make. Instead it ripens an environment toward sexual violence, and it also heightens the private aftershocks that are weathered for years to come.

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