The creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blue reflects on his tumultuous life, driven by a nearly insatiable creative energy and a matching penchant for self-destruction. Life’s Work is a profound memoir from a brilliant mind taking stock as Alzheimer’s loosens his hold on his own past. “This is David Milch’s farewell, and it will rock you.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, USA Today, Kirkus Reviews “I’m on a boat sailing to some island where I don’t know anybody. A boat someone is operating and we aren’t in touch.” So begins David Milch’s urgent accounting of his increasingly strange present and often painful past. From the start, Milch’s life seems destined to echo that of his father, a successful if drug-addicted surgeon. Almost every achievement is accompanied by an act of self-immolation, but the deepest sadnesses also contain moments of grace. Betting on racehorses and stealing booze at eight years old, mentored by Robert Penn Warren and excoriated by Richard Yates at twenty-one, Milch never did anything by half. He got into Yale Law School only to be expelled for shooting out streetlights with a shotgun. He paused his studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to manufacture acid in Cuernavaca. He created and wrote some of the most lauded television series of all time, made a family, and pursued sobriety, then lost his fortune betting horses just as his father had taught him. Like Milch’s best screenwriting, Life’s Work explores how chance encounters, self-deception, and luck shape the people we become, and wrestles with what it means to have felt and caused pain, even and especially with those we love, and how you keep living. It is both a master class on Milch’s unique creative process, and a distinctive, revelatory memoir from one of the great American writers, in what may be his final dispatch to us all.

If all sports are really about war, then rugby is a heart-thumping epic of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. In Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man, bestselling author Jay Atkinson describes his thirty-five year odyssey in the sport-from his rough and rowdy days at the University of Florida, through the intrigue of various foreign tours, club championships, and all star selections, up to his current stint with the freewheeling Vandals Rugby Club out of Los Angeles. Jay has played in more than 500 matches, for which he's suffered three broken ribs, a detached retina, a fractured cheekbone and orbital bone, four deadened teeth, and a dislocated ankle. Written in the style of Siegried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Atkinson's book explains why it was all worth it--the sum total of his violent adventures, and the valuable insights he has gained from them.

First published in the year 1912, 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man' by James Weldon Johnson is the fictional account of a young biracial man, referred to as the "Ex-Colored Man", living in post-Reconstruction era America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

"San'ya," Tokyo's largest day-laborer quarter and the only one with lodgings, had been Oyama Shiro's home for 12 years when he took up his pen and began writing about his life as a resident of Tokyo's most notorious neighborhood. In this fascinating book, he portrays himself as an outsider both from mainstream society and from his adopted home.

Albert Jay Nock, perhaps the most brilliant American essayist of the 20th century, and certainly among its most important libertarian thinkers, set out to write his autobiography but he ended up doing much more. He presents here a full theory of society, state, economy, and culture, and does so almost inadvertently. His stories, lessons, observations, and conclusions pack a very powerful punch, so much so that anyone who takes time to read carefully cannot but end up changed in intellectual outlook. One feels that one has been let in a private club of people who see more deeply than others. This is truly an American classic.

Working Class Hero: Memoirs of a Providence Fireman is one man's action-packed account of twenty-three years of life as a firefighter in busy metropolitan Providence-the third largest city in the Northeast. Experience what it's like to be taken on one emergency call after another-fires, shootings, stabbings, and more. Encounter situations that are completely unimaginable to the average citizen. Thoughtfully written with the reader in mind, describing each stage of an incident, this book allows the reader to visualize riding along with the firefighters as they pull up to a scene and must take immediate action. In this book, Lieutenant Tom Kenney will take you inside the mind of a firefighter as he makes life and death decisions. Celebrate his victories and suffer his defeats. Glimpse a world few people ever experience. From practical jokes and fun around the firehouse to gut-wrenching real-life tragedies, this book covers it all!