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Editor's note: It's been 20 years since the groundbreaking memoir The Liars' Club sent Mary Karr into the literary spotlight with its phenomenal success and widespread acclaim. Since then, Karr has gone on to publish two more bestselling memoirs — Cherry and Lit — and has mentored such revered authors as Cheryl Strayed and Koren Zailckas. In her new book, The Art of Memoir, Karr turns her attention to the memoir form itself and offers an illuminating guide to the essential elements of the craft.

 

As supplements to the new book, we're thrilled to present a selection of "Memoir Tutorial" videos, courtesy of HarperBooks. In the first piece, Mary Karr addresses the triumphs and challenges of the literary memoir genre. In the other two pieces, authors Lena Dunham and Gary Shteyngart discuss the memoir in general and Karr's work in the genre.

We hope you enjoy this exclusive video premier!

 

 

 

 

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At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year.

Today's featured giver is William Gibson, author of The Peripheral.

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What books are you giving to friends and family this holiday season and why?

Glow by Ned Beauman because it's brilliant, tight, funny.

Tigerman by Nick Harkaway because it's like Douglas Adams wearing Joseph Conrad, but better, and the author's imagination is utterly, delightfully peculiar.

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes because I love ardent intra-genre contemporary weirdness, and her Detroit is superb.

What's the best book you've received as a gift?

A two-volume omnibus of Sherlock Holmes, from my mother, when I was 10.

What's the strangest book you've received as a gift?

18 Folgate Street by Dennis Severs. As close a thing as there is to a book that is a haunted house.

Do you have any book-related holiday traditions?

Every November I go over all the book reviews in that year's editions of Fortean Times and tell my wife which ones I think I'd most like.

What book(s) are you planning on reading over the holidays?

I think I may reread Kellow Chesney's The Victorian Underworld, which is perhaps my single favorite work of nonfiction.

What type of book makes the best cold-weather reading?

I seem to particularly enjoy good historical nonfiction in the

At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year.

Today's featured giver is Fred Armisen, author of The Portlandia Cookbook.

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What books are you giving to friends and family this holiday season and why?

Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes across America by John Waters and Yes Please by Amy Poehler. Two very funny books by two of my favorite people in the world.

Have you ever bought a book that you intended to give as a gift but ended up keeping for yourself?

The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn.

What's the best book you've received as a gift?

Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil.

What books are you planning on reading over the holidays?

Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder and Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter by Randy L.

At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year.

Today's featured giver is Cary Elwes, author of As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride.

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What book are you giving to friends and family this holiday season?

Brando's Smile by Susan L. Mizruchi.

Have you ever bought a book that you intended to give as a gift but ended up keeping for yourself?

Never. The best gifts are the ones you want for yourself.

What's the best book you've received as a gift?

Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made by Alison Castle.

Do you have any book-related holiday traditions?

'Twas the Night before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore.

Name a fictional character and describe the perfect gift for them (book or otherwise).

Fencing: A Renaissance Treatise by Camillo Agrippa for Westley from The Princess Bride.

Author photo taken by Miranda Penn

At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year.

Today's featured giver is Edward O. Wilson, author of The Meaning of Human Existence.

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What book are you giving to friends and family this holiday season and why?

J. Craig Venter's Life at the Speed of Light. The ultimate discipline of the biological sciences will be synthetic biology, the radical modification and creation of new forms of life. This book is by one of the pioneers of the field and is clearly and cogently written.

What's the best book you've received as a gift?

As an 18-year-old sophomore at the University of Alabama, it was Ernst Mayr's Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist, in which I learned about evolution.

What's the strangest book you've received as a gift?

Godel, Escher, Bach, a part of which was sent to me by Douglas Hofstadter on a single roll of computer readout in 1979. The next year it won a Pulitzer.

What books are you planning on reading over the holidays?

Arrival City by Doug Saunders and Countdown by Alan Weisman.

What type of book makes the best cold-weather reading?

Technical and popular books on tropical forests!

Author photo by Jerry

At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year.

Today's featured giver is Neil Patrick Harris, author of Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography.

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Do you have a favorite children's book to give budding readers?

I love Roald Dahl. His books are so quirky and odd — and great bait to get kids interested in reading. They all have odd, dark elements yet are filled with humor and humanity. One of my favorites is Danny the Champion of the World — a beautifully written story of a boy and his father, and their adventures hunting quail. I'd love to make it into a movie someday.

Have you ever bought a book that you intended to give as a gift but ended up keeping for yourself?

Indeed! And often! It's one of my favorite pastimes: shopping for others and buying for myself. Most recently: S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. I bought it online to give to my mother, but when it arrived, the physical book was so immersive and layered and epic that I didn't want to give it up. I eventually bought many more copies for friends, but I needed to go first.

What's the best book you've received as a gift?

My charming assistant/sidekick Zoe gave me Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves a few years ago. I'm a fan of unique structure (as you may have noticed), and this book is all over the place. I must confess, I still haven't read it — I know it's a book you really need to pay attention to, and I just haven't had the time yet to dedicate to it. But it looks amazing, and she insists it will be my new favorite book.

What's the strangest book you've received as a gift?

See answer above! It's crazy — full stories in footnotes and backward pages. Backward pages! Crazy.

Do you have any book-related holiday traditions?

We are big book readers to our kids. So now that they are four, we are looking forward to lots of holiday reading traditions.

What type of book makes the best cold-weather reading?

My instincts say the classics, but that's probably because I've been in California for most of my life. I have that romanticized idea of sitting in some snowy cabin on the East Coast reading Moby-Dick or The Sound and the Fury. Though given my current list of to-reads, it'll likely instead be biographies of magicians from the past or books revealing the secrets of magic's history. But true to form, I'll probably be smoking a pipe. Wearing an ascot. Drinking port in a snifter.

Rudolph, Grinch, Claus, or Krampus?

Rudolph, circa the 1964 stop-motion-animated TV special. Nothin' but happy holiday

At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year.

Today's featured giver is Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries.

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What books are you giving to friends and family this holiday season and why?

I'm giving poetry to my partner, who is a poet himself and so very difficult to buy for, as his tastes are much more diverse and informed than mine. I know that the presses he most admires are New Directions, The Cultural Society, Flood Editions, Talisman House, and the recently formed Verge Books — I'll do some research first and find what's new and forthcoming on their lists.

Is there a book you find yourself gifting year after year?

I've given The Gift by Lewis Hyde to a great many people. For obvious reasons, it's a book that's best given away.

Do you have a favorite children's book to give budding readers?

Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle and E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan. For readers who are a little older, Robert O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I seem to be going on an animal theme here.

Do you have any book-related holiday traditions?

I love to spend the holiday season rereading. Rereading is such a pleasure and so necessary for a writer — you notice different things the second or third time around. This year I've been making my way through Shakespeare's plays, and I'd like to go back at Christmas and read them all again, but in chronological order this time.

What type of book makes the best cold-weather reading?

Well, in New Zealand it's hot at Christmastime, so it'll be a while before I have to think about winter weather! But nothing beats a mystery on a cold day. Some of my favorite mysteries are The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and The Historian by Elizabeth

Describe your latest book/project/work.

Something Rich and Strange is a collection of selected stories, including three stories previously unpublished in book form.

Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.

Donald Harington is as underrated as any America writer I know of, and I'd suggest starting with his novel With.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.

"My mother is a fish." – Faulkner

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it?

I was on a panel with Richard Flanagan. I've always admired his work and after our event I had him sign his new novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It's the best novel by a living writer I've read in the last decade.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?

Yeats' castle in Ireland.

Describe the best breakfast of your life.

My grandmother's biscuits, eggs, and gravy.

Name the best television series of all time, and explain why it's the best.

The Wire, because they had writers on it who could actually write.

Dogs, cats, budgies, or turtles?

Dogs.

In the For-All-Eternity category, what will be your final thought?

Do I have time to revise that last sentence?

Five great Australian novels (besides Flanagan's novel above):

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Oyster by Janette Turner Hospital

Fredy Neptune by Les Murray

Voss by Patrick White

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

Author photo by Ulf Andersen.

A landmark achievement by Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything is essential reading on the ways climate change creates opportunities for us to reexamine our entire free market system — and will hopefully provoke us into lasting, significant

Leviathan Wakes is an excellent, fast-paced, well-thought-out version of a near-future, space-faring humanity. Full of actual science, realistic characters, and a believable human future, the novel contains some very intriguing ideas about space combat and possible alien life. I'd recommend this book to hard-core science fiction lovers along with just about