Arcadia Public Library

"Harry Potter and Sense and Sensibility actor Alan Rickman builds upon his legacy as a world-class actor, a tireless political activist, an avid traveler, and more through his diaries--a twenty-five-year passion project in which Rickman invites readers backstage and into his life. Alan Rickman remains the one of the most beloved actors of all time across almost every genre in the American and British markets, from his breakout role as Die Hard's Hans...

"It's no coincidence that the world's best writers tend to keep diaries. If you faithfully record your life in a journal, you're writing every day--and if you write every day, you become a better writer. David Sedaris has kept a diary for forty years. This means that if you've kept a diary for a year of your life or less, Sedaris is at least forty times better at writing than you are. In his diaries, he's recorded everything that has captured his...

"A raucous, stunningly candid, deliriously smart diary of two years in the life of the incomparable Heidi Julavits. Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she'd since become. Instead, 'The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor.' The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about...

"In 2018, without any plan or agenda for what might happen next, Patti Smith posted her first Instagram photo: her hand with the simple message "Hello Everybody!" Known for shooting with her beloved Land 250 Camera, Smith started posting selfies with her phone, portraits of her kids, her radiator, her boots, and her Abyssinian cat, Cairo. Followers felt an immediate affinity with these miniature windows into Smith's world, her daily coffee, the books...

"The students of today tell their stories of adversity and growth in letters to the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of The Freedom Writers Diary-featuring powerful responses from the original Freedom Writers. Over twenty years ago, Erin Gruwell's first-ever class of high school students in Long Beach, California was labeled "unteachable"--but she saw past that. Instead of treating them as scores on a test, she understood that each of them had...

Bringing together the hilarious, revealing, and lucidly intelligent writing of one of England's best-known literary figures, Keeping on keeping on contains Alan Bennett's diaries from 2005 to 2015--with everything from his much celebrated essays to his irreverent comic pieces and reviews--reflecting on a decade that saw four major theater premieres and the films of The history boys and The lady in the van. A chronicle of one of the most important...

"In May 2018, former Monty Python stalwart and intrepid globetrotter Michael Palin spent two weeks in the notoriously secretive Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a cut-off land without internet or phone signal, where the countryside has barely moved beyond a centuries-old peasant economy but where the cities have gleaming skyscrapers and luxurious underground train stations. His resulting documentary was widely acclaimed. Now he shares his day-by-day...

In the diary that she would call Fire, Nin sails to New York City and, having temporarily fled her static marriage to Hugh Guiler and her love affair with Henry Miller, indulges her infatuation with analyst Otto Rank. Her interest in the study of psychology grows, but in time she tires of Rank ... and she returns to Paris, Hugh, and Henry. Settling into a great serenity, a psychological moon life, she is haunted by a rising dissatisfaction, which...

An outstanding literary event: the journals--begun in the late 1940s and continued through more than three decades--of a great American writer. John Cheever's journals provide, of course, peerless insights into the creation of his novels and stories. But they are equally the record of a complex, often dark, always closely observed inner world. No 20th-century American writer of comparable stature left such an unreservedly revealing and moving account...