Karr is a national treasure--that rare genius who's also a brilliant teacher. This joyful celebration of memoir packs transcendent insights with trademark hilarity. Anyone yearning to write will be inspired, and anyone passionate to live an examined life will fall in love with language and literature all over again. -- George Saunders

Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.

For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and black belt sinner, providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told-- and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.

Joining such classics as Stephen King's On Writing and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today's most popular literary forms--a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.

#4 on The New York Times' list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation

Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear. --Oprah.com

The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's--a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as funny, lively, and un-put-downable (USA Today) today as it ever was.

#4 on The New York Times' list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation--now with a foreword by Lena Dunham in celebration of its twentieth anniversary

Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear. --Oprah.com

The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's--a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as funny, lively, and un-put-downable (USA Today) today as it ever was.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

New York Times Book Review - The New Yorker - Entertainment Weekly - Time - Washington Post - San Francisco Chronicle - Chicago Tribune - Christian Science Monitor - Slate - St. Louise Post-Dispatch - Cleveland Plain Dealer - Seattle Times - NBCC Award Finalist

Mary Karr's unforgettable sequel to her beloved and bestselling memoirs The Liars' Club and Cherry lassos you, hogties your emotions and won't let you go (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).

Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up--as only Mary Karr can tell it.

The Boston Globe calls Lit a book that reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art. The New York Times Book Review calls it a master class on the art of the memoir and Susan Cheever states, simply, that Lit is the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years.

From Mary Karr comes this gorgeously written, often hilarious story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age. Picking up where the bestselling The Liars' Club left off, Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms and hooks up with an unforgettable band of heads and bona-fide geniuses. Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter. Karr assembles a self from the smokiest beginnings, delivering a long-awaited sequel that is both bawdy and wise (San Francisco Chronicle).

As in all her work, Karr's genius is in creating her own music from a mashup of lexicons, daringly and often wittily infusing the lyrical with everyday vernacular.--BookPage

Whether enrolling in college for the first time or returning after an extended absence, this motivational guide provides adult students with a wealth of practical guidance. This thorough handbook explores not only how to succeed academically while balancing family, work, and other important responsibilities, but also addresses how students can learn to confront their fears, increase their self-confidence and resiliency, and create support groups. Containing essential information on financing education through loans, grants, and scholarships as well as practical tips for managing time, preparing for tests, taking effective notes, and using internet resources, this one-stop reference also includes action review checklists.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

New York Times Book Review - The New Yorker - Entertainment Weekly - Time - Washington Post - San Francisco Chronicle - Chicago Tribune - Christian Science Monitor - Slate - St. Louise Post-Dispatch - Cleveland Plain Dealer - Seattle Times - NBCC Award Finalist

Mary Karr's unforgettable sequel to her beloved and bestselling memoirs The Liars' Club and Cherry lassos you, hogties your emotions and won't let you go (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).

Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up--as only Mary Karr can tell it.

The Boston Globe calls Lit a book that reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art. The New York Times Book Review calls it a master class on the art of the memoir and Susan Cheever states, simply, that Lit is the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years.

What gives Sinners Welcome its sharp edge is the poet's eloquently passionate struggle at the junction of doubt and devotion. --Washington Post

From Mary Karr, the prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Liars' Club, Cherry and Lit, comes Sinners Welcome, her fourth collection of poetry that traces her improbable journey from a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism.

#4 on The New York Times' list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation--now with a foreword by Lena Dunham in celebration of its twentieth anniversary

Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear. --Oprah.com

The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's--a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as funny, lively, and un-put-downable (USA Today) today as it ever was.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Mary Karr's bestselling, unforgettable sequel to her beloved memoirs The Liars' Club and Cherry--and one of the most critically acclaimed books of the year--Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live.

The Boston Globe calls Lit a book that reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art. The New York Times Book Review calls it a master class on the art of the memoir in its Top 10 Books of 2009 Citation. Michiko Kakutani calls it a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won't let you go in her New York Times review. And Susan Cheever states, simply, that Lit is the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years.

In addition to the New York Times, Lit was named a Best Book of 2009 by the New Yorker (Reviewer Favorite), Entertainment Weekly (Top 10), Time (Top 10), the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Seattle Times.

A new volume of poetry from the New York Times bestselling and esteemed author of The Liar's Club and Lit.

Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous--that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The squalor of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power--illness, death, love's agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you're an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness.

The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's--a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This book is an unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood.

Mary Karr's four volumes of poetry are Sinner's Welcome (published by HarperCollins in 2006), Viper Rum, The Devil's Tour, and Abacus. She has received The White Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. Her first memoir, The Liars Club (Penguin, 1995), received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for best first non-fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and was named Best Book of 1995 by more than thirty newspapers and magazines. The sequel, Cherry, (Viking, 2000) was excerpted in The New Yorker and appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and BookSense. It was named a Notable Book in The New York Times. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and lives in Syracuse and New York City.

In her celebrated essay Against Decoration, published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a new formalism that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are humanist poems, written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience--poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil's Tour, her newest collection, she writes: This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: 'The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav'n or a heav'n of hell ... I myself am hell.

In her third collection of poetry, Viper Rum, Mary Karr delves into autobiographical subject matter; various beloveds are birthed and buried in these touching lyrics, some of which, as the title suggests, deal with drink:

I cast back to those last years
I drank, alone nights at the kitchen sink,
bathrobed, my head hatching snakes,
while my baby slept in his upstairs cage
and my marriage choked to death

Precise and surprising, Karr's poems take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own (Poetry).

Also included is Karr's controversial and prize-winning essay Against Decoration, in which she took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days-the new formalism that elevates form to an end itself.

Mary Karr describes herself as a black-belt sinner, and this -- her fourth collection of poems --traces her improbable journey from the inferno of a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism. Not since Saint Augustine wrote Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet! has anyone brought such smart-assed hilarity to a conversion story.

Karr's battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, friends' deaths, a teenage son's leaving home) as well as in elegies for a complicated mother. The poems disarm with the arresting humor familiar to readers of her memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry. An illuminating cycle of spiritual poems have roots in Karr's eight-month tutelage in Jesuit prayer practice, and as an afterword, her celebrated essay on faith weaves the tale of how the language of poetry, which relieved her suffering so young, eventually became the language of prayer. Those of us who fret that poetry denies consolation will find clear-eyed joy in this collection.

Una carta de amor a la adolescencia. Adictiva y descarada, m s divertida y sexy que nunca, Mary Karr captura con agudeza el hambre y la emoci n de una chica ante el mundo nuevo, sin estrenar, que se abre ante sus ojos. «Karr captura, con absoluta precisi n, lo que significa para una adolescente besar al primer chico que le gusta... C mo es comenzar la escuela secundaria... Lo que supone ser una joven hambrienta de libros, embelesada con las palabras y las ideas embriagadoras que ofrecen una liberaci n de las banalidades de la vida de un pueblo peque o... Como ya hizo en El club de los mentirosos, Karr combina el lirismo de una poeta y la lengua vern cula de un tejano con su don natural para contar historias . Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

A love letter to adolescence. Addictive and sassy, funnier and sexier than ever, Mary Karr acutely captures a girl's hunger and excitement in the face of the brand-new world that opens before her eyes.

Es posible re rse a carcajadas mientras lees un libro que trata sobre el Amor, el Alcoholismo, la Depresi n, el Matrimonio, la Maternidad y... Dios? Por supuesto. Iluminada es un buen ejemplo, el mejor ejemplo. Pocas memorias (con el ritmo de una gran novela) est n a la altura de estas p ginas. La joven que pas su dura infancia en Texas, en el seno de una familia mucho m s que «peculiar , vive durante su primera madurez un infierno del que quiz s lo puedan salvarla, adem s de la literatura y la fe, la ayuda de otros que pasaron antes por lo mismo que ella; sin olvidar el amor por su hijo, algo que la inunda al mismo tiempo que la confunde, como a tant simas madres. Iluminada est escrito con la implacable honestidad de Mary Karr, que se analiza a s misma sin escr pulos y con un humor irreverente; y nos habla de ello sin pelos en la lengua, sin sentido del rid culo, y con una prosa visceral que tiene un grand simo poder de seducci n. Iluminada es un libro apasionante e inclasificable sobre c mo crecer y c mo encontrar nuestro lugar en el mundo. Hay en l pasajes divertid simos y pasajes estremecedores, pura vida. Iluminada por la literatura, iluminada por lo espiritual, iluminada (es decir, intoxicada hasta perder la noci n de realidad) por el alcohol... La pena y el sacrificio se convierten en humor y promesa de futuro; Karr demuestra en cada p gina que est en verdad comprometida con la literatura como una forma de arte no s lo conmovedora, sino tambi n motivadora, liberadora. Si hay un libro que pueda ayudarnos a comprender qu fuimos, qu somos y qu seremos antes y despu s de atravesar alg n desierto es ste, emocionante como una resurrecci n.

Who knew it was possible to laugh out loud at a book about love, alcoholism, depression, marriage, motherhood, and God? This memoir tells of a woman's difficult childhood in Texas and her process finding relief in her love for her son, or the help of others who came before her. This unclassifiable book is, ultimately, a story of growing up and finding a place in the world.