On sale April 22nd, 2025

A tender, cleareyed memoir, Accidentally on Purpose charts a journey full of purpose, belonging, and real love—a “recipe for a life worth living” (Stacy London).

Kristen Kish never could have imagined people on the street knowing her name—not when she was a carefree softball-tossing kid, in high school working at a pretzel stand, and not even when she finally found her true calling as a chef. In those early days, becoming a chef meant tethering oneself to a restaurant and working in the back of a kitchen, not a television set. But working in the spotlight happened naturally, even if the attention was totally unanticipated.  And like most things in Kristen’s life, the road was so much more winding and complicated than it may have appeared from the outside.
 
From growing up as an adoptee in the Midwest, to trying to fit in with all the other girls who were busy dating boys, to coming out and finding love when she least expected it, Kristen learned that, unlike a map, no set of plans or definitions can dictate or explain a life. In fact, accidents happen. Curveballs will come. And even the full-circle moments—like winning Top Chef to becoming its Emmy-nominated host years later—could have guaranteed these opportunities.
 
In Accidentally on Purpose, what defines Kristen’s story aren’t the missteps or even the pleasant surprises that crop up but how she learned to find her voice and use it. Because while accidents may be unexpected, they don’t have to be at odds with purpose. And as Kristen approaches life’s milestones, big and small, with intention, she realizes at those junctures—the ones beyond the borders of the map, behind-the-scenes, and off camera—are where the decisions and discoveries are made. Where the unexpected meets the intentional. And that’s where things get really interesting.

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Accidentally on Purpose By Kristen Kish (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale April 22nd, 2025

From the bestselling author of Eat Cake. Be Brave, a love letter to the strong, opinionated Southern women who raised her and surround us all.

Lucy and Ethel. Laverne and Shirley. Dorothy, Sophia, Blanche, and Rose. Chicken-Fried Women is a celebration of them: the women who raised us, taught us to cook and clap back. The ones who prayed for us, raged at us and humbled us a notch or two when we needed it. These are the women who have encouraged us, teased us, chastised us, and mortified us. And as they fill up the seats around our table, we realize we wouldn’t have it any other way.

They’re our Chicken-Fried Women—battered on the outside, tender on the inside. Some are salty and a couple are Nashville Hot.  Filled with a hilarious cast of larger-than life women, this book explores why no one messes with Southern women and their hair, why the whole family comes along when you go bra shopping, why true crime and aquarobics brings us together, and how faith shapes us through it all. 

Insightful, big-hearted and laugh-out-loud funny, Chicken-Fried Women is a celebration of friendship, kinship and the women who shaped us.

Chicken-Fried Women By Melissa Radke (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale April 29th, 2025

From the #1 New York Times bestselling writer and author of How to Love an American Man comes a memoir that inspires us to remember the special teachers in our lives and reflect on the change we create when we share our stories.

Mrs. Korthaus has always been ahead of her time—an educator who inspired her students to dream bigger, think deeper, and live boldly. For decades, she led an English classroom with caring and conviction, but it’s not until she’s retired, and then fighting cancer, that she begins to share her story: long ago marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., building a corporate career, and overcoming heartbreak before “accidentally” becoming a teacher and forever shaping the lives of countless young adults—including bestselling author Kristine Gasbarre.

In Show, Don’t Tell, Kristine reflects on her thirty-year friendship with this extraordinary teacher who shaped her life so significantly. She shares the profound lessons Mrs. Korthaus taught her and other students on self-discovery, resilience, strength, and showing up fully for life. It shines a spotlight on the power of sharing our lives and our stories with each other as it moves between tragedy, awe, and the heartwarming relationship forged over decades between two women from different generations. Above all, it delivers a moving reminder about the elders who’ve believed in us—and a call to thank them for the lives they influenced us to lead.

Show, Don't Tell By Kristine Gasbarre (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale April 29th, 2025

From an award-winning artist who was featured in Humans of New York comes a bold personal narrative about overcoming family trauma, addiction, poverty—and forging a creative life in the greatest city in the world. 

Born in Brooklyn in 1963, Patrick Dougher grew up in some of the most turbulent and culturally impactful periods of NYC's history. Often neglected as a child by his parents—a father who struggled with alcohol addiction and an overworked mother who struggled to make ends meet—he learned to fend for himself. Now a renowned visual artist, musician, actor and writer, Dougher brings to the page his memories, struggles, personal revelations, and a life intimately tied to the realities of growing up Black and disenfranchised on the streets of one of the most remarkable cities in the world.

Concrete Dreamland is tragic and triumphant, gritty and hard, poetic and outrageously funny. Told in Dougher's brutally raw and courageously honest voice, these stories act as snapshots of a life lived in extremes: from gangsters to God, street style to sexuality, to recovery from drug addiction and alcoholism. He tells of his adventures as a pre-hip hop “hard rock' and an original Black punk rocker surviving during the dangerous days of the crack and AIDS epidemic in NYC, while also sharing tales of racism, homelessness, and his many brushes with fame and death.
 
Audacious, unique, and moving, Concrete Dreamland is an unforgettable story of addiction, redemption, and life on the streets of a vanishing New York.

Concrete Dreamland By Patrick Dougher (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale April 29th, 2025

Teacher By Teacher traces the remarkable journey of the 10th U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives.

The story of John B. King Jr.’s inspiring path to President Obama’s Cabinet begins the day that his mother died. He insisted on going to school that day, knowing he would find comfort in his classroom. As he navigated living alone with a father dying from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, it was public school teachers who saved his life. King’s teachers believed in him and saw his potential. They made school a safe, supportive, and engaging place where King could be a kid despite the challenges at home. While some might have dismissed a rebellious young Black and Puerto Rican teen whose life was in crisis, King’s teachers and counselors gave him a second chance.

King went on to earn degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale and committed his career to trying to do for other young people what educators did for him. Teacher By Teacher is an inspiring account of how dedicated educators—both King’s own teachers and the phenomenal teachers who he has encountered throughout his career as a teacher, principal, and education policymaker—can profoundly shape the lives of their students. King’s experiences constantly reinforce the role of schools as places of survival, healing, and hope.

This book is about overcoming challenges and the mentors who help us make it through them. Teacher By Teacher should inspire students, parents, teachers, and everyone who believes in the transformative power of education. But more than that, this book examines the life-changing impact of mentorship, especially for those who are underserved by public institutions and social systems in America.

Teacher By Teacher By John B. King Jr., Read By Joshua Quinn and John B. King Jr. (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale May 6th, 2025

From the most visible woman writing about weightlifting today, a "profoundly engrossing" memoir and manifesto about how lifting helped dissolve her allegiance to diet culture; taught her to be at home in her body; and led her to grow every kind of strength (Elizabeth Greenwood).

In A Physical Education, Casey Johnston recounts how she ventured into the brave new world of weightlifting, leaving behind years of restrictive eating and endless cardio. Woven through the trajectory of how she rebuilt her strength and confidence is a staggering exposé of the damaging doctrine spread by diet and fitness culture.  

Johnston's story dives deep into her own past relationships with calorie restriction, exercise, and codependency. As she progresses on her weightlifting journey, she begins to eat to fuel her growing strength—and her food cravings vanish. Her physical progress fuels a growing understanding of how mainstream messaging she received about women’s bodies was about preserving the status quo. Previously convinced that physical improvement was a matter of suffering, she now knows it requires self-regard and patience. A little pushing at a time adds up to the reawakening of parts of herself she didn’t even know were there.

A Physical Education asks why so many of us spend our lives trying to get "healthy” by actively making our bodies weaker. Casey Johnston is a voice for those of us who feel underdeveloped and unfulfilled in our bodies and are looking to come home to ourselves.

A Physical Education By Casey Johnston (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale May 6th, 2025

Covering her life and sixty-year career from Sonny & Cher to show-stopping solo performer, award-winning actress, fashion icon, and beyond, this is a glorious retrospective of one of the world’s most enduring entertainers, Cher. Featuring a foreword by Cyndi Lauper!
 
Commemorating six decades since her first #1 hit in 1965, I Got You Babe captures Cher’s one-of-a-kind life. Written by award-winning writer and editor Annie Zaleski, this celebration of the fearless, down-to-earth “Goddess of Pop” explores key moments in her life and career in words and photos. Among the topics covered:

Her 50-year friendship with fellow diva Tina Turner, which began in 1975 when they performed “Shame, Shame, Shame” together.

Her story of creating a “revenge dress” with designer Bob Mackie for the 1986 Oscars after being snubbed for a nomination for her performance in Mask.

The night in 1989 she made the Navy wish it could “Turn Back Time” by arriving at the USS Missouri to film her video not wearing the coveralls they expected but a barely-there fishnet bodysuit.

Cher’s unfiltered social media presence. From classic posts like “BREAKING NEWS: IM BEING BURIED IN MY FISHNETS” to weighing in on issues she believes in.

When Cher learned about Kaavan, dubbed “the world’s loneliest elephant.” The creature was kept in chains in a zoo in Pakistan and forced to perform for decades. After fans brought the problem to her attention, Cher eventually helped get him moved in 2021, and her efforts were captured in a Smithsonian documentary.

Amid these moments are photo after photo of some of the most eye-popping outfits ever worn in life and on stage. As an avid clothes horse who wasn’t afraid to wear a see-through dress to the Met Gala in 1974, Cher’s many looks will be given their due in this engaging, career-spanning retrospective.

I Got You Babe By Annie Zaleski, Read By Gabra Zackman (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale May 20th, 2025

Pulitzer Prize winning writer, editor and TV host Jonathan Capehart recounts powerful stories from his life about embracing identity, picking battles, seizing opportunity and finding his voice.

MSNBC anchor Jonathan Capehart is one of the most recognizable faces in cable news. But long before that success, Capehart spent his boyhood growing up without his father, shuttling back and forth between New Jersey and rural Severn, North Carolina, and contemplating the complexities of race and identity as they shifted around him. It was never easy bridging two worlds; whether being told he was too smart or not smart enough, too Black or not Black enough, Capehart struggled to find his place. Then, an internship at The Today Show altered the course of his life, bringing him one step closer to his dream. From there, Capehart embarks on a journey of self-discovery. 

Yet Here I Am takes us along that journey, from his years at Carleton College, where he learns to embrace his identity as a gay Black man surrounded by a likeminded community; to his decision to come out to his family, risking rejection; and finally to his move to New York City, where time and again he stumbles and picks himself up as he blazes a path to become the familiar face in news we know today.   

Honest and endearing, Yet Here I Am is an inspirational memoir of identity, opportunity, and finding one's voice and purpose along the way. 

Yet Here I Am By Jonathan Capehart (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale May 27th, 2025

An author creates a narrative blend of history, cultural criticism, and memoir in celebration of everyday queer women, based on a lesbian helpline that existed in North London in the nineties.

With warmth and humour, Elizabeth Lovatt reimagines the women who called and volunteered for the Lesbian Line in the 1990s, whilst also tracing her own journey from accidentally coming out to disastrous dates to finding her chosen family. With callers and agents alike dealing with first crushes and break-ups, sex and marriage, loneliness and illness, this is a celebration of the ordinary lives of queer women.
 
Through these revelations of the complexities, difficulties and revelries of everyday life, Lovatt investigates the ethics of writing about queer 'sheros' and the role living-history plays in the way we live today. What do we owe to our lesbian forebears? What can we learn from them when facing racism, transphobia and ableism in the community today?

Steeped in pop culture references and feminist and queer theory, Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line is a timely and vital exploration of how lesbian identity continues to remake and redefine itself in the 21st century, and where it might lead us in the future.

Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line By Elizabeth Lovatt, Read By Roshaan Riyahi-Boni (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale June 3rd, 2025

From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Gay Bar comes a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting story of outlaw love.

It’s 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams — a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a “city of refuge.”

With Atherton Lin’s inimitable blend of tenderness and wicked humor, Deep House moves through the couple’s string of rented apartments while unlocking doors to a lineage of gay men who have come before — smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in the privacy of their own homes. They include hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subverted the system, activists who went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the celebrated artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Following Gay Bar — called “a rich tapestry” by Vanity Fair and “an absolute tour de force” by Maggie Nelson — Deep House juxtaposes whispered disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama and political stunts to explore myriad forms of intimacy while questioning the mechanisms that legitimize love. Deep House is at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.

Deep House By Jeremy Atherton Lin (Audiobook Excerpt)

Grammy-winning audiobook publisher. Authors include James Patterson, David Baldacci, and Michael Connelly. Earbuds encouraged. Follow us on Twitter at @HachetteAudio.

New tracks tagged #Biography &amp; Autobiography

New tracks tagged #Biography & Autobiography