Read Chronicles: Volume One

Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.

Annie Ernaux's life from 1941 to 2006 as a collective French memory in the third person; her Nobel.

Voices of the liquidators, widows and resettled villagers; Alexievich's Nobel oral history.

Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.

Hemingway's 1920s Paris, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald, published after his death.

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in the Chelsea Hotel; the memoir of a friendship.

Keith Richards remembers more than he should; the rock memoir.

Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.