Displaying 10 books

Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business

2024

by Roxane Gay

From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, a strikingly fresh cultural critic (Washington Post), comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between.

Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individual topics: Can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting?

In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend” columnist, Gay reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of her best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years.

Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more—with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay’s devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.

Shred Sisters

2024

by Betsy Lerner

Shred Sisters is a wry and riveting debut novel about family, mental illness, and the hard-won path between two sisters.


It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight, but when her stunning confidence morphs into something erratic and unpredictable, she becomes a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Put simply, she has no brakes.


Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, dreams of winning a Nobel Prize and unlocking the mysteries of the mind. Amy believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. Except none of that can explain what’s happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the bipolar disorder that will shatter Amy’s carefully constructed world.


As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place—first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships—every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. For all that upends and unsettles these sisters, an inextricable bond always draws them back.


Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss, and love. If anything is true, it’s what Amy learns on her road to self-acceptance: No one will love you or hurt you more than a sister.

Colored Television

2024

by Danzy Senna

Colored Television presents a brilliant dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex. Jane harbors high hopes that her life is on the brink of transformation. After a prolonged period of precarious existence, Jane, her artist husband Lenny, and their two children embark on a journey as house sitters in a friend's opulent abode nestled in the Los Angeles hills—a fortuitous arrangement that aligns perfectly with Jane's sabbatical.

If she can complete her latest work of literature, Nusu Nusu—a sweeping epic that Lenny playfully dubs her 'mulatto War and Peace'—she'll secure tenure, along with a semblance of stability and achievement. However, reality fails to meet expectations. Desperate for an alternative, Jane, like many authors before her, casts a hopeful eye towards Hollywood. A chance encounter with an up-and-coming producer, eager to craft 'diverse content' for a streaming platform, brings a glimmer of hope. He is keen to collaborate with a 'real writer' to produce what he imagines will be the ultimate biracial comedy for television.

Just as things begin to look up for Jane, they take a drastic turn for the worse. Colored Television is not only humorous and incisive but also a compelling read, marking Senna's most timely and insightful novel to date.

The Wedding People

2024

by Alison Espach

The Wedding People is a propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself.

Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other. In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

Bear

2024

by Julia Phillips

Bear is a mesmerizing novel of two sisters on a Pacific Northwest island whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor—a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods, by the celebrated, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth. They were sisters and they would last past the end of time. Sam and her sister, Elena, dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive.

Sam works long days on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can't earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence. Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want?

When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it's time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the plan to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger. A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us—and within us, Bear is a propulsive, mythical, rich novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.

Blue Sisters

2024

by Coco Mellors

Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.

The Ministry of Time

2024

by Kailane Bradley

Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kailane Bradley. This book is a time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingeniously constructed exploration of the nature of truth and power. It is also a story about the potential for love to change it all.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams. Shortly afterward, she is told about the project she'll be working on: a recently established government ministry is gathering "expats" from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time. She is tasked with working as a "bridge": living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as "1847" or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by concepts such as "washing machine," "Spotify," and "the collapse of the British Empire." But he adjusts quickly; after all, he is an explorer by trade. Soon, what the bridge initially thought would be a seriously uncomfortable housemate dynamic, evolves into something much more. Over the course of an unprecedented year, the bridge will be forced to confront the past that shaped her choices, and the choices that will shape the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks the universal question: What happens if you put a disaffected millennial and a Victorian polar explorer in a house together?

Brooklyn

2024

by Tracy Brown

Tracy Brown crafts a tale about a master manipulator and serial survivor, who will scorch earth to get what she wants. The question isn't who murdered her; the question is who wouldn't?

Brooklyn Melody James has finally gotten the punishment she deserves after leaving a web of lies, heartache, and betrayal behind her. As her life slips away, Brooklyn remembers the events that shaped her into the cold, calculating creature she became.

Brooklyn learned the art of hustling from her parents who used the church to get money. Idolizing her father and despising her mother, Brooklyn's determined to be the type of woman who makes her own rules. When her back's up against the wall, she sacrifices her family, takes the burnt offering that remains, and runs away. In NYC, young Brooklyn charms her way into the inner circle of hustlers and stick-up kids, learning tricks along the way. She catches the eye of a major player in the drug game, Hassan, and they have a breathless love affair. Brooklyn becomes integrated into his operation, earning the trust of Hassan and his associates. But when she gets the keys to the kingdom, driven by unfettered ambition and a ruthless desire to survive, Brooklyn snatches the pot of gold, leaving bitter retribution promises behind her.

From DC to Maryland, Brooklyn burns bridges and breaks hearts. What she doesn't realize is that someone is prepared to end her reign of terror. As she faces her killer and her fate, Brooklyn's stunned that justice comes from the least likely place.

Supercommunicators

2024

by Charles Duhigg

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit, a fascinating exploration of what makes conversations work, and how we can all learn to be Supercommunicators at work and in life.

Come inside a jury room as one juror leads a starkly divided room to consensus. Join a young CIA officer as he recruits a reluctant foreign agent. And sit with an accomplished surgeon as he tries, and fails, to convince yet another cancer patient to opt for the less risky course of treatment. In Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg blends deep research and his trademark storytelling skills to show how we can all learn to identify and leverage the hidden layers that lurk beneath every conversation.

Communication is a superpower and the best communicators understand that whenever we speak, we're actually participating in one of three conversations: practical (What's this really about?), emotional (How do we feel?), and social (Who are we?).

In the end, he delivers a simple but powerful lesson: With the right tools, we can connect with anyone.

The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade

2024

by Hannah Durkin

The Survivors of the Clotilda joins the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic Barracoon, offering an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil. This compelling narrative is told through the stories of its survivors—the final documented survivors of any slave ship—whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.


The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after a federal law banned the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the start of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century, serving as the last witnesses to the final act of a significant and tragic period in world history.


In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.


An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography, and social commentary, The Survivors of the Clotilda is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Black experience and of America and its tragic past.

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