Books with category 🛣 Journey
Displaying 13 books

Somewhere Beyond the Sea

2024

by TJ Klune

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is the highly anticipated sequel to TJ Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea, a beloved and best-selling fantasy novel.

Arthur Parnassus has created a good life from the remnants of a difficult past. As the caretaker of an extraordinary orphanage on a remote and unique island, he aspires to become the adoptive father to the six enchanted and powerful children in his care.

Arthur dedicates himself fully, ensuring that the children never endure the neglect and suffering he experienced as an orphan on the same island. He's not alone in his efforts; his life partner, Linus Baker, a former employee of the Department In Charge of Magical Youth, stands with him. Alongside them are the island's sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will go to any lengths to safeguard the children.

When Arthur is compelled to confront his shadowy history publicly, he leads a battle for a future that his family and all magical beings are entitled to. The arrival of a new magical child, who embraces the term 'monster'—a label Arthur fought to shield his children from—indicates a pivotal moment for their family. They must either unite more robustly than before or risk disintegration.

Return to Marsyas Island for Arthur's tale—a narrative of perseverance and love, about the challenging journey to fight for the life you choose and the effort required to maintain it.

Mean Boys

2024

by Geoffrey Mak

Mean Boys: A Personal History delves into the complex world of male friendships and rivalries, exploring how they shape our identities and experiences. Geoffrey Mak shares his personal journey, examining the intricate dynamics of competition and camaraderie among men.

Through a series of vivid anecdotes and reflective insights, Mak reveals the often unspoken rules that govern male relationships. He sheds light on the challenges and triumphs that come with navigating these bonds, offering a candid look at the role of masculinity in modern society.

This memoir is not just a tale of personal growth but a broader commentary on the societal expectations placed on men. Mak's narrative is both thought-provoking and relatable, as he invites readers to reconsider what it means to be a 'mean boy' in today's world.

An Unfinished Love Story

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America's most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. In his thirties, he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.

Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved. The Goodwins' last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.

Their expedition gave Dick's last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.

Committed

2024

by Suzanne Scanlon

Committed is a raw and masterful memoir that navigates the complexities of becoming a woman and going mad—and the intersection of both. Suzanne Scanlon's journey begins in the 90s as a student at Barnard College, where the loss of her mother sends her adrift in a sea of grief and inexpressible pain. This turmoil leads to a suicide attempt that results in her admission to the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Spanning nearly three years and a myriad of experimental treatments, Suzanne eventually leaves the institute on unsteady footing. The following decades mark her path to recovery and a profound understanding of her suffering as part of a broader narrative—a lineage of women whose intricate and often silenced stories of self-realization are dismissed as mere “crazy chick” and “madwoman” clichés.

Through her personal odyssey, Suzanne discovers a resonating thrill in the works of influential women writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, and Shulamith Firestone. Committed is both a tale of personal discovery and a call to reclaim the archetype of the madwoman, celebrating it as a source of insight and a means to transcendence.

I Cheerfully Refuse

2024

by Leif Enger

I Cheerfully Refuse is a career-defining tour-de-force from New York Times bestselling, award-winning novelist Leif Enger. Set in a not-too-distant America, it is the tale of Rainy, a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife.

An endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, Rainy seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society.

Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. As his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.

Like Love

2024

by Maggie Nelson

Like Love: Essays and Conversations is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent.

The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.

Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Ghost Dogs: On Killers And Kin

2024

by Andre Dubus III

Ghost Dogs: On Killers And Kin is a collection of essays from the literary master and bestselling author of Townie, Andre Dubus III. In this work, Dubus reflects on a life filled with challenges, contradictions, and fulfillments. The narrative takes readers on an intimate journey through the author's personal experiences, thoughts, and emotions.

Parasol Against The Axe

2024

by Helen Oyeyemi

Parasol Against the Axe, a novel by the prize-winning, bestselling author Helen Oyeyemi, takes readers on an adventurous and kaleidoscopic journey into the heart of Prague, a city portrayed as a living entity capable of welcoming or rejecting its visitors.

Hero Tojosoa, upon accepting an invitation to a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie, finds herself in the intriguing and often deceptive embrace of Prague. A mysterious book she carries distorts her perception, its content shifting with each reader and each reading, unveiling a tapestry of fictional tales from Prague's history. Throughout the weekend, unexpected figures join the festivities, imparting their wisdom, humor, and hints of betrayal.

The sudden arrival of a third woman from Hero and Sofie's shared past intensifies the tension and challenges their differing recollections. As the lines between illusion and delusion, fact and interpretation become blurred, Hero must navigate the treacherous waters of friendship and storytelling.

Parasol Against the Axe probes the influence of the reader on a narrative and the narrative on the reader, posing the ultimate question: in a clash between friends, is it wiser to be the shield or the weapon?

Interesting Facts About Space

2024

by Emily R. Austin

Interesting Facts About Space is a journey through the cosmos, guided by the witty and introspective Enid. An aficionado of all things astronomical, Enid can describe the terrifying wonders of black holes with ease, but her own fears are much closer to home—like her inexplicable phobia of bald men, a secret she guards closely.

Between her addiction to true crime podcasts and a carousel of dates with women from dating apps, Enid is trying to navigate the complexities of life, including reconnecting with her estranged half-sisters following their father's death. But life takes a peculiar turn when Enid finds herself in her first serious romantic relationship and starts to suspect that she's being stalked.

As Enid's paranoia escalates, she's forced to face the haunting realization that she can't escape the most persistent follower of all—herself. With a blend of quirky humor, charm, and a touch of heartache, Interesting Facts About Space explores the importance of confronting our hidden fears and the most intimately human aspects of our identity.

Martyr!

2024

by Kaveh Akbar

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is an electrifying, funny, and wholly original novel that heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction. The story follows Cyrus Shams, a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, who is guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings on a remarkable search for a family secret. This journey leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus grapples with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident, and his father's life in America was circumscribed by his work at a factory farm. As a drunk, an addict, and a poet, Cyrus's obsession with martyrs drives him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death and toward his mother, through a painting that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, and others.

The Fine Art Of Literary Fist-Fighting

2024

by Lee Gutkind

An account of the emergence of creative nonfiction, written by the "godfather" of the genre. In the 1970s, Lee Gutkind, a leather-clad hippie motorcyclist and former public relations writer, fought his way into the academy. Then he took on his colleagues. His goal: to make creative nonfiction an accepted academic discipline, one as vital as poetry, drama, and fiction.

In this book, Gutkind tells the true story of how creative nonfiction became a leading genre for both readers and writers. Creative nonfiction--true stories enriched by relevant ideas, insights, and intimacies--offered liberation to writers, allowing them to push their work in freewheeling directions. The genre also opened doors to outsiders--doctors, lawyers, construction workers--who felt they had stories to tell about their lives and experiences.

Gutkind documents the evolution of the genre, discussing the lives and work of such practitioners as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, Upton Sinclair, Janet Malcolm, and Vivian Gornick. Gutkind also highlights the ethics of writing creative nonfiction, including how writers handle the distinctions between fact and fiction. Gutkind's book narrates the story not just of a genre but of the person who brought it to the forefront of the literary and journalistic world.

The Rebel's Clinic

2024

by Adam Shatz

Since his death in 1961 at the age of thirty-six, Frantz Fanon has loomed ever larger. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power have inspired radical movements across the world. But who was Frantz Fanon? In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey--from a civil servant's modest home in Martinique to fighting in the French Army during World War II, practicing psychiatry in rural France and Algeria, and joining the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist before his death at a military hospital in Maryland.

Shatz situates Fanon's writings in the context of his close and contested relations with the French intellectuals of his era, as well as his encounters with psychiatric patients, guerrilla fighters, and the early leaders of independent African states. Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life--and a guide to the books that underlie Black Lives Matter and other groups attempting to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

The Last Fire Season

2024

by Manjula Martin

H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means—now—to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world.

When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods of Northern California, she wanted to be closer to the wilderness that she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a health crisis that left her with chronic pain, and found a sense of healing through tending her garden beneath the redwoods of Sonoma County. But the landscape that Martin treasured was an ecosystem already in crisis. Wildfires fueled by climate change were growing bigger and more frequent: each autumn, her garden filled with smoke and ash, and the local firehouse siren wailed deep into the night.

In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous wildfires across the West and kicked off the worst fire season on record, Martin, along with thousands of other Californians, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic. Both a love letter to the forests of the West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that led to their current dilemma, The Last Fire Season, follows her from the oaky hills of Sonoma County to the redwood forests of coastal Santa Cruz, to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada, as she seeks shelter, bears witness to the devastation, and tries to better understand fire's role in the ecology of the West. As Martin seeks a way to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, she comes to question her own assumptions about nature and the complicated connections between people and the land on which we live.

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