Books with category 📚 Non-Fiction
Displaying books 49-96 of 1649 in total

Accordion Eulogies

2024

by Noe Alvarez

Searching, propulsive, and deeply spiritual, Accordion Eulogies is an odyssey to repair a severed family lineage, told through the surprising history of a musical instrument.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez never knew his grandfather. Stories swirled around this mythologized, larger-than-life figure: That he had abandoned his family, and had possibly done something awful that put a curse on his descendants. About his grandfather, young Noé was sure of only one thing: That he had played the accordion.

Now an adult, reckoning with the legacy of silence surrounding his family’s migration from Mexico, Álvarez resolves both to take up the instrument and to journey into Mexico to discover the grandfather he never knew. Álvarez travels across the US with his accordion, meeting makers and players in cities that range from San Antonio to Boston. He uncovers the story of an instrument that’s been central to classic American genres, but also played a critical role in indigenous Mexican history.

Like the accordion itself, Álvarez feels trapped between his roots in Mexico and the U.S. As he tries to make sense of his place in the world—as a father, a son, a musician—he gets closer to uncovering the mystery of his origins.

Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk

2024

by Kathleen Hanna

An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Hey girlfriend I got a proposition, goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want. Kathleen Hanna's rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 90s and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like "Rebel Girl" and "Double Dare Ya" are more powerful than ever.

But where did this transformative voice come from? In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes clear, being in a "girl band," especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her—including with her bandmates, Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Johanna Fateman; her friendships with Kurt Cobain and Ian MacKaye; and her introduction to Joan Jett— were all a testament to how the punk world could nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin.

She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how it continues to fuel her revolutionary art and music.

The Situation Room

George Stephanopoulos, former senior advisor to President Clinton and for more than 20 years anchor of This Week and co-anchor of Good Morning America, recounts the crises that decided the course of history, from the place 12 presidents made their highest-pressure decisions: the White House Situation Room. No room better defines American power and its role in the world than the White House Situation Room. And yet, none is more shrouded in secrecy and mystery. Created under President Kennedy, the Sit Room has been the epicenter of crisis management for presidents for more than six decades. Time and again, the decisions made within the Sit Room complex affect the lives of every person on this planet.

Detailing close calls made and disasters narrowly averted, THE SITUATION ROOM will take readers through dramatic turning points in a dozen presidential administrations, including:

  • Incredible minute-by-minute transcripts from the Sit Room after both Presidents Kennedy and Reagan were shot
  • The shocking moment when Henry Kissinger raised the military alert level to DEFCON III while President Nixon was drunk in the White House residence
  • The extraordinary scene when President Carter asked for help from secret government psychics to rescue American hostages in Iran
  • A vivid retelling of the harrowing hours during the 9/11 attack
  • New details from Obama administration officials leading up to the raid on Osama Bin Laden
  • And a first-ever account of January 6th from the staff inside the Sit Room

THE SITUATION ROOM is the definitive, past-the-security-clearance look at the room where it happened, and the people—the famous and those you've never heard of—who have made history within its walls.

First Love: Essays On Friendship

2024

by Lilly Dancyger

First Love: Essays on Friendship is a bracing, intimate essay collection that delves into the power and complexity of female friendship in the wake of violence. Authored by the critically acclaimed Lilly Dancyger, this book emerges from the tragic murder of her cousin Sabina, which profoundly altered her understanding of womanhood and rippled through her closest friendships.

The loss of Sabina, her first love, serves as a catalyst for a bold and refreshing exploration of the connections between women. Dancyger examines the intensity of adolescent best friendships, fluid sexuality, mothering, and chosen family. Each essay is deeply rooted in a significant female friendship from her life, reaching outwards to challenge cultural assumptions about feminine identity and desire, and the ways in which women support one another in a world that often seeks to diminish them.

With seamless integration of personal anecdotes, literature, and pop culture references—from fairytales and true crime to the works of Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath, and even the 'sad girls' of Tumblr—Dancyger's essays weave a multifaceted narrative of a life as told through the lens of friendships. This collection is a profound exploration of the essence of loving one another and elevates friendships to the status of love stories, offering them the deep consideration traditionally reserved for romantic relationships.

First Love argues that although friendship cannot shield us from the dangers of the world, the love found within it is always worth the risk. In times of tragedy, Dancyger reminds us, it is our friends who provide the support necessary for survival. Through First Love, the invaluable bonds of friendship are celebrated and given their rightful recognition.

Counting Feminicide

Why grassroots data activists in Latin America count feminicide—and how this vital social justice work challenges mainstream data science. What isn’t counted doesn’t count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women.

Against this failure, Counting Feminicide brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D’Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account.

Counting Feminicide showcases the incredible power of data feminism in practice, in which each murdered woman or girl counts, and, in being counted, joins a collective demand for the restoration of rights and a transformation of the gendered order of the world.

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.

The Demon of Unrest

2024

by Erik Larson

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile, brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a slow-burning crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston—Fort Sumter.

Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, inflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.

Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.

Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

2024

by Danielle Dutton

From the author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL comes a prose collection like no other, where different styles of writing and different spaces of experience create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. Danielle Dutton's endlessly inventive books have been praised as "strikingly smart and daringly feminist" (Jenny Offill), "brilliantly odd" (The Irish Independent), and "beguiling" (The Wall Street Journal).

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, four distinct sections operate like Joseph Cornell boxes, each offering its own vibrant proposal for what contemporary writing might be. "Prairie" is a cycle of stories set in the Midwest, a surreal landscape of wildflowers, ominous rivers, violence, virtual reality, art, fear, and loss. The conceptual work in "Dresses" reconsiders the canon through the lens of its garb, like a wild literary closet. "Art" turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction relate to one another, a theme central to the whole book. The final section, "Other," collects pieces in irregular ("other") forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious or heartbreaking for reasons as inexplicable as the abiding beauty and strangeness of all of Dutton's work.

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.

Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

2024

by Alua Arthur

Briefly Perfectly Human is a deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more fulfilling, and authentic lives, from America’s most visible death doula.


For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.


Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.


This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.


Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls “death embrace.” Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,” Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”

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” clichĂ©s.

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.

Knife

2024

by Salman Rushdie

From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, Knife is a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.

Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

The States of the Earth

HOW THE DISENCHANTMENT OF EMPIRE LED TO CLIMATE CHANGE.

While industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand with racial capitalism in the age of empires: a terrestrial paradise was to be achieved through accumulation and the ravaging of nature.

Far from a defence of religion, The States of the Earth argues that phenomena such as evangelism and political Islam are best understood as products of empire and secularization. In a world where material technology was considered divine, religious and secular forces both tried to achieve Heaven on Earth by destroying Earth itself.

The Wives

2024

by Simone Gorrindo

The Wives is a captivating memoir by Simone Gorrindo that tells the story of one woman’s experience of joining a community of army wives after leaving her New York City job. It provides a profoundly intimate look at marriage, friendship, and the power of human connection.


When her new husband joins an elite Army unit, Simone is uprooted from New York City and dropped into Columbus, Georgia. With her husband frequently deployed, Simone is left to find her place in this new world, alone—until she meets the wives.


Gorrindo gives us an intimate look into the inner lives of a remarkable group of women and a tender, unflinching portrait of a marriage. This memoir is a love story, an unforgettable coming-of-age tale, and a bracing tour of the intractable divisions that plague our country today. The Wives offers a rare and powerful gift: a hopeful stitch in the fabric of a torn America.

All Things Are Too Small

2024

by Becca Rothfeld

All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural critic Becca Rothfeld's soul cry for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, ravishment, ugliness, and unbound truth in aesthetics, whether we're talking about literature, criticism, or design. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess; alas, in the contemporary Anglophone West, we've got it flipped.

The gap between rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, yawns hideously wide, while we stagnate in a cultural equality that imposes restraint. This collection of essays ranges from topics such as Sally Rooney, sadomasochism, and women who wait, making a glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in culture in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion.

Being Reflected Upon

2024

by Alice Notley

Being Reflected Upon is a memoir in verse from one of America's legendary poets. Alice Notley delivers a collection that serves as a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics. The book is a reflective journey through Notley's Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, a period that encapsulates her experiences with illness and recovery following her first breast cancer treatment.

As Notley penned these poems, she discovered connections between events of this period and those from previous decades. The narrative moves from reminiscences of her mother and childhood in California to meditations on illness and recovery. It also encompasses various poetic adventures in cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh.

The collection is deeply concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and the dead. The term "stream-of-consciousness" is not just a stylistic description but also teases out a lived physics or philosophy that Notley explores through her work.

Death Styles

Death Styles is a poignant exploration of the intertwining of style and survival in the face of profound loss. Following her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, author Joyelle McSweeney embarks on a personal challenge to write a poem each day, using a single icon as a creative spark. From the unexpected muses like River Phoenix and Mary Magdalene to a backyard skunk, McSweeney delves deep into each subject, pushing through the exhaustion of grief.

With its candid and mesmerizing lyrics, Death Styles takes readers on a journey through the contradictory forces of survival and mourning. It is a testament to the power of poetic expression to navigate through life's most challenging moments, discovering hope in the act of creation and the resilience to step out of the shadows of death.

Finding A Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better At Art

2024

by Nicholson Baker

From the acclaimed and bestselling writer Nicholson Baker, a deeply personal account of his journey learning how to paint for the first time, and a meditation on the power of art in times of crisis.

Nicholson Baker wanted to learn how to paint. In 2019, after years of researching and writing about secret and often horrible government programs for his book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, he was wiped out. Having been steeped for so long in the history of war, violence, and conspiracy, the world had lost some of its brightness. Photography had scratched a creative itch for years, but now, Baker was desperate to squeeze more out of what he saw – he wanted to live, slowly, through the snatches of life he was recording in photos. Maybe, he thought, he could learn to paint? The idea consumed him, but he was nagged by an even more debilitating doubt: What if he failed?

Finding a Likeness is Baker's record of the years he worked to improve his artistic skills, beginning with his first, humble attempts to set paintbrush to paper. Driven by a natural curiosity and a strong desire to paint faces, clouds, and landscapes that actually resemble faces, clouds, and landscapes, he attends classes from local artists, watches YouTube tutorials, and seeks out master painters from the past and present in the hopes of uncovering their secrets. In his inimitable voice, Baker recounts the highs and lows of the creative process, reflects on memories of growing up as the son of two painters, and learns what it means to really see.

Filled with Baker's own art, as well as the work of artists from around the world, Finding a Likeness is a tender and deeply felt testimony to taking a step back and going back to basics. Baker improves dramatically in his craft, but as he considers what it means to try, fail, and try again, he discovers far more than what it takes to paint a cloud – rather, he shows us how to bear witness to the world, to the good and the bad, and to do it all justice with paper and ink.

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.

New And Selected Poems

2024

by Marie Howe

New and Selected Poems is an indispensable collection that spans more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from acclaimed poet Marie Howe. Characterized by "a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions," as noted by Matthew Zapruder in the New York Times Magazine, Howe's poetry effortlessly transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles.

This essential volume draws from each of Howe's four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood—and contains more than fifteen new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or contemplating aging while walking the dog, Howe is hailed as "a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy" by Dorianne Laux.

Sociopath: A Memoir

2024

by Patric Gagne

Sociopath: A Memoir is a compelling narrative that delves into the life of an individual grappling with sociopathy. Patric Gagne brings readers into her world, beginning with the realization in her early years that she was different from her peers. Emotions that come naturally to most—fear, guilt, empathy—were foreign to her, leaving her feeling an overwhelming sense of nothingness.

Struggling to conform to societal expectations, Patric resorted to theft, deceit, and occasional violence, all in an attempt to feel something. Her journey took a turn in college when she received confirmation of her long-held suspicion: she was a sociopath. Despite the bleak outlook presented by mental health professionals, who offered no treatment or hope for a 'normal' life, Patric's story takes a hopeful turn when she reconnects with a past love.

This reunion sparks a glimmer of possibility: if she is capable of love, perhaps she isn't the monster society makes sociopaths out to be. With new-found motivation, she sets out on a mission, with the support of her partner and a cast of intriguing characters, to challenge the stigma surrounding her diagnosis and advocate for the millions who, like her, are often misunderstood.

Sociopath: A Memoir is not just a tale of self-discovery and redemption; it's a testament to the power of love and the human spirit's capacity for change. It's a narrative that offers hope and understanding for those who have been labeled as different or difficult, and it encourages a deeper, more empathetic view of mental health.

Tap Dancing on Everest

2024

by Mimi Zieman

The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain and only successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first larger team, Mimi Zieman’s team would climb without using supplemental oxygen, porter support, or chance for rescue. She would accompany the climbers as the doctor—and only woman—although she was still in her third year of medical school.

Full of self-doubt, Zieman grappled with whether to go but couldn’t resist the call of the mountains. On Everest, when three climbers disappeared during their summit attempt, she reached the knife edge of her limits and dug deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.

Sparkling with suspense and vulnerability, Tap Dancing on Everest is a coming-of-age story about the risks we take to become our truest selves. Zieman weaves her childhood as the daughter of immigrants raised in 1970’s New York City, her father a Holocaust survivor, with adventure and medicine, capturing the curiosity and awe of a young woman as she faces down messages to stay small and safe and ventures into the unknown.

Traces Of Enayat

Traces Of Enayat is a brilliant work of creative nonfiction from one of the preeminent poets of the Arab-speaking world, exploring the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature's tragic heroine. Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. In the following decades, it's as if Enayat never existed.

Years later, celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal discovers Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, leading her on a journey of reflection and rediscovery. Through interviews with family members and friends, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife, tracking down the places where Enayat spent her days. From the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal's own past, a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms.

Traces Of Enayat embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject, crafting a luminous biographical detective story.

We Loved It All

2024

by Lydia Millet

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet is an intimate evocation of the glory of nature, our vexed position in the animal kingdom, and the difficulty of adoring what we destroy. In her first work of nonfiction, acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet offers a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of nonhuman beings.

Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, Millet offers intimate portraits of what she calls “the others”―the extraordinary animals with whom we still share the world, along with those already lost. Humans, too, fill this book, as Millet touches on the lives of her world-traveling parents, fascinating partners and friends, and colorful relatives, from diplomats to nut farmers―all figures in the complex tapestry each of us weaves with the surrounding world.

Written in the tradition of Annie Dillard or Robert Macfarlane, We Loved It All is an incantatory work that will appeal to anyone concerned about the future of life on earth―including our own.

You Are Here

You Are Here: Poetry In The Natural World, edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada LimĂłn, is a singular collection of poems that reflects on our relationship to the natural world. This book brings together fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto GonzĂĄlez, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more.

Contrary to the traditional images evoked by "nature poetry," this collection presents an updated and vibrant perspective. Each poem interacts with the author's local landscape, whether it's the vast array of flora in a national park or a resilient tree blooming by a bus stop. These works offer an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us.

Through a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States, You Are Here challenges our preconceptions about nature and poetry. The collection is both joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, offering a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" signify in the current era, and inviting readers to experience both in a fresh, new light.

On Giving Up

2024

by Adam Phillips

A new book from the acclaimed psychoanalytic writer Adam Phillips on giving up to feel more alive. To give up or not to give up? The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple. Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.

There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment—an attempt to make a different future. In On Giving Up, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive?

The Anxious Generation

2024

by Jonathan Haidt

A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.


With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world. While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.


After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?


In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the "play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s.


He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.


Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the "collective action problems" that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.


Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

There's Always This Year

There's Always This Year is a poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent, and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America. While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan.

Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir. "Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jumpshot," Abdurraqib writes. "The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time."

There's Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It's about basketball in the way They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, Abdurraqib's exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

A Chance Meeting: Encounters Between American Writers And Artists

2024

by Rachel Cohen

A Chance Meeting: Encounters Between American Writers And Artists by Rachel Cohen is a tapestry of creativity and circumstance, chronicling the many links and serendipitous meetings between giants of American culture. This inventive consideration of American culture evokes actual meetings between historical figures such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marcel Duchamp.

The narrative reveals how these figures met in ordinary ways—a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or simply standing near the drinks. They conversed for a few hours or for decades, and later, it seemed impossible that they could have missed each other. From a boyhood encounter between Henry James and Mathew Brady to the partnership of Avedon and James Baldwin, the book delves into the friendships, mentorships, and collaborations that sparked creativity and influenced American literature and art.

Cohen's work draws the reader into the mysterious process by which creativity has been sparked and passed on among iconoclastic American writers and artists, forming a long chain of influence stretching from the Civil War era through a century that profoundly affected contemporary culture.

The Black Box: Writing The Race

The Black Box: Writing The Race is a profound exploration of how Black Americans have wielded the power of the written word to carve out their identity, defy the falsehoods of racism, and engage in robust debates within their own community throughout American history.

Derived from the renowned introductory course in African American Studies at Harvard, led by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this work narrates the journey of Black self-definition in America. It highlights the efforts of literary giants such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. These figures have utilized literature to create a "home" for Black individuals in a society marred by virulent racism.

At its core, the book celebrates the paradox that a community, initially shaped by oppressors to rationalize inhumane enslavement, has reinvented itself through literature. This transformation has been an act of defiance, leading to the emergence of a culture that is resilient, creative, and powerful, despite internal disagreements about the essence of being "Black" and the crafting of a past that fosters a more equitable future.

The Black Box: Writing The Race is an epic tale that documents how a multitude of creative minds have revealed and resisted the confines of the metaphorical "black box"—a label imposed upon them, often arbitrarily, since the nation's inception. This book captures the saga of a people's creation through their essays, speeches, novels, plays, and poems, chronicling their persistent struggle and triumph.

Who's Afraid Of Gender?

2024

by Judith Butler

From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless.

Lessons For Survival: Mothering Against The Apocalypse

2024

by Emily Raboteau

Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau uses the lens of motherhood to craft a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice —and what it takes to find shelter. Lessons For Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises.

With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and ways her children may safely play in city parks while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community discovers the most intimate meanings of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black women/motherhood, and to the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature.

This innovative work of reportage and autobiography will appeal to readers of the bestseller All We Can Save and Joan Didion’s The White Album alike. Lessons For Survival stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.

On Extinction: Beginning Again At The End

2024

by Benjamin Ware

How to think about the end of the world and what we must do to rebuild beyond that final moment, for readers of The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Extinction: A Radical History by Ashley Dawson. What are we to think as we face the sixth extinction moment? Kant's invitation to imagine an 'end of all things' no longer feels like just a thought experiment.

Philosopher Ben Ware argues that we must accept this without looking away. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we see our current reality. He argues that in order to map the catastrophic present, we will first need to take a tiger's leap into the past in order to construct a new 'dialectics of extinctions'.

On Extinction takes us on a breath-taking philosophical journey. Bringing dialectical thought to bear on one of the most pressing issues of our times, Ware argues that radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst, but rather with beginning again at the end: bringing to completion a mode of political and economic life which tethers us all–the yet to be born–to a sick but undying present. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need.

Reading Genesis

Marilynne Robinson, one of our greatest novelists and thinkers, presents a radiant, thrilling interpretation of the book of Genesis.

For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents, by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.

Both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture. Reading Genesis, which includes the original text, is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God's enduring covenant with humanity. This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God's abiding faith in Creation.

The Moon That Turns You Back

2024

by Hala Alyan

The Moon That Turns You Back is a new collection of poetry by Hala Alyan, the author of The Arsonists' City and The Twenty-Ninth Year. This collection explores the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family across different times and places. Alyan delves into the experiences of displacement and war, creating a tapestry of memories that interlink Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem.

The poems challenge the boundaries between space and time, intermingling daily life with the brutalities of geopolitical strife. Alyan examines the forces that can displace an individual from home and body, and conversely, the resilience and love that can anchor a person back into their essence and familial legacy. The work raises poignant questions about transformation and stability for those who have led a life in constant change.

You Get What You Pay For

2024

by Morgan Parker

Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression.

She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In this collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Morgan and her therapist, Morgan examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the ubiquity of a beauty culture that excludes Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche—and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

2024

by Nam Le

An explosive, devastating debut book of poetry from the acclaimed author of The Boat. In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature—in a virtuosic array of forms and registers—before shattering the form itself.

In line with the works of Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this book is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression, and historical trauma.

But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one's home, country, culture, or language. And the complex violence—for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this—of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks, and camouflages, Le's poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

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.

Here After

2024

by Amy Lin

Here After is a poetic, raw depiction of an unlikely love followed by a dizzying loss. A stunning, taut memoir from debut Canadian author Amy Lin that will resonate deeply with anyone who has been in grief’s grasp. “When he dies, I fall out of time.” Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. On a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds’ move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy’s family. It’s the last time she sees her husband alive.

What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest portrayal of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held “truths” about what the grieving process looks like. Here After is an intimate story of deep love followed by dizzying loss; a memoir so finely etched that its power will remain with you long after the final page.

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

2024

by Angela Saini

A groundbreaking exploration of gendered oppression—its origins, its histories, our attempts to understand it, and our efforts to combat it

For centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species. But how would our understanding of gender inequality—our imagined past and contested present—look if we didn’t assume that men have always ruled over women, if we saw inequality as something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted?

In The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini explores the roots of what we call patriarchy, uncovering a complex history of how it first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present. She travels to the world’s earliest known human settlements, analyzes the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and traces cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and feminists began to actively question what patriarchy meant as part of the attempt to understand the origins of inequality. In our own time, despite the pushback against sexism, abuse, and discrimination, even revolutionary efforts to bring about equality have often ended in failure and backlash. But The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality is a hopeful book—one that reveals a multiplicity to human arrangements that undercuts the old grand narratives and exposes male supremacy as no more, and no less, than an ever-shifting element in systems of control.

Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers: A Life is the first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America's greatest writers. Drawing from newly available letters and journals, this biography paints a full picture of a brilliant and complex artist, Carson McCullers, whose literary stature has endured over time.

Carson McCullers, born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, aspired to become a concert pianist, but her talent for writing, evident since she was sixteen, led her to a different path. The influence of music can be seen throughout her work, and her personal life was as rich and complex as her novels. At the age of twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, and their tumultuous twelve-year marriage ended tragically with his suicide in 1953.

McCullers' debut novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, published when she was just twenty-three, catapulted her to literary stardom. Despite her public success, her private life remained enigmatic. Now, with access to a wealth of materials that have surfaced in recent years, Mary V. Dearborn gives us an unprecedented look into the life of a writer who was decades ahead of her time, capturing the heart and longing of the outcast.

Dead Weight: Essays On Hunger And Harm

2024

by Emmeline Clein

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein tells the story of her own disordered eating alongside, and through, other women from history, pop culture and the girls she's known and loved. Tracing the medical and cultural history of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Clein investigates the economic conditions underpinning our eating disorder epidemic, and illuminates the ways racism and today's feminism have been complicit in propping up the thin ideal.

While examining goop, Simone Weil, pro-anorexia blogs, and the flawed logic of our current methods of treatment, Clein also grapples with the myriad ways disordered eating has affected her own friendships and romantic relationships.

Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression and denial that is insidious, pervasive, and dangerous, one that internalizes and promotes the fetish of self-shrinking as a core tenet of the American cult of femininity. This is replicated in our algorithms, our television shows, our novels, and our relationships with one another. A sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic for readers fascinated by the external forces shaping our lives, Dead Weight is electrifying, unapologetically bold, and fiercely compassionate.

Grief Is for People

2024

by Sloane Crosley

Disarmingly witty and poignant, Sloane Crosley's first memoir explores multiple kinds of loss following the death of her closest friend. Grief Is for People is an unusual kind of grief book—the story of several compounding, unexpected losses, and the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it, but told with the verve and voice we have come to expect from Sloane Crosley.

Focusing her trademark humor and wit on the deep pain and confusion of losing her closest friend and mentor to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, searching for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief to understand her new reality. Sloane and Russell worked together and played together, navigating the corridors of office life, the literary world, weekends in the country, and the dramatic ups and downs of making it in New York City. In a city where friends become family, they were best friends. When Russell dies, Sloane is already reeling from a break-in and the theft of her jewelry, her most prized and meaningful possessions. While Russell's death puts that loss in perspective, it also propels her on a quest to right the losses she is feeling, as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic.

Crosley's search for answers is frank, funny, and gilded with a deeply resounding empathy. Upending the "grief memoir" in utterly unexpected and entirely welcome ways, Grief Is for People rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of loss during these grief-stricken times.

No Judgement

2024

by Lauren Oyler

No Judgement: Essays is a forthcoming collection by Lauren Oyler, known for her sharp wit and insightful commentary. While the descriptive copy is not yet available from the Publisher, readers can expect a series of compelling essays that delve into the art of being critical.

Oyler's work often explores the intersection of culture, social media, and literature, offering a unique perspective on contemporary issues. This collection promises to be an essential read for anyone interested in the power of critique in our modern world.

Normal Women

The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus—a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history.

Most histories have been written by men, about men, relegating women—with the exception of a few queens—to the shadows of time. Now, bestselling author Philippa Gregory reveals the importance of ordinary women, providing a more balanced and truer chronicle that expands and adds rich detail to the story of Great Britain.

In Normal Women, Gregory draws on an enormous archive of primary and secondary sources to rewrite British history, focusing on the agency, persistence, and effectiveness of everyday women throughout periods of social and cultural transition. She sweeps from the making of the Bayeux tapestry in the eleventh century to the Black Death in 1348—after which women were briefly paid the same wages as men, the last time for seven centuries—to the 1992 ordination of women by the Church of England, when the church accepted, for the first time, that a woman could perform the miracle of the mass.

Through the stories of the female soldiers of the civil war, the guild widows who founded the prosperity of the City of London, highwaywomen and pirates, miners, ship owners, international traders, the women who ran London theaters and commissioned plays from Shakespeare, and the "female husbands" who married each other legally in church and lived as husband and wife, Gregory redefines "normal" female behavior to include heroism, rebellion, crime, treason, money-making, and sainthood. As she makes clear, normal women make history.

Normal Women will include black-and-white illustrations throughout and a full-color insert.

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America's Invasion Of Iraq

2024

by Steve Coll

From bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll comes The Achilles Trap, the definitive story of the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein. This deeply researched and news-breaking investigation explores how human error, cultural miscommunication, and hubris led to one of the costliest geopolitical conflicts of our time.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the justification was clear: Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, allegedly possessed weapons of mass destruction posing a grave danger to the world. The absence of such weapons led to scrutiny of the political and intelligence failures that precipitated the invasion, occupation, and ensuing civil war. A key unresolved question: Why did Saddam give the false impression that he possessed WMDs?

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the complex web of individuals, power plays, and geopolitics that culminated in America's war with Iraq. Coll traces Saddam's rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program, delving into the dictator's inner circle. He vividly portrays diplomats, scientists, family members, and generals—all beholden to a leader responsible for widespread suffering.

CIA and presidential administrations repeatedly failed to understand Saddam's paranoia, resentments, and inconsistencies. Utilizing unpublished sources, interviews with participants, and Saddam's own transcripts and audio files, Coll provides an unparalleled portrait of a man who believed the world was against him.

The Achilles Trap is a work of great historical significance, offering a definitive account of the corruptions of power, diplomatic deceptions, and personal vanities that led to avoidable statecraft errors, resulting in immeasurable human suffering and a permanently altered political landscape.

Splinters: Another Kind Of Love Story

2024

by Leslie Jamison

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm.

In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents' complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world.

The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.

How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we've caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to "stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon" (NPR).

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.

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