Books with category đź“š Non-Fiction
Displaying books 49-96 of 960 in total

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?). If you don't know what kind of conversation you're having, you're unlikely to connect.

Supercommunicators know the importance of recognizing—and then matching—each kind of conversation, and how to hear the complex emotions, subtle negotiations, and deeply held beliefs that color so much of what we say and how we listen. Our experiences, our values, our emotional lives—and how we see ourselves, and others—shape every discussion, from who will pick up the kids to how we want to be treated at work. In this book, you will learn why some people are able to make themselves heard, and to hear others, so clearly.

With his storytelling that takes us from the writers' room of The Big Bang Theory to the couches of leading marriage counselors, Duhigg shows readers how to recognize these three conversations—and teaches us the tips and skills we need to navigate them more successfully.

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

The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

2024

by Joan Acocella

Joan Acocella, one of our finest cultural critics, has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it—its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm.

As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times, "Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?" The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella's career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations, "life and art."

In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling in the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella our dream companion among its shelves.

The Great Wave

An urgent examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are capsizing old assumptions in a great wave of change breaking over today’s world, creating both opportunity and peril—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Truth.

The twenty-first century is experiencing a watershed moment defined by chaos and uncertainty, as one emergency cascades into another, underscoring the larger dynamics of change that are fueling instability across the world.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices—once regarded as radical, unorthodox, or marginal—are disrupting the status quo in politics, business, and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation.

Writing with a critic’s understanding of cultural trends and a journalist’s eye for historical detail, Michiko Kakutani looks at the consequences of these new asymmetries of power. She maps the migration of ideas from the margins to the mainstream and explores the growing influence of outsiders—those who have sown chaos and fear (like Donald Trump), and those who have provided inspirational leadership (like Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky).

Kakutani argues that today’s crises are not only signs of an interconnected globe’s profound vulnerabilities, but also stress tests pointing to the essential changes needed to survive this tumultuous era and build a more sustainable future.

This American Ex-Wife

2024

by Lyz Lenz

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life is a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage and divorce in America today, presenting an argument that the former needs a reboot. Journalist and proud divorcée Lyz Lenz delivers an exuberant and unapologetic account, flipping the script on the media's portrayal of divorced women.

Studies indicate that nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women—women who seek liberation from relationships premised on their fundamental inequality. Through a combination of reportage, sociological research, literature, and popular culture, this book weaves personal stories of union and separation to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of American marriage.

Lenz pushes for a collective reevaluation of the institution, challenging the notion that divorce is a personal failure when, in fact, it may be a practical and powerful solution for women to reclaim the power they deserve. This raucous manifesto for acceptance, solidarity, and collective female refusal offers readers a riveting ride, all the while pointing toward a future of greater freedom.

A Map Of Future Ruins

2024

by Lauren Markham

A provocative, virtuosic inquiry that reveals how the valorization of migrations past is intimately linked to the exclusion and demonization of migrants today.

When and how did migration become a crime? Why have “Greek ideals” remained foundational to the West’s idea of itself? How have our personal migration myths—and nostalgia for times past—shaped today’s troubling realities of nationalism and fortified borders?

In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece to cover the aftermath of a fire that had burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not humanitarian activists, not the country’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government, which resented the disproportionate responsibility it bore for an overwhelming international human rights problem. But almost immediately, in spite of scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.

As she immersed herself in the story, Markham saw that it was part of a larger tapestry, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in the myths we tell ourselves about who we are.

A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don’t just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future.

I Heard Her Call My Name

2024

by Lucy Sante

An iconic writer's lapidary memoir of a life spent pursuing a dream of artistic truth while evading the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was. For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States without ever entirely settling here, she only really felt at home when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s. In that feral moment, she found her people among a band of fellow bohemians picking their way through the wreckage. Some of her friends would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous.

Sante flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But in the deepest sense, she still felt like her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself. Sante's memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. It is a story with many twists and turns: however necessary and long overdue her embrace of womanhood was, it was nonetheless a fearful business, filled with pitfalls and pratfalls.

Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man's identity, in a man's world. She had found herself, widening the aperture of her heart in the bargain. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond.

Smoke And Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories

2024

by Amitav Ghosh

Smoke And Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories is a compelling blend of travelogue, memoir, and historical essay by renowned author Amitav Ghosh. In this captivating narrative, Ghosh unravels the complex web of the opium trade's impact on global history, including its entanglement with his own family's past.

Ghosh's journey begins with the startling realization during his research for the Ibis trilogy that the lives of nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers were profoundly influenced by the currents of the Indian Ocean and the lucrative cargo they bore: opium. This revelation leads him to explore the opium trade's transformative effect on Britain, India, and China, and the role it played in the financial survival of the British Empire.

The narrative delves into the origins of some of the world's largest corporations, the fortunes of America's elite families and prestigious academic institutions, and the foundations of contemporary globalism. Ghosh's exploration is rich with insights into horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism.

Through Smoke And Ashes, Amitav Ghosh reveals the significant yet often overlooked role that the opium poppy has played in shaping our modern world—a world that now stands at the precipice of significant change.

Ten Bridges I've Burnt

2024

by Brontez Purnell

Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse brings forth a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir from the beloved author of 100 Boyfriends, Brontez Purnell. With his unique literary style, Purnell turns his keen gaze inward, crafting a narrative that is as much a collection of genre-defying verse as it is a candid self-exploration.

In this series of thirty-eight autobiographical pieces, Purnell is at his unapologetic best. He vividly recounts events ranging from a ferocious altercation at a poetry conference to the challenges of navigating TV writers' rooms while dealing with personal trauma. Purnell grapples with the legacies inherited from his family, both curses and gifts, and lays bare a whirlwind of experiences that include misadventures and intimate encounters.

Throughout the memoir, Purnell's musings extend to a diverse array of subjects, from love and loneliness to the intricacies of capitalism and Blackness, as well as reflections on physical exercise and the ethics of artistic creation. His writing, marked by a balance of humor and insight that garnered acclaim for 100 Boyfriends, thrives on its unpredictability and fluidity. Ten Bridges I've Burnt stands as yet another testament to Purnell's boundary-pushing creativity, offering a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

The Hammer

2024

by Hamilton Nolan

A timely, in-depth, and vital exploration of the American labor movement and its critical place in our society and politics by acclaimed labor reporter Hamilton Nolan. Nolan is an expert who has covered labor and politics for more than a decade, and has helped to unionize his own industry.

The thesis is simple: Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix this problem. But the labor movement of today has failed to enable enough individuals to join unions. Thus, organized labor's powerful potential is being wielded incompetently. And what is happening inside of organized labor will—far more than most people realize—determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come.

In deeply reported chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers how organized labor can and does wield power effectively—in spots—but also why it has long been unable to build itself into the powerful institution that the working class needs. These narratives both inspire by example and motivate by counter-example. Whether it's a union that has succeeded in a single city, and is trying to scale that effectiveness nationally, or the ins and outs of a historically large and transformative union campaign, or the human face of a strike, or a profile of the most anti-union state in America, Nolan highlights the actual mechanisms that connect labor to politics to real change. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the powerful and charismatic head of the flight attendants union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader of the labor movement, to try to fix what is broken about it. The Hammer draws the line from forgotten workplaces to Washington's halls of power, and shows how labor can utterly transform American politics—if it can first transform itself.

Towers of Ivory and Steel

2024

by Maya Wind

How Israeli universities collaborate in Israeli state violence against Palestinians

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.

As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.

Alphabetical Diaries

2024

by Sheila Heti

Alphabetical Diaries is a captivating exploration of self-perception and artistic expression by Sheila Heti, an author celebrated for her innovative literary works. Over a decade ago, Heti embarked on an unconventional journey through her personal diaries, where she meticulously catalogued a decade's worth of entries, sorting them alphabetically in an attempt to discern patterns and recurrent themes in her life.

By detaching her sentences from the chronological narrative and organizing them in this unique manner, Heti uncovers the essence of her identity, defined by surprisingly consistent concerns and musings. This process of re-evaluation and discovery has culminated in a work that transcends the personal to touch upon universal truths, establishing Alphabetical Diaries as a testament to Heti's artistic prowess and introspective depth.

Get the Picture

2024

by Bianca Bosker

The New York Times bestselling author of Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker takes readers on another fascinating, hilarious, and revelatory journey—this time burrowing deep inside the impassioned, secretive world of art and artists. An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bosker's existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn't look away.

Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.

In Get the Picture, Bosker throws herself into the nerve center of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators, and, of course, artists themselves—the kind who work multiple jobs to afford their studios while scrabbling to get eyes on their art. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister, talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors, has her face sat on by a nearly-naked performance artist, and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for hours on end while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonization machine but also a more expansive way of living.

Probing everything from cave paintings to Instagram, and from the science of sight to the importance of beauty as it examines art's role in our culture, our economy, and our hearts, Get the Picture is a rollicking adventure that will change the way you see forever.

How To Live Free In A Dangerous World

2024

by Shayla Lawson

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.

Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson's travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.

Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.

Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

2024

by Ingrid Robeyns

Ingrid Robeyns, a world-leading philosopher and economist, presents a powerful case for limitarianism—the idea that there should be a maximum limit on individual wealth. In Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, she explores the ethical and democratic implications of wealth accumulation and its impact on society at large.

Robeyns provides a compelling argument for why extreme wealth is problematic, citing that it:

  • perpetuates poverty and inequality
  • is often linked to 'dirty money'
  • undermines democracy
  • contributes to climate change
  • exceeds what one can justifiably deserve

The book suggests that there are more constructive uses for excess money and that even the wealthy would benefit from a wealth cap. Through a radical reimagining of our economic systems, Robeyns ignites an urgent debate about wealth and challenges the foundations of capitalism and neoliberalism.

Be A Revolution

2024

by Ijeoma Oluo

Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World--And How You Can, Too is an eye-opening and galvanizing look at the current state of anti-racist activism across America by Ijeoma Oluo, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race and Mediocre.

In this book, Oluo examines the impact of white male supremacy on our systems, culture, and lives throughout American history and presents a compelling argument for understanding these systems of oppression. More importantly, it addresses the critical question: What can we do about them?

Be A Revolution showcases the efforts of people across America working to create real positive change in our structures. It covers various powerful systems such as education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more, highlighting the actions taken to create change for intersectional racial equity.

Moreover, it provides readers with insights into how they can find entryways into change in these areas or contribute to the important work being done elsewhere. Oluo's goal is to educate, inspire action, and shift conversations on race and racism from a place of pain and trauma to a place of loving action. This book is not only an urgent chronicle of an important moment in history but also an inspiring and restorative call for action.

Read Write Own

2024

by Chris Dixon

In Read Write Own, tech visionary Chris Dixon presents a potent exploration of the power of blockchains to reshape the future of the internet—and how that affects us all. This book is a critical examination of the internet's evolution and a vision for a better future powered by blockchain networks.

Dixon provides a compelling narrative of the internet's history, describing its early promise of a decentralized and democratic network, and how it shifted towards centralization by corporations such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. Read Write Own marks the emergence of the 'read-write-own' era, also known as web3, where blockchain technology empowers communities rather than solely corporations.

With his twenty-five-year career in the software industry, Dixon separates the blockchain movement from cryptocurrency speculation, emphasizing the former's potential for fostering creativity, entrepreneurship, and comprehensive digital ecosystems. This book is a must-read for internet users, business leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs looking to understand the past and navigate the future of the internet.

Spectral Evidence

2024

by Gregory Pardlo

Spectral Evidence is a profound exploration by Gregory Pardlo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic. In this major collection of poetry, Pardlo's words flow seamlessly through a variety of themes, from the life of pro-wrestler Owen Hart to Tituba, the only Black woman accused during the Salem witch trials, and the MOVE organization's confrontations with Philadelphia Police.

The collection invites readers to ponder on topics such as Blackness, beauty, faith, and the impact of law. It is both cerebral and intimate, urging us to reflect on our notions of devotion and art, the criminalization and mortality of Black bodies, and the quest for justice. These themes are intricately woven into our current societal fabric, our history, and the Western literary tradition. Pardlo's poetry acts as a bridge connecting the past and present, challenging us to consider the role of art in interpreting and understanding the world around us.

This Is The Honey

2024

by Kwame Alexander

This Is the Honey: An Anthology Of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander, is a breathtaking poetry collection that embodies hope, heart, and heritage. As the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time come together, this anthology serves as a beacon of inspiration.

Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Amanda Gorman, Terrance Hayes, and Nikki Giovanni, the anthology is a rich tapestry of voices that resonate with generations of resilient joy.

The collection is replete with poems exploring themes of joy, love, origin, resistance, and praise, with language that drips with poignant and delightful imagery. It is a definitive, fresh, and deeply moving tribute to the power of words and an essential addition to any lover of language.

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.

Filterworld

2024

by Kyle Chayka

From New Yorker staff writer and author Kyle Chayka comes a timely history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself. From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices.

The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we've grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal.

This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called “Filterworld.” Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit.

But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question. In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions arise: What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?

To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.

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.

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.

1000 Words

2024

by Jami Attenberg

Inspired by Jami Attenberg's wildly popular literary movement #1000WordsofSummer, this writer's guide features encouraging essays on creativity, productivity, and writing from acclaimed authors including Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, Celeste Ng, Meg Wolitzer, and Carmen Maria Machado.

In 2018, novelist Jami Attenberg, faced with a looming deadline, needed writing inspiration. Using a bootcamp model, she and a friend set out to write one thousand words daily for two weeks straight. They opened this practice to Attenberg's online community and soon hundreds then thousands of people started using the #1000WordsofSummer hashtag to track their work and support one another. What began as a simple challenge between two friends has become a literary movement—write 1,000 words per day without judgment, or bias, or concerns about writer's block, and see what comes of it.

1000 Words is the book-length extension of this movement. It is about becoming—and staying—motivated, discovering yourself and your creative desires, and approaching your craft from a new direction. It features advice from more than fifty well-known writers, including New York Times bestsellers, Pulitzer Prize winners, and stars of the literary world. Framing these letters are words of wisdom and encouragement, plus specific strategies, from Attenberg on how to carve out a creative path for yourself all year round. Paired with vibrant word art illustrations, 1000 Words is an accessible and motivational craft book that allows you to open any page and get a quick and fulfilling hit of inspiration.

The Furies: Women, Vengeance, And Justice

2024

by Elizabeth Flock

Renowned journalist and author Elizabeth Flock delves into a topic that many shy away from, challenging our notions about the role and necessity of female-led violence in opposing systems that are fundamentally against women. The Furies: Women, Vengeance, And Justice is a profound inquiry into the lives of three women who, facing failure from the very institutions designed to safeguard them—government, police, courts—resorted to violence to reclaim power, safety, and freedom.

The book presents immersive narratives of Brittany Smith, a young woman from Stevenson, Alabama, who, after claiming to have killed a man in self-defense against rape, was denied protection by the Stand-Your-Ground law; Angoori Dahariya, who leads a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, avenging victims of domestic abuse; and Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a member of an all-female militia that confronted ISIS in Syria.

Through Flock's compelling prose and extensive on-the-ground research, this work explores the nuances of whether women's safety can ever be fully ensured without the use of force. It asks hard-hitting questions about the effectiveness of vengeance, the potential for creating lasting change within misogynistic and paternalistic systems, and the vision of societies where women wield real power.

The Furies ignites a conversation about gender equality, power dynamics, and the celebrated yet complex legacy of women who fight back.

Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice

2023

by Jennifer Mullan

A call to action for therapists to politicize their practice through an emotional decolonial lens. An essential work that centers colonial and historical trauma in a framework for healing, Decolonizing Therapy illuminates that all therapy is—and always has been—inherently political.

To better understand the mental health oppression and institutional violence that exists today, we must become familiar with the root of disembodiment from our histories, homelands, and healing practices. Only then will readers see how colonial, historical, and intergenerational legacies have always played a role in the treatment of mental health.

This book is the emotional companion and guide to decolonization. It is an invitation for Eurocentrically trained clinicians to acknowledge privileged and oppressed parts while relearning what we thought we knew. Ignoring collective global trauma makes delivering effective therapy impossible; not knowing how to interrogate privilege (as a therapist, client, or both) makes healing elusive; and shying away from understanding how we as professionals may be participating in oppression is irresponsible.

My Name Is Barbra

My Name Is Barbra, the long-awaited memoir by the superstar of stage, screen, recordings, and television, is a testament to a career that spans six decades. Barbra Streisand, a living legend and one of the few EGOT winners, has one of the most recognizable voices in the history of popular music. Her story unfolds from her beginnings in Brooklyn to her ascension to stardom in New York nightclubs, her iconic performance in Funny Girl, and her myriad of successes thereafter.

Streisand's narrative is as frank, funny, opinionated, and charming as the woman herself. She shares her early challenges in acting, her venture into singing, the recording of her acclaimed albums, the painstaking journey of creating Yentl, and her directorial work on The Prince of Tides. The book also delves into her friendships with notable figures, her political activism, and the joy she's found in her marriage to James Brolin.

With a story as captivating as her performances, Barbra Streisand's memoir is a celebration of an extraordinary life in entertainment, eagerly awaited by her legions of fans.

Unmasking AI

2023

by Joy Buolamwini

"Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines" is a compelling exploration into the evolution of artificial intelligence and its implications on human rights and society. Penned by Dr. Joy Buolamwini, a leading figure in the field of AI research, this book is a call to action to mitigate the harms caused by unchecked technological development.

Starting from her early engagement with robotics in high school to her groundbreaking research at MIT, Buolamwini unfolds her journey of unmasking the "coded gaze"—a term she coined to describe the encoded discrimination within tech products. Through her work with the Algorithmic Justice League, she has been a pivotal force in the movement against AI-induced biases, advocating for a future where technology serves all of humanity equally.

With an intersectional approach, Buolamwini highlights the overlapping issues of racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism in the tech industry, urging for a collective effort towards algorithmic justice. "Unmasking AI" is not just a critique of the current state of artificial intelligence but a hopeful vision for a more inclusive and equitable technological future.

The Woman in Me

2023

by Britney Spears

The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope. In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others.

The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history. Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears's groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.

Judgment At Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

2023

by Gary J. Bass

A landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals—the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg.

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, and their fellow victors, the questions of justice seemed clear: Japan’s leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against citizens in China, the Philippines, Korea, and elsewhere; rampant abuses of POWs. For the Allied Forces, the trial was an opportunity to achieve justice against the defendants, but also to create a legal framework for the prosecution of war crimes and to prohibit the use of aggressive war, and to create the kind of liberal international order that would prevail in Europe. For the Japanese leaders facing trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism.

For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the US and Europe. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to destabilize the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought division and complexity; these tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded, from China’s descent into civil war to India’s independence and partition to Japan’s first successful democratic elections and the rewriting of a new, liberal constitution.

Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era.

Some People Need Killing: A Memoir Of Murder In My Country

Some People Need Killing: A Memoir Of Murder In My Country is a riveting account by journalist Patricia Evangelista, who came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that promised a new future for the Philippines. Decades later, as the nation grappled with mounting inequality, it witnessed the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of Rodrigo Duterte.

Evangelista's book is a meticulously reported chronicle of the Philippines' drug war. For six years, she immersed herself in the world of killers and survivors, documenting the police and vigilante killings carried out in the name of Duterte's war on drugs—a conflict that has led to the slaughter of thousands and created an atmosphere of fear.

The book's title comes from the words of a vigilante, reflecting a psychological accommodation that many in the country have made: "I'm really not a bad guy," he said. "I'm not all bad. Some people need killing." Through her profound act of witness and literary journalism, Evangelista offers a dissection of the grammar of violence and an investigation into the human impulses to dominate and resist.

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary

2023

by Sarah Ogilvie

The Dictionary People is a fascinating history and celebration of the many far-flung volunteers who helped define the English language, word by word.


The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia... and thousands of others.


With deep transgenerational and broad appeal, this is a thrilling literary detective story that, for the first time, unravels the mystery of the endlessly fascinating contributors the world over who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read, write, and speak. It was the greatest crowdsourcing endeavor in human history, the Wikipedia of its time.


The Dictionary People is a celebration of words, language, and people, whose eccentricities and obsessions, triumphs, and failures enriched the English language.

Be Useful

Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is an inspirational guide that outlines the seven key rules for discovering and realizing one's true purpose in life. Schwarzenegger shares the tools he developed on his journey to becoming the world's greatest bodybuilder, highest-paid movie star, and a prominent political leader.

Arnold's father instilled in him the profound lesson to always be useful, a principle that Arnold has carried throughout his varied and successful career. In this book, Schwarzenegger speaks with a voice that is both earnest and powerful as he recounts personal stories of success and failure, some of which are being shared for the first time.

This book is not just about Arnold's achievements, but also about the mental tools he created to escape the confines of his rural Austrian upbringing. He emphasizes the importance of self-reliance and shares his wisdom, encouraging readers to apply these tools in pursuit of their own dreams and purposes. Arnold's message is clear: nobody will come to your rescue, but the good news is that you have all you need within yourself.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States offers an unflinching examination of the history of the United States from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. This profound work radically reframes over 400 years of history, centering the voices of Native Americans and their resistance to settler-colonialism and genocide.


This 10th anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Raoul Peck and a new introduction by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. The book delves into the brutal realities of the nation’s founding and its ongoing legacy, exploring events from the war in Afghanistan to the Charlottesville rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden.


Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz traces the perseverance of Indigenous peoples over four centuries, challenging myths such as America's founding as a revolution against tyranny, the passivity of Native peoples, and the narrative of the US as a "nation of immigrants."


Today, more than 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations exist in the United States, comprising nearly three million people. This classic bottom-up history aims to break the silences that have haunted the nation's narrative and brings to light the stories of those who have been marginalized.

Eve

2023

by Cat Bohannon

Eve is an ambitious, eye-opening, myth-busting and groundbreaking history of the evolution of the female body, by a brilliant new researcher and writer, Cat Bohannon. This book delves into questions scientists should have been addressing for decades, such as:

  • Why do women live longer than men?

  • Why do women have menopause?

  • Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s?

  • Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet?

  • Does the female brain really exist?

With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon’s findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women’s pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.

A 21st-century update of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Eve offers a true paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is and why it matters.

How To Say Babylon

2023

by Safiya Sinclair

How to Say Babylon is a profound memoir by Safiya Sinclair, offering a glimpse into her journey to find her voice as a woman and a poet amidst a strict Rastafarian upbringing. The narrative echoes the struggles depicted in Educated and Born a Crime, presenting Sinclair's battle against her father's patriarchal views and his obsession with protecting her and her sisters from what Rastas call Babylon—the Western world's immoral and corrupting influences.

The memoir recounts how Sinclair's father, a militant Rastafari and reggae musician, imposed severe restrictions on the women in the family, including the prohibition of pants, makeup, jewelry, and personal opinions. Amidst this repressive environment, Sinclair's mother provided her children with books, including poetry, which became Safiya's solace and a means to develop her own identity.

Through education and the power of words, Sinclair forges a path toward independence, despite the inevitable confrontations with her father that escalate into violence. How to Say Babylon is not only Sinclair's personal reckoning with her cultural roots and the stifling traditions she grew up with but also a lyrical exploration of a woman's resilience and empowerment. It is a story that resonates universally, while offering an intimate look into the world of Rastafari—a culture often named but seldom understood.

End Times

In the late 1980s, two teenage girls found refuge from a world of cosy conformity, sexism and the nuclear arms race in protest and punk. Then, drawn in by a promise of meaning and purpose, they cast off their punk outfits and became born-again Christians. Unsure which fate would come first - nuclear annihilation or the Second Coming of Jesus - they sought answers from end-times evangelists, scrutinising friends and family for signs of demon possession and identifying EFTPOS and barcodes as signs of a looming apocalypse.

Fast forward to 2021, and Rebecca and Maz - now a science historian and an engineer - are on a road trip to the West Coast. Their journey, though full of laughter and conversation and hot pies, is haunted by the threats of climate change, conspiracy theories, and a massive overdue earthquake.

End Times interweaves the stories of these two periods in Rebecca's life, both of which have at heart a sleepless fear of the end of the world. Along the way she asks: Why do people hold on to some ideas but reject others? How do you engage with someone whose beliefs are wildly different from your own? And where can we find hope when it sometimes feels as if we all live on a fault line that could rupture at any moment?

Articulations

A well-known writer, activist, and disability rights advocate, Henrietta Bollinger's debut essay collection speaks to their experiences as a queer, disabled person, and as a twin. Articulations is a timely, personal, and poignant appraisal of life in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Soundtracked by the Topp Twins, Anika Moa, Woody Guthrie and more, Bollinger's essays take us on a journey from first crushes and first periods to parliamentary reform and Disability Pride. They challenge the norms of our ableist society, asking us to consider better ways of being with each other and ourselves.

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