Cecilia is a surreal novella that delves deep into the intensity and eroticism of girlhood friendships, the ecstasy of desire and disgust, and matriarchal mythmaking. The story unfolds with Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor's office, reencountering Cecilia, a woman who has captivated her since their school days. As they coincidentally board the same bus, with each claiming not to be following the other, their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories.
In the midst of this defamiliarization, the narrator begins to see queerness itself as an alienation from normative time. Smart, subversive, and gripping, Cecilia takes readers on a winding, misty road trip through bodily transformation, inextricable histories of desire and violence, diaspora, and obsessive love.
Why grassroots data activists in Latin America count feminicideâand how this vital social justice work challenges mainstream data science. What isnât counted doesnât 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 murdersâand 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 DâIgnazio 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.
Burma Sahib is a riveting new novel from acclaimed author Paul Theroux, exploring one of English literature's most beloved and controversial figuresâGeorge Orwell. This biographical fiction delves into the early years of Orwell as an officer in colonial Burma, a time that transformed him from Eric Blair, the British Raj policeman, into Orwell, the anticolonial writer.
At the tender age of nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair sets sail for India, filled with dread for the assignment that lies ahead. As a conscript trained to serve the British Empire, Blair is tasked with overseeing the local policemen in Burma. He must navigate the complex social, racial, and class politics of his fellow Britons while simultaneously learning the local languages and maintaining control over his men.
Faced with challenges to his self-worth and a sense that he is not suited for the role, Blair's experiences in the hot, beautiful land of Burma are overwhelming. His clashes with superiors and the unfolding drama in this setting ultimately lead to a profound transformation, forever changing the man known to the world as George Orwell.
Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possessâitâs about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.
Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak youâve reached, but how far youâve climbed to get there.
An innocent family, carjacked on a desolate highway, is abducted to a bizarre new world. A world being born in the Californian desert. They discover Earth has been invaded by an alien microorganism. The deadly entity attacks like a virus, but survivors of the disease genetically bond with it, developing amazing powers, near-immortality, unnatural desires - and a need to spread the contagion and create a secret colony of the transformed. Now the meaning of "survival" changes. For the babies born in the colony are clearly, undeniably, not human...
In a violent near-future, Asa Elias Doyle and her companions encounter an alien life form so heinous and destructive, they exile themselves in the desert so as not to contaminate other humans. To resist the compulsion to infect others is mental agony, but to succumb is to relinquish humanity and free will. Desperate, they kidnap a doctor and his two daughters as they cross the wasteland--and endanger the world.
In an alternate America marked by volatile class warfare, Blake Maslin is traveling with his teenage twin daughters when their car is ambushed. Their attackers appear sickly yet possess inhuman strength, and they transport Blake's family to an isolated compound. There, the three captives discover that the compound's residents have a highly contagious alien disease that has mutated their DNA to make them powerful, dangerous, and compelled to infect others. If Blake and his daughters do not escape, they will be infected with a virus that will either kill them outright or transform them into outcasts whose very existence is a threat to the world around them. In the following hours, Blake and his daughters each must make a vital choice: risk everything to escape and warn the rest of the world, or accept their new reality -- as well as the uncertain fate of the human race.
From internationally bestselling author Charlie Jane Anders comes Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, the sequel to Victories Greater Than Death in the thrilling adventure Unstoppable series, set against an intergalactic war.
They'll do anything to be the people they were meant to be â even journey into the heart of evil.
Rachael Townsend is the first artist ever to leave Earth and journey out into the galaxy â but after an encounter with an alien artifact, she can't make art at all. Elza Monteiro is determined to be the first human to venture inside the Palace of Scented Tears and compete for the chance to become a princess â except that inside the palace, she finds the last person she ever wanted to see again. Tina Mains is studying at the Royal Space Academy with her friends, but she's not the badass space hero everyone was expecting. Soon Rachael is journeying into a dark void, Elza is on a deadly spy mission, and Tina is facing an impossible choice that could change all her friends' lives forever.
Do you find painful repeating patterns in your relationships? Do you experience frustrations like old hurts, criticism, complaints, predictability, or boredom? Would you like to learn to alchemize these into honesty, trust, laughter, passion, and play? The majority of people have never been taught how to do relationships. You likely created your relationships using a paradigm where one person wins and the other loses. While this may not show up all of the time, it can create an unconscious tendency to maneuver the other person.
In this book, Relating Revolution: All It Takes is One Person to Change, you will learn a new paradigm called Third Consciousness, which will change how you view all of your relationships. You will:
This applies to more than just romantic partnerships. It works in relationships with friends, family, and even colleagues. Using this book, you can start to transform your relationships into fuel for the MORE in your life.
Whether you want to address a challenging relationship situation; or learn to play the relationship game so both people win; or are just curious to find out what is really possible when relating with others, you are not alone. This book can be your guide.
Stanley, an out of work tech writer, is deeply unsatisfied with the lack of meaning in his life. Of the three places he feels should provide meaning in his lifeâreligion, work, and familyâonly one gives his life purpose: family.
In PART ONE, his lack of meaning starts to change. Out of desperation to support his family, he takes a short-term contract job on the other side of the country. He cannot afford to fly, so he packs his car for the cross-country journey.
The trip gets strange almost immediately when he reluctantly picks up a hitchhiker who transforms Stanley's religious views by answering questions that have kept religion at arm's length.
A young woman follows winter across five continents on a physical and spiritual journey that tests her body and soul, in this transformative memoir, full of heart and courage, that speaks to the adventurousness in all of us.
Steph Jagger had always been a force of nature. Dissatisfied with the passive, limited roles she saw for women growing up, she emulated the men in her lifeâchasing success, climbing the corporate ladder, ticking the boxes, playing by the rules of a masculine ideal. She was accomplished. She was living The Dream. But it wasn't her dream.
Then the universe caught her attention with a sign: Raise Restraining Device. Steph had seen this ski lift sign on countless occasions in the past, but the familiar words suddenly became a personal call to shake off the life she had built in a search for something different, something more.
Steph soon decided to walk away from the success and security she had worked long and hard to obtain. She quit her job, took a second mortgage on her house, sold everything except her ski equipment and her laptop, and bought a bundle of plane tickets. For the next year, she followed winter across North and South America, Asia, Europe, and New Zealandâand up and down the mountains of nine countriesâon a mission to ski four million vertical feet in a year.
What hiking was for Cheryl Strayed, skiing became for Steph: a crucible in which to crack open her life and get to the very center of herself. But she would have to break herself downâfirst physically, then emotionallyâbefore she could start to rebuild. And it was through this journey that she came to understand how to be a woman, how to love, and how to live authentically.
Electrifying, heartfelt, and full of humor, Unbound is Steph's storyâan odyssey of courage and self-discovery that, like Wild and Eat, Pray, Love, will inspire readers to remove their own restraining devices and pursue the life they are meant to lead.
In essence, it's an ugly duckling tale. Our heroine, Aureliana, returns to school after fifteen years for a reunion. School doesn't hold happy memories for her. As a roly-poly Italian (known as the Italian Galleon), always armed with a Tupperware full of pungent Mediterranean food, she was bullied incessantly throughout her years there.
Now in her 30s, Aureliana wants to put the past behind her once and for all and face up to the bullies who made her life hell. But she is much-changed from the girl she once was - all curves and 'because I'm worth it' hair - and no one recognizes her when she arrives. Losing her bottle, she backs out on her plan for revenge and slinks off, hoping never to be reminded of her years at school again.
But fate gets in the way, and after the reunion, her path keeps crossing with James - major hunk and Aureliana's major crush back at school. But alas, as a cronie to the bullies, Aureliana to this day believes that his beautiful exterior hides an ugly interior.
As they continue to cross paths, a love/hate relationship ensues until eventually something shifts, and they both start to discover what the person underneath is really like...
Full of Mhairi's trademark laugh-out-loud humor, Here's Looking At You is a novel about facing your demons and being happy with who you really are.
A sometimes funny, tragically graphic, compelling tale of a woman suffering...
She has no name of her own. She is every name everyone has ever called her. She is nameless. She has a good job, a beautiful home, and a wonderful husband. She is everything she was supposed to be. She has structure and stability, but she is lost.
She is trying. Her whole life is spent trying; yet her whole life has been nothing but an apology. She is so tired of trying and failing.
In just one week, she learns her entire life is a series of brutalities. She learns intense, consuming passion for the first time with a beautiful stranger. She learns love within this passion, and she learns heartbreak while without.
Slowly her breakdown overcomes her. She tries to rise above her circumstances, but when she has nothing left to fight with; she tries to ease the pain forever.
Desperately, she fights her way through the agony of life, and she returns with a gentle hope. She wants to live, and she wants to love, for the first time in her life.
Now, she has a name. Now, she can be 'her'... Any HER that she wants to be.
Book Three of The Wingfeather Saga
Janner Wingfeather's father was the High King of Anniera. But his father is gone. The kingdom has fallen. The royal family is on the run, and the Fang armies of Gnag the Nameless are close behind.
Janner and his family hope to find refuge in the last safe place in the world: the Green Hollowsâa land of warriors feared even by Fangs of Dang. But there's a big problem. Janner's little brotherâheir to the throne of Annieraâhas grown a tail. And gray fur. Not to mention two pointed ears and long, dangerous fangs.
To the suspicious folk of the Green Hollows, he looks like a monster. But Janner knows better. His brother isn't as scary as he looks. He's perfectly harmless. Or is he?
Join the Wingfeathers on an adventure filled with mystery, betrayal, and sneakery in a land of tasty fruits. There's a monster on the loose and the truth lurks in the shadows.
Krishnamurti shows how people can free themselves radically and immediately from the tyranny of the expected, no matter what their age. This book opens the door to transforming society and their relationships.
With witty sarcasm, Krishnamurti discusses the chains in which the present man lives, addressing fears of the known and fears of the unknown. He critiques the readiness to accept the ideological tyranny of religious institutions while rejecting political dictatorship.
Freedom from all the shackles that draw us backward from being a universal citizen is the core topic discussed in this book.
I Am Not Myself These Days follows a glittering journey through Manhattan's dark underbellyâa shocking and surreal world where alter egos reign and subsist (barely) on dark wit and chemicals.
This is a tragic romantic comedy where one begins by rooting for the survival of the relationship and ends by hoping someone simply survives. Kilmer-Purcell is a terrifically gifted new literary voice who straddles the divide between absurdity and normalcy, stitching them together with surprising humor and lonely poignancy.
Join the adventure of a young advertising art director by day and a glitter-dripping drag queen by night. This memoir is a stunningly witty and deeply moving tour de force by a remarkable talent.
Cloud Atlas, authored by David Mitchell, is a visionary novel that combines elements of adventure, mystery, and philosophical speculation. The narrative begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary traveling from the Chatham Isles to California. During his journey, he becomes acquainted with Dr. Goose, who treats him for a rare brain parasite.
The story then leaps to Belgium in 1931, where we meet Robert Frobisher, a disinherited composer who finds himself in the household of an ailing maestro. The narrative continues to shift, taking us to the West Coast in the 1970s with Luisa Rey, a reporter uncovering a conspiracy, and then to various other settings including a near-future Korean superstate and a post-apocalyptic Hawaii.
The unique structure of Cloud Atlas sees the narrative fold back on itself, with characters' fates intertwining across time and space. It's a novel that questions the nature of reality and identity, and how our actions reverberate through history. Mitchell's work is as playful as it is profound, earning it the status of a modern classic and a worldwide phenomenon.
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, is a collection that showcases Kafka's mastery in storytelling, encapsulating the anxieties and alienation of modern life in a surreal, often absurd, manner.
The Metamorphosis is Kafka's most famous story, where Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. This harrowing yet amusing tale explores themes of alienation, family loyalty, and unconditional love.
Also included is The Judgment, which Kafka considered his breakthrough story, and The Stoker, the first chapter of his novel Amerika. These stories, along with The Metamorphosis, form a suite Kafka referred to as "The Sons," presenting a devastating portrait of the modern family.
Other notable stories in this collection include In the Penal Colony, which delves into the horrors of a torture machine, and A Hunger Artist, a tale of an artist's struggle to communicate with an uncomprehending public.
Kafka's lucid and succinct writing style captures the labyrinthine complexities and futility-laden horror of modern existence, making this collection a must-read for those interested in psychological and existential themes.
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic and one of the world's great antiwar books, centers on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes the novel as a result of a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. The novel combines elements of historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in the life story of Billy Pilgrim.
Billy, a barber's son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee, experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he also experiences time travel, or coming "unstuck in time." An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five established Kurt Vonnegut Jr. as a cult hero in American literature, a status that has only strengthened over time despite censorship challenges. The novel's political edginess, genre-bending inventiveness, frank violence, and transgressive wit have inspired generations of readers to see the world differently and speak out.
More than fifty years after its initial publication during the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety remains darkly humorous and profoundly affecting, serving as an enduring beacon through our own era's uncertainties.
Sabineâtwenty years a magician's assistant to her handsome, charming husbandâis suddenly a widow. In the wake of his death, she finds he has left a final trick; a false identity and a family allegedly lost in a tragic accident but now revealed as very much alive and well. Named as heirs in his will, they enter Sabine's life and set her on an adventure of unraveling his secrets, from sunny Los Angeles to the windswept plains of Nebraska, that will work its own sort of magic on her.
From the bestselling author of The Dutch House, this enchanting book is something of a magic trick in itself. Sabine's extraordinary tale, with its big dreams, vast spaces, and disparate realities lying side by side, captures the hearts of its readers and proves to be the perfect place for miraculous transformations.
Baltimore woman disappears during family vacation. This headline marks the beginning of a transformative journey for forty-year-old Delia Grinstead. Last seen strolling down the Delaware shore in nothing but a bathing suit, Delia carries only a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her family, she has vanished without a trace or reason. But for Delia, who feels like a tiny gnat buzzing around her family's edges, walking away from it all is an impulse that leads her into a new, exciting, and unimagined life.
Anne Tyler details Delia's adventure with great skill, creating distinct characters caught in poignantly funny situations. As Delia reinvents herself, she discovers feelings of passion and wonder she'd long since forgotten. The thrill of walking away from it all leads to a newfound sense of self and the feeling that she is, finally, the star of her own life story.
Life changed for me in three days - the day my mother died, the day my dad married Candice, and the day I met Kennedy Jenner. From the moment I saw him, I was drawn to him. Like a moth to a flame, I couldn't keep away from the irresistible heat of the fire.
That knowing, confident smile... those beautiful pale blue eyes... and those dimples... simply delicious. Who could resist such a beautiful strong man?
Hope York transformed herself from a boring small-town girl into a flawless beauty on the outside. But inside, she never changed. Kennedy Jenner was a successful, wealthy, and jaw-dropping handsome man that could have whatever he wanted, on his own terms. And he wanted Hope. But would he still want her after he saw her for who she really was, instead of what she carefully planned for everyone to see? And will his own secret past stand in his way of getting what he really wants?