From the legendary dance critic Deborah Jowitt, Errand into the Maze is the definitive biography of the visionary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham.Between 1926 and 1991, the year of her death, Martha Graham choreographed close to one hundred masterpieces. She changed how dancers were perceived onstage, devised new ways of moving, and pioneered a revolutionary dance technique. Along the way, Graham engaged with the debates, ideas, and events of the twentieth century-creating dances of social comment and human experiences. Graham, the first dancer and choreographer to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and named Time's "Dancer of the Century," was a visionary artistic force. Hers was the iconic face of what came to be called modern dance.In Errand into the Maze, the legendary dance critic Deborah Jowitt gives us the definitive portrait of this great American artist. Beginning with Graham's childhood and early work in theatrical productions, and touching on her offstage adventures, this elegant, empathetic biography places Graham's works and creations at the heart of her story. Her dances, brimming with emotional intensity, are intimately linked with their creator, and she was foregrounded in many; she was the heroine in almost all the dances she choreographed, portraying figures like Jocasta, Clytemnestra, and Judith. In this volume, Graham is center stage once more, and Jowitt casts a bright and brilliant spotlight on her life and work.
"Weird and exhilarating and funny and sad and disturbing and scary and poignant and righteous." -Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearers Club"Pure nightmare fuel." -Gus Moreno, author of This Thing Between UsIt's the summer of 1989 and Beatrice and Henrietta Volt are coming of age on remote Fowler Island, their ancestral home and wild playground. Thicker than thieves, the sisters plot their futures, having no idea that their parents are separating. Or that the plan is to separate them. Ten years pass before Henrie gets a desperate call from her sister-their father has died suddenly and B.B. needs her to come back to the island for the funeral. But Henrie doesn't want to go back. She's barely put the island and all those rumors about missing women behind her. And isn't it odd that she remembers nothing at all about the night she left? And why is she suddenly filled with fear about the quarry pond behind the house? Told from the perspectives of four flawed, fascinating women, The Insatiable Volt Sisters is a lush, enthralling fable about monsters real and imagined. From the unbounded imagination of Rachel Eve Moulton, the critically acclaimed author of Tinfoil Butterfly, comes another eerie, terrifying exploration of family and legacy: Will the Volt sisters inherit the horrors of their past or surpass them?
A magical middle grade debut, inspired by Filipino folklore, about a ten-year-old girl who embarks on a quest in the world of gods and spirits to save her and her family from a sinister shadow god. Perfect for fans of The Girl Who Drank the Moon and When You Trap a Tiger.A Junior Library Guild SelectionMarikit is used to wearing recycled clothes. Her mother, the best seamstress in the barrio, has become an expert at making do ever since Marikit's father and brother were lost at sea. But for her tenth birthday, all Marikit wants is something new. So when her mother gifts her a patchwork dress stitched together with leftover scraps from her workshop, Marikit vows to never wear it. That is, until the eve of her birthday, when shadow creatures creep into their home, attempt to take Marikit away, and upend the very life she knew.When she's swept away from the human world, Marikit discovers that her dress is a map, one lovingly crafted to lead her to safety in the magical lands of the Engkantos. She trudges through the enchanted lands of mythical creatures, making friends out of monsters and challenging gods. With the help of her friends, including an exuberant firefly and a cursed boy, Marikit journeys through the land of the Engkantos to find the key to saving her family, all without being eaten alive.
In this propulsive memoir from Achut Deng and Keely Hutton, inspired by a harrowing New York Times article, Don't Look Back tells a powerful story showing both the ugliness and the beauty of humanity, and the power of not giving up.I want life.After a deadly attack in South Sudan left six-year-old Achut Deng without a family, she lived in refugee camps for ten years, until a refugee relocation program gave her the opportunity to move to the United States. When asked why she should be given a chance to leave the camp, Achut simply told the interviewer: I want life.But the chance at starting a new life in a new country came with a different set of challenges. Some of them equally deadly. Taught by the strong women in her life not to look back, Achut kept moving forward, overcoming one obstacle after another, facing each day with hope and faith in her future. Yet, just as Achut began to think of the US as her home, a tie to her old life resurfaced, and for the first time, she had no choice but to remember her past.
National Book Award winner Kathryn Erskine teams up with Keith Henry Brown on this lyrical picture book that celebrates music and Black identity.Trevor's dad is a DJ, and he always picks the best music-tunes jivin', beat drivin', high fivin'!-he's DJ Dap Daddy!But after his parents split up and Dad moves out, Trevor feels like the pitch doesn't fit between them. Trevor has his own music now-hip-hop-and Dad can't seem to let go of his old soul favorites. As the end-of-year dance approaches, Trevor and his father will have to find their new groove to get the party started.My Dad Is a DJ is a hip-hoppin', beat boppin', tunes poppin', not stoppin' story of a father and son's shared love of music and each other.
A Must-Read at The Washington Post and Oprah Daily"Steamy, smart, and hilarious." -Oprah Daily"Effervescent . . . Acerbically funny and tender . . . [A] supremely layered, emotionally and intellectually resonant novel for our time." -Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston GlobeChristine Grillo's Hestia Strikes a Match is the slyly funny story of a woman looking for love and friendship in the midst of a new American civil war.The year is 2023, and things are bad-bad, but still not as bad as they could be. Hestia Harris is forty-two, abandoned by her husband (he left to fight for the Union cause), and estranged from her parents (they're leaving for the Confederacy). Yes, the United States has collapsed into a second civil war and again it's Unionists against Confederates, children against parents, friends against friends.Hestia has left journalism (too much war reporting) for a job at a Baltimore retirement village on the Inner Harbor (lots of security). She's single and adrift, save for her coworkers and Mildred, an eighty-four-year-old, thrice-happily-married resident who gleefully supports Hestia's half-hearted but hopeful attempts to find love again in a time of chaos and disunion. She reckons with the big questions (How do we live in the midst of political collapse? How do we love people who believe terrible things?) and the little ones (How do I decorate a nonworking fireplace? Can I hook up with a mime?), all while wrestling with that simmering, roiling, occasionally boiling feeling that things are decidedly not okay, but we have to keep going, one foot in front of the other, because maybe, just maybe, we can still find the kinds of relationships that sustain a person through anything.Christine Grillo's Hestia Strikes a Match is an irreverent, incisive, laugh-out-loud interrogation of modern love of all kinds, in all its messy beauty. Equal parts wise and hilarious, it fills the heart, fortifies the spirit, and will surely help to fend off despair. In the face of the everyday wildness of our times, it asks and answers that newly constant question: How do we make a full, wonderfully ordinary life when the whole mad world is clattering down around us?
That's Debatable is a witty, smart, and feminist romantic comedy, author Jen Doll explores what it means to set boundaries while breaking down barriers.Millicent Chalmers isn't here to make friends.She's here to win, and she's on track to set a record if-no, when-she wins the state debate tournament for the fourth year in a row. Calm, cool, and always in control, Millie doesn't care what anyone else thinks of her, least of all the sexist bullies bent on destroying her reputation.Taggart Strong couldn't care less about winning debate, much to the consternation of his teammates, school and parents. In fact, he might even enjoy losing, as long as the side he believes in wins. But when a tournament takes a scary turn, Millie and Tag find themselves unexpectedly working together. Maybe Millie can teach Tag a thing or two about using his head, and Tag can teach Millie a little bit about following her heart.
A Stonewall Honor BookFrom the author of the critically acclaimed novel For Black Girls Like Me, Mariama J. Lockington, comes a coming-of-age story surrounding the losses that threaten to break us and the friendships that make us whole again. Thirteen-year-old Andi feels stranded after the loss of her mother, the artist who swept color onto Andi's blank canvas. When she is accepted to a music camp, Andi finds herself struggling to play her trumpet like she used to before her whole world changed. Meanwhile, Zora, a returning camper, is exhausted trying to please her parents, who are determined to make her a flute prodigy, even though she secretly has a dancer's heart.At Harmony Music Camp, Zora and Andi are the only two Black girls in a sea of mostly white faces. In kayaks and creaky cabins, the two begin to connect, unraveling their loss, insecurities, and hopes for the future. And as they struggle to figure out who they really are, they may just come to realize who they really need: each other.In the Key of Us is a lyrical ode to music camp, the rush of first love, and the power of one life-changing summer.
A mesmerizing historical novel of suspense and intrigue about a teenage girl who risks everything to save her missing brother.Poland, July 1944. Sixteen-year-old Maria is making her way home after years of forced labor in Nazi Germany, only to find her village destroyed and her parents killed in a war between the Polish Resistance and Ukrainian nationalists. To Maria's shock, the local Resistance unit is commanded by her older brother, Tomek-who she thought was dead. He is now a "Silent Unseen," a special-operations agent with an audacious plan to resist a new and even more dangerous enemy sweeping in from the East. When Tomek disappears, Maria is determined to find him, but the only person who might be able to help is a young Ukrainian prisoner and the last person Maria trusts-even as she feels a growing connection to him that she can't resist.Tightly woven, relentlessly intense, The Silent Unseen depicts an explosive entanglement of loyalty, lies, and love during wartime, from Amanda McCrina, the acclaimed author of Traitor, a debut hailed by Elizabeth Wein as "Alive with detail and vivid with insight . . . a piercing and bittersweet story."
A timely and inspiring nonfiction guide for middle grade readers about the history of our fight against climate change, and how young people today are rising to action. Inspired by Nathaniel Rich's Losing Earth: A Recent History, the acclaimed book that grew out of an August 2018 issue of the New York Times Magazine solely dedicated to it, Saving Earth tells the human story of the climate change conversation from the recent past into the present day. It wrestles with the long shadow of our failures, what might be ahead for today's generation, and crucial questions of how we understand the world we live in-and how we can work together to change the outlook for the better. Written by acclaimed author Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich and enlivened with illustrations from Tim Foley, and filled with the voices of climate activists from the past and present, this book is both a call to action and a riveting dramatic history.A Junior Library Guild Selection
For little ones reluctant to say good night, this laugh-out-loud story from beloved author Jory John and internationally acclaimed illustrator Olivier Tallec will guide them through different methods of falling asleep-until they might just get tired after all.ATTENTION, READER: This book is going to MAKE YOU TIRED! It will CALM YOU DOWN! Yes, this book WILL PUT YOU TO SLEEP! How? Easy. There are monster trucks dashing across the pages. There are sheep being chased by dragons. There are electric guitars wailing throughout. Plus so MUCH MORE! Yep. All the typical stuff that makes you sleepy. So . . . are you asleep yet? No? Well, maybe another method would work better . . . So read on, and it's guaranteed you'll start to snooze!
An action-packed, empowering middle grade novel about a girl who has to speak up when her wheelchair motocross dreams get turned upside down.Twelve-year-old Emmie is working to raise money for a tricked-out wheelchair to get serious about WCMX, when a mishap on a poorly designed ramp at school throws her plans into a tailspin. Instead of replacing the ramp, her school provides her with a kind but unwelcome aide-and, seeing a golden media opportunity, launches a public fundraiser for her new wheels. Emmie loves her close-knit rural town, but she can't shake the feeling that her goals-and her choices-suddenly aren't hers anymore. With the help of her best friends, Emmie makes a plan to get her dreams off the ground-and show her community what she wants, what she has to give, and how ready she is to do it on her own terms.Air is a smart, energetic middle grade debut from Monica Roe about thinking big, working hard, and taking flight.
To everyone who has heard of my famous younger brother but has never heard of me.I Am Mozart, Too is a picture book biography about Wolfgang's older sister, Maria Anna Mozart, who was a child prodigy and a secret composer, perfect for Women's History Month.Nannerl and Wolfie love playing the harpsichord together. They are so talented, the Mozart siblings perform all over Europe for packed audiences in beautiful concert halls. Even Empress Maria Theresa requests that they stop in Vienna to play especially for her.But then Nannerl does something naughty: She starts writing music of her own. Papa fumes. Girls are not allowed to compose! Girls belong behind the curtain.While Wolfie's solo career takes flight, Nannerl must settle for a life offstage. But it doesn't stop her from pursuing her dreams in secret.With vivid, sweeping art by Adelina Lirius, author Audrey Ades tells the powerful true story of a talented, ambitious girl who has been hidden from history-a girl who was and always will be a genius, too.
"Dazzling." -Marcela Valdes, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)"A spellbinding novel by one of the best writers of the Americas." -Junot Díaz, author of This is How You Lose HerTen-year-old Rauli lives in a world that is often hostile. His older brother is violent; his philandering father doesn't understand him; his intelligence and sensitivity do not endear him to the other children at school. He loves to read, especially Greek myths, but in Cuba in the 1970s, novels and gods can be dangerous. Despite the signs that warn Rauli to repress and fear what he is, he knows three things to be true: First, that he was born in the wrong body. Second, that he will die, aged eighteen, as a soldier in the Cuban intervention in Angola. And third, that he is the reincarnation of the Trojan princess Cassandra.Moving between Rauli's childhood and adolescence, between the Angolan battlefield, the Cuban city of Cienfuegos, and the shores of ancient Troy, Marcial Gala's Call Me Cassandra tells of the search for identity amid the collapse of Cuba's utopian dreams. Burdened with knowledge of tragedies yet to come, Rauli nonetheless strives to know himself. Lyrical and gritty, heartbreaking and luminous, Rauli's is the story of the inexorable pull of destiny.
"An ingenious pocket universe." -Caitlin Horrocks, The New York Times Book Review "Gunnhild Øyehaug is a magician of the highest rank."-Catherine LaceyOn an ordinary day in Bergen, Norway, in the late 1990s, Anna is reading in the garden while her two-year-old daughter, Laura, plays on her tricycle. Then, in one startling moment, Anna misreads a word, an alternate universe opens up, and Laura disappears. Twenty years or so later, life has gone on as if nothing happened, but in each of the women's lives, something is not quite right.Both Anna and Laura continue to exist, but they are invisible to each other and forgotten in each other's worlds. Both are writers and amateur pianists. They are married; Anna had two more children after Laura disappeared, and Laura is expecting a child of her own. They worry about their families, their jobs, the climate-and whether this reality is all there is.
A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke-one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original worksOn a summer day under a blue sky a man is stung on his foot by a bee. "The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Off with you. The hour of departure has arrived." The man boards a train to Paris, crosses the city by Métro, then boards another, disembarking in a small town on the plains to the north. He is searching for a young woman he calls the Fruit Thief, who, like him, has set off on a journey to the Vexin plateau. What follows is a vivid but dreamlike exploration of topography both physical and affective, charting the Fruit Thief's perambulations across France's internal borderlands: alongside rivers and through ravines, beside highways and to a bolt-hole under the stairs of an empty hotel. Chance encounters-with a man scrambling through the underbrush in search of his lost cat, and with a delivery boy who abandons his scooter to become a fellow traveler for a day-are like so many throws of the dice, each exposing new facets of this mysterious individual in the manner of a cubist portrait.In prose of unrivaled precision, lucidly rendered into English by Krishna Winston, The Fruit Thief elevates the terrain of everyday life to epic status, and situates the microgeography of an individual at the center of a book like few others. This is one of Nobel laureate Peter Handke's most significant and original achievements.
"Passionate and meticulous . . . [Ehrlich] delivers thought-provoking metaphors, unforgettable scenes and many beautifully worded phrases." -Benjamin Labatut, The New York Times Book ReviewOne of The Telegraph's best books of the yearThe first major biography of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who discovered neurons and transformed our understanding of the human mind-illustrated with his extraordinary anatomical drawingsUnless you're a neuroscientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal is likely the most important figure in the history of biology you've never heard of. Along with Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur, he ranks among the most brilliant and original biologists of the nineteenth century, and his discoveries have done for our understanding of the human brain what the work of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton did for our conception of the physical universe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his lifelong investigation of the structure of neurons: "The mysterious butterflies of the soul," Cajal called them, "whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind." And he produced a dazzling oeuvre of anatomical drawings, whose alien beauty grace the pages of medical textbooks and the walls of museums to this day.Benjamin Ehrlich's The Brain in Search of Itself is the first major biography in English of this singular figure, whose scientific odyssey mirrored the rocky journey of his beloved homeland of Spain into the twentieth century. Born into relative poverty in a mountaintop hamlet, Cajal was an enterprising and unruly child whose ambitions were both nurtured and thwarted by his father, a country doctor with a flinty disposition. A portrait of a nation as well a biography, The Brain in Search of Itself follows Cajal from the hinterlands to Barcelona and Madrid, where he became an illustrious figure-resisting and ultimately transforming the rigid hierarchies and underdeveloped science that surrounded him. To momentous effect, Cajal devised a theory that was as controversial in his own time as it is universal in ours: that the nervous system is comprised of individual cells with distinctive roles, just like any other organ in the body. In one of the greatest scientific rivalries in history, he argued his case against Camillo Golgi and prevailed.In our age of neuro-imaging and investigations into the neural basis of the mind, Cajal is the artistic and scientific forefather we must get to know. The Brain in Search of Itself is at once the story of how the brain as we know it came into being and a finely wrought portrait of an individual as fantastical and complex as the subject to which he devoted his life.
A man mourning his alcoholic father faces a paradox: to pay tribute, lay scorn upon, or pour a drink. A wrenching, dazzling, revelatory debutWeaving between the preparations for his father''s funeral and memories of life on both sides of the U.S.ΓÇôMexico border, Obed Silva chronicles his father''s lifelong battle with alcoholism and the havoc it wreaked on his family. Silva and his mother had come north across the border to escape his fatherΓÇÖs violent, drunken rages. His father had followed and danced dangerously in and out of the familyΓÇÖs life until he was arrested and deported back to Mexico, where he drank himself to death, one Carta Blanca at a time, at the age of forty-eight.Told with a wry cynicism, a profane, profound anger, an antic, brutally honest voice, and a hard-won classical frame of reference, Silva channels the heartbreak of mourning while wrestling with the resentment and frustration caused by addiction. The Death of My Father the Pope is a fluid and dynamic combination of memoir and an examination of the power of languageΓÇöand the introduction of a unique and powerful literary voice.
A New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice | One of Esquire''s 125 best books about HollywoodAward-winning master critic Robert Gottlieb takes a singular and multifaceted look at the life of silver screen legend Greta Garbo, and the culture that worshiped her.“Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941,” Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, “Greta Garbo is in people’s minds, hearts, and dreams.” Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, she managed, in sixteen short years, to infiltrate the world’s subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was thirty-six, only made her more irresistible. Garbo appeared in just twenty-four Hollywood movies, yet her impact on the world—and that indescribable, transcendent presence she possessed—was rivaled only by Marilyn Monroe’s. She was looked on as a unique phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world, but in reality she was a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, naïve, and always on her guard. When she arrived in Hollywood, aged nineteen, she spoke barely a word of English and was completely unprepared for the ferocious publicity that quickly adhered to her as, almost overnight, she became the world’s most famous actress.In Garbo, the acclaimed critic and editor Robert Gottlieb offers a vivid and thorough retelling of her life, beginning in the slums of Stockholm and proceeding through her years of struggling to elude the attention of the world—her desperate, futile striving to be “left alone.” He takes us through the films themselves, from M-G-M’s early presentation of her as a “vamp”—her overwhelming beauty drawing men to their doom, a formula she loathed—to the artistic heights of Camille and Ninotchka (“Garbo Laughs!”), by way of Anna Christie (“Garbo Talks!”), Mata Hari, and Grand Hotel. He examines her passive withdrawal from the movies, and the endless attempts to draw her back. And he sketches the life she led as a very wealthy woman in New York—“a hermit about town”—and the life she led in Europe among the Rothschilds and men like Onassis and Churchill. Her relationships with her famous co-star John Gilbert, with Cecil Beaton, with Leopold Stokowski, with Erich Maria Remarque, with George Schlee—were they consummated? Was she bisexual? Was she sexual at all? The whole world wanted to know—and still wants to know.In addition to offering his rich account of her life, Gottlieb, in what he calls “A Garbo Reader,” brings together a remarkable assembly of glimpses of Garbo from other people’s memoirs and interviews, ranging from Ingmar Bergman and Tallulah Bankhead to Roland Barthes; from literature (she turns up everywhere—in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and the letters of Marianne Moore and Alice B. Toklas); from countless songs and cartoons and articles of merchandise. Most extraordinary of all are the pictures—250 or so ravishing movie stills, formal portraits, and revealing snapshots—all reproduced here in superb duotone. She had no personal vanity, no interest in clothes and make-up, yet the story of Garbo is essentially the story of a face and the camera. Forty years after her career ended, she was still being tormented by unrelenting paparazzi wherever she went.Includes Black-and-White Photographs
This sweet picture book celebrates a parent's love and support of a child through life's milestones, from learning to walk to the first day of school and all the highs and lows in between.From the night you arrive to your first night away,from learning to crawl to healing a broken heart,and for all the highs and lows in between. . .through every season, every challenge, and every joy, you are loved.With lyrical text from Maggie C. Rudd and stunning art by Elisa Chavarri, I'll Hold Your Hand celebrates the unbreakable bond of family, and all the ways our actions can say "I love you" louder than words.
An innovative biography of Edgar Allan Poe--highlighting his fascination and feuds with science
"An exhilarating account of a remarkable historical moment, in which characters known to many of us as immutable icons are rendered as vital, passionate, fallible beings . . . Lively, precise, and accessible." -Claire Messud, Harper'sAround the turn of the nineteenth century, a steady stream of young German poets and thinkers coursed to the town of Jena to make history. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had dealt a one-two punch to the dynastic system. Confidence in traditional social, political, and religious norms had been replaced by a profound uncertainty that was as terrifying for some as it was exhilarating for others. Nowhere was the excitement more palpable than among the extraordinary group of poets, philosophers, translators, and socialites who gathered in this Thuringian village of just four thousand residents.Jena became the place for the young and intellectually curious, the site of a new departure, of philosophical disruption. Influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then an elder statesman and artistic eminence, the leading figures among the disruptors-the translator August Wilhelm Schlegel; the philosophers Friedrich "Fritz" Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling; the dazzling, controversial intellectual Caroline Schlegel, married to August; Dorothea Schlegel, a poet and translator, married to Fritz; and the poets Ludwig Tieck and Novalis-resolved to rethink the world, to establish a republic of free spirits. They didn't just question inherited societal traditions; with their provocative views of the individual and of nature, they revolutionized our understanding of freedom and reality.With wit and elegance, Peter Neumann brings this remarkable circle of friends and rivals to life in Jena 1800, a work of intellectual history that is colorful and passionate, informative and intimate-as fresh and full of surprises as its subjects.
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