A treasure of world literature back in print, featuring a new introduction by Eimear McBride This omnibus edition includes the novels The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss. The country girls are Caithleen "Kate" Brady and Bridget "Baba" Brennan, and their story begins in the repressive atmosphere of a small village in the west of Ireland in the years following World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a survivor. Setting out to conquer the bright lights of Dublin, they are rewarded with comical miscommunications, furtive liaisons, bad faith, bad luck, bad sex, and compromise; marrying for the wrong reasons, betraying for the wrong reasons, fighting in their separate ways against the overwhelming wave of expectations forced upon "girls" of every era.The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue charts unflinchingly the pattern of women's lives, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair, in remarkable prose swinging from blunt and brutal to whimsical and lyrical. It is a saga both painful and hilarious, and remains one of the major accomplishments of Edna O'Brien's extraordinary career.
From Christie Matheson and Anuska Allepuz comes a radiant picture book with a powerful message: you're never too small to make a difference. Featuring dreamy artwork, this makes for a beautiful gift for kids or graduates!Mouse feels all alone one dark and dreary night. She wonders if anybody else feels lonely, too. She's not sure if a single person can make a difference, but she decides to try.Mouse lit one light...And the result is magical. One by one, others in the neighborhood follow Mouse's lead. With each new spark, the stormy night becomes less gloomy. This luminous story is a brilliant and tender call to action, encouraging readers to spread kindness and create change in the world - one light at a time.
A moving middle-grade debut about foster care, self-advocacy, and realizing that a found family is a real family.
Civil rights icon Claudette Colvin teams up with Phillip Hoose-author of the Newbery Honor and National Book Award-winning blockbuster biography Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice-to tell her groundbreaking story in this unforgettable picture book illustrated by New York Times-bestselling artist Bea Jackson.
"After the bustle of the holiday season, grandparents wave goodbye and it's time to pack up the sparkly ornaments. The house feels too quiet. What do you do when the excitement and festivities are over? The fireplace may be a perfect place to read new books with a cup of hot cocoa and some snuggles with Mom and Dad. And leftovers might still be pretty tasty. Upon reflection, the memories of the Christmas season can bring smiles, not sadness -- and a hopefulness that there's still so much to look forward to."
Stranger Things meets A Monster Calls in this spine-tingling, emotionally rich middle grade novel about a boy who must protect his neighborhood from a malevolent monster tree while dealing with the recent loss of his father.
"When kitty first got adopted, everything was purr-fect. Then came the rules. NO eating the bread! NO chasing the baby! BAD KITTY! Excuse me? She's not a bad kitty. Left with no choice, she says goodbye to everything she loves (even her favorite crinkled-up receipt) and quits! But kitty's adventure in the great outdoors doesn't go as planned, and she realizes that she may have made a few mistakes. She knows she can do better, but how can she get home? Would her family even want her back?"--
"Maya is only three days into summer vacation and already bored. Outside her window, the street is full of neighbors. Coming and going. Earning and spending. Fixing and mending. Everyone has something to do--everyone's hands are busy. Except Maya's. When she opens her palms, they are empty. They are small. ... As Maya longs to do something useful alongside her neighbors--proclaim truth, stand for justice, or show mercy--she discovers that children like her can give the greatest gift of all: love.
"A group portrait of young Afghans who came of age during the two decades following 9/11"--
"A history of the right-wing political figures who defined the early 1990s"--
"Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for--and finding--more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such 'radical outpost of Jesus followers, ' dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia's Circle of Hope grew for forty years, planted four congregations, ... found itself in crisis, [and ultimately disbanded]. The story that follows is an American allegory full of questions with urgent relevance for so many of us, not just the faithful: How do we commit to one another and our better selves in a fracturing world? Where does power live? Can it be shared? How do we make 'the least of these' welcome?"--
An empowering message inspired by a beloved quote from Madeleine L'Engle's enduring classic A Wrinkle in Time. "Stay angry, little Meg," Mrs. Whatsit whispered. "You will need all your anger now."This picture book encourages girls everywhere to proudly share their ideas and emotions, even if those traits will be met with resistance. Because being brave, sensitive, stubborn, curious, loud, kind, and playful helps them build strength and stay true to themselves.Michelle Jing Chan's bright artwork welcomes girls of all backgrounds to use these important affirmations.
Blending memoir with social history, Clair Wills movingly explores the gaping holes in the fabric of modern Ireland, and in her own family story.In 2015, the Irish government commissioned an investigation into the state's network of Mother and Baby Homes after the discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of up to eight hundred children prompted international outrage. The homes, which operated from the 1920s to the 1990s, were responsible for nearly nine thousand child deaths and countless other abuses.Yet in the face of overwhelming evidence, everyone seemed to forget what had actually occurred. No one remembered who the babies were, how they died, or where they were buried. A whole society had learned not to look, or not to look too closely, and certainly not to ask too many questions.Clair Wills's investigation leads her back to the discovery that nearly thirty years ago a cousin of hers had been born in one of the Homes and her existence had been covered up. As Wills finds out more about her own family's secret chronicle of loss, her investigation expands into an exploration of the secrets and silences that make up our family stories, the limits of record-keeping, and the fragility of memory itself. Wills unravels a history of illegitimacy that stretches back into her grandmother's life in Ireland a hundred years ago and forward to her own generation today. Missing Persons reveals the truth that seeps through the gaps in our stories about the past and that is encrypted in things left unsaid-if you learn how to read what is missing.
A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit. Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.
Peterson unfurls the quotidian fabric of our lives, patterned with the difficulties of language and this moment.Confusion frames the human predicament. In Katie Peterson's Fog and Smoke, confusion is, literally, our climate. Writing to, and from, the California landscape, Peterson sees fog and smoke as literal-one a natural weather event, the other an aftereffect of the West's drought-caused fires-but they are also metaphysical. Fog and smoke subsume the poet and reflect the true conditions (and frustrations) of our ability to perceive and to connect. She writes, "I've been speaking about it at a distance. / Now I want to talk about its thickness. / A person could get killed in here."The collection moves through three sections: First, the poet follows her local fog's cyclical journey of descent and dispersion; second, in a sort of pastoral interlude, she travels widely, almost erratically, to the California desert, the greater world, and ancient history; finally, she descends into the enclosed space of the household, and the increased confinement and intimacy of raising a child during the pandemic. Peterson unfolds the small moments that make up our lives and reveals the truths contained within them, and her poems capture the lyricism of our daily rhythms-the interruptions, dialogues, and epiphanies.
The Way That Leads Among the Lost reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City's tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico's most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them-the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws readers into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia's own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs-a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take.Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on readers.
The culmination of Christopher Tilghman's great Chesapeake saga, a story spanning four centuries of an American family.It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering for its annual celebration at the family's historic Chesapeake farm, Mason's Retreat. It isn't everyone's favorite tradition, but Harry Mason has once again goaded his wife, Kate, and their children into participating. Their oldest, Rosalie, is having trouble with her marriage; the youngest, Ethan, is in the throes of a fitful first relationship. In between, Eleanor despairs over her stalled novel, a fictionalized memoir of the wife of the first Mason immigrant who landed in 1659. Kate, recovering from a second round of chemotherapy, is at the center of this ritual of remembrance. Tart and candid, she asks her husband, "What crimes against humanity did your family not commit on this farm?" And so it happens that when the family, joined by a cast of neighbors and cousins from France, sits down for dinner, the question of how they should regard their past comes to the fore.Told with warmth and humor, On the Tobacco Coast is Christopher Tilghman's concluding meditation on the themes of his novels about Mason's Retreat: place and history, the persistence of family stories, race and white privilege, the enigmas and customs of regions. It is a reflection on the state of America today, its battles with its own history, and efforts to reckon with the wrongs of the past while looking forward to a more just future.
A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America's greatest photographers.Timothy O'Sullivan is America's most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don't know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work "surrealistic and disturbing."At the same time, we know very little about O'Sullivan himself. Nor do we know-really know-much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan's Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author's own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O'Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and '70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means. Sullivan, known for his probing investigations of place in the pages of The New Yorker and books like Rats and My American Revolution, has produced a work that, like O'Sullivan's magisterial photos of geysers and hot springs, exposes a fissure in the American landscape itself.
A stunning memorial work that excavates the forgotten experience of West Indian soldiers during World War I.Deep-dyed in language both sensuous and biblical, Ishion Hutchinson's School of Instructions memorializes the experience of West Indian soldiers volunteering in British regiments in the Middle East during World War I. The poem narrates the psychic and physical terrors of these young Black fighters in as they struggle against the colonial power they served; their story overlaps with that of Godspeed, a schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, in which the horizontal, documentary shape of the narrative is interrupted by sudden lyric effusions, unsettles both time and event, mapping great moments of heroism onto the trials of everyday existence It reshapes grand gestures of heroism in a music of supple, vigilant intensity. Elegiac, epochal and lyrical, School of Instructions confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and weaves shards of remembrance-"your word mass / your mix match / your jamming of elements"-into a unique form of survival. It is a masterpiece of imaginative recuperation by a poet of prodigious gifts.
In Claudia Dey's Daughter, a woman long caught in her father's web strives to make a life-and art-of her own.To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.So says Mona Dean-playwright, actress, and daughter of a man famous for one great novel, a man whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, her father begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights-painfully, parasitically-in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father's crimes and ejected from the family.Mona's tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss-one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements-can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.
A virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption, by an electrifying debut novelist. When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones's story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation.As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce-who, like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier-keep emerging.Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave is a virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption. It explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.
"Destined to become a new classic . . . Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought." -Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker: A Literary BiographyOne of Lit Hub's most anticipated books of 2023A transformative feminist intervention in the way we think about women's stories and bodies.Coming across the term "art monster" in Jenny Offill's 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, Lauren Elkin was intrigued. What kinds of connections might there be between art and monstrosity, and how was it different when the artist in question was a woman?Art Monsters is a landmark feminist intervention in the way we think about women's stories and bodies, calling attention to a radical genealogy of feminist art that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims. Exploring a rich lineage of visual artists, thinkers, and writers, Elkin examines the ways feminists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth of their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, raced bodies, female bodies: What are the languages of the body, and what are the materials we need to transcribe them? Above all, how can we use the notion of the feminist "art monster" to shape how we live our lives?Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson, Elkin demonstrates her power as a cultural critic in this erudite and engaging book. From Kara Walker's silhouettes to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's trilingual masterpiece Dictee, Art Monsters daringly weaves links between disparate artists and writers, and shows that their work offers a potent defense of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, ambiguity and opacity.
"There have been many biographies of Lou Reed, but Will Hermes has written the definitive life . . . He has brought to the assignment a sharp eye, a clear head, a lucid prose style, and a determination to let Lou be Lou, without judgment." -Lucy Sante, author of Low LifeThe most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.Since his death ten years ago, Lou Reed's living presence has only grown. The great rock-poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou Reed: The King of New York, Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed's life and legacy, dramatizing his long, brilliant, and contentious dialogue with fans, critics, fellow artists, and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed's complex partnerships with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson; track the deadpan wit, street-smart edge, and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground and beyond; and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage he took from his mentor Delmore Schwartz.As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats to the landmark status he later achieved, he also tells the story of New York City as a cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library's much-publicized Reed archive, Hermes employs the library collections, the release of previously unheard recordings, and a wealth of recent interviews to give us a new Lou Reed-a pioneer in living and writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures.
American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 presents the epic history of America's most controversial weapon.In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.In American Gun, the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner-the American Kalashnikov-as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America's gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry.Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images.
Hailed as "an essential reeducation on one of the most consequential events in US history" by Ibram X. Kendi, this gripping middle-grade account offers a fresh look at the groundbreaking 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom by spotlighting the protest's radical roots and the underappreciated role of Black women-includes a wealth of contemporary black-and-white photos throughout.Six decades ago, on August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom-a moment often revered as the culmination of this Black-led protest. But at its core, the March on Washington was not a beautiful dream of future integration; it was a mass outcry for jobs and freedom NOW-not at some undetermined point in the future. It was a revolutionary march with its own controversies and problems, the themes of which still resonate to this day.Without diminishing the words of Dr. King, More Than a Dream looks at the march through a wider lens, using Black newspaper reports as a primary resource, recognizing the overlooked work of socialist organizers and Black women protesters, and repositioning this momentous day as radical in its roots, methods, demands, and results. From Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long, the acclaimed authors of Call Him Jack, comes a classic-in-the-making that will transform our modern understanding of this legendary event in the fight for racial justice and civil rights.
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