Böcker utgivna av PICADOR

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE AND PAPERBACK ROW"[Holleran's] new novel is all the more affecting and engaging because the images of isolation and old age here are haunted . . . In 1978 Holleran wrote the quintessential novel about gay abandon, the sheer, careless pleasure of it: Dancer from the Dance. Now, at almost eighty years of age, he has produced a novel remarkable for its integrity, for its readiness to embrace difficult truths and for its complex way of paying homage to the passing of time." -Colm Tóibín, The New York Times Book Review"It's rare to find fiction that takes this kind of dying of the light as its subject and doesn't make its heroes feel either pathetic or polished with a gleam of false dignity . . . This sad, beautiful book captures the sensations Holleran's characters are chasing-as well as the darkness that inevitably comes for them, and us." -Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles TimesOne of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.The Kingdom of Sand is a poignant tale of desire and dread-Andrew Holleran's first new book in sixteen years. The nameless narrator is a gay man who moved to Florida to look after his aging parents-during the height of the AIDS epidemic-and has found himself unable to leave after their deaths. With gallows humor, he chronicles the indignities of growing old in a small town.At the heart of the novel is the story of his friendship with Earl, whom he met cruising at the local boat ramp. For the last twenty years, he has been visiting Earl to watch classic films together and critique the neighbors. Earl is the only person in town with whom he can truly be himself. Now Earl's health is failing, and our increasingly misanthropic narrator must contend with the fact that once Earl dies, he will be completely alone. He distracts himself with sexual encounters at the video porn store and visits to Walgreens. All the while, he shares reflections on illness and death that are at once funny and heartbreaking.Holleran's first novel, Dancer from the Dance, is widely regarded as a classic work of gay literature. Reviewers have described his subsequent books as beautiful, exhilarating, seductive, haunting, and bold. The Kingdom of Sand displays all of Holleran's considerable gifts; it's an elegy to sex and a stunningly honest exploration of loneliness and the endless need for human connection, especially as we count down our days.

A hilariously filthy tale of sex, crime, and family dysfunction from the brilliantly twisted mind of John Waters, the legendary filmmaker and bestselling author of Mr. Know-It-All.Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief. Scammer. Master of disguise. Dogs and children hate her. Her own family wants her dead. She's smart, she's desperate, she's disturbed, and she's on the run with a big chip on her shoulder. They call her Liarmouth-until one insane man makes her tell the truth.Liarmouth, the first novel by John Waters, is a perfectly perverted "feel-bad romance," and the reader will thrill to hop aboard this delirious road trip of riotous revenge.

Hilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful, Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted tale of love, memory, morality, and mind control, as well as a fresh foray into the philosophy of romance. A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK of 2022 at Glamour, W, Nylon, Fortune, Literary Hub, The Millions, and more!One night in New York City's Chinatown, a woman is at a reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into an ex-boyfriend. And then another. And . . . another. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past. What would normally pass for coincidence becomes something far stranger. The recently engaged Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship but with the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned mystical guru, might have an unhealthy investment in the outcome. Memories of the past swirl and converge in ways both comic and eerie as Lola is forced to decide if she will surrender herself to the conspiring of one very contemporary cult. Is it possible to have a happy ending in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips and sanity is for sale? With her gimlet eye, Sloane Crosley spins a wry literary fantasy that is equal parts page-turner and poignant portrayal of alienation.

Will Jawando's My Seven Black Fathers tells a deeply affirmative story of hope and respect for men of color at a time when Black men are routinely stigmatized."Will Jawando's account of mentorship, service, and healing lays waste to the racist stereotype of the absent Black father. By arguing that Black fathers are not just found in individual families, but are indeed the treasure of entire Black communities, Will makes the case for a bold idea: that Black men can counter racist ideas and policies by virtue of their presence in the lives of Black boys and young men. This is a story we need to hear." -Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an AntiracistAs a boy growing up outside DC, Will, who went by his Nigerian name, Yemi, was shunted from school to school, never quite fitting in. He was a Black kid with a divorced white mother, a frayed relationship with his biological father, and teachers who scolded him for being disruptive. Eventually, he became close to Kalfani, a kid he looked up to on the basketball court. Years after he got the call telling him that Kalfani was dead, another victim of gun violence, Will looks back on the relationships he had with a series of extraordinary mentors who enabled him to thrive.Among them were Mr. Williams, the rare Black male grade school teacher, who found a way to bolster Will's self-esteem; Jay Fletcher, the openly gay colleague of his mother's who got him off junk food and took him to his first play; Wayne Holmes, the high school coach and chorus director who saw him through a crushing disappointment; Deen Sanwoola, the businessman who helped him bridge the gap between his American upbringing and his Nigerian heritage, eventually leading to a dramatic reconciliation with his biological father; and President Barack Obama, who made Will his associate director of public engagement at the White House-and invited him to play basketball on more than one occasion. Without the influence of these men, Will knows he would not be who he is today: a civil rights and education policy attorney, a civic leader, a husband, and a father.Drawing on Will's inspiring personal story, My Seven Black Fathers offers a transformative way for Black men to shape the next generation.

A captivating memoir of one woman's long journey to late transition, as the trans community emerges alongside her."[An] achingly beautiful memoir." -Manuel Betancourt, The New York Times Book Review"A universal and profound meditation on the price of authenticity." -Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There and Good BoyLong before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn't even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch's This Body I Wore chronicles one woman's long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades."How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?" This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question that Goetsch, an award-winning poet and essayist, addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at New York City's Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city's crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and '90s. Under cover of night, crossdressers risked their jobs and their safety to give expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Many would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas of the trans community largely ignored by history.Goetsch has written not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years?

From the author of the New York Times-bestselling Four Thousand Weeks, a totally original approach to self-help: success through failure, calm through embracing anxiety.Self-help books don't seem to work. Few of the many advantages of modern life seem capable of lifting our collective mood. Wealth-even if you can get it-doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. Romance, family life, and work often bring as much stress as joy. We can't even agree on what "happiness" means. So are we engaged in a futile pursuit? Or are we just going about it the wrong way? Looking both east and west, in bulletins from the past and from far afield, Oliver Burkeman introduces us to an unusual group of people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. Whether experimental psychologists, terrorism experts, Buddhists, hardheaded business consultants, Greek philosophers, or modern-day gurus, they argue that in our personal lives, and in society at large, it's our constant effort to be happy that is making us miserable. And that there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty-the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid. Thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and ultimately uplifting, The Antidote is the intelligent person's guide to understanding the much-misunderstood idea of happiness.

From the eminent and award-winning historian Robert A. Gross comes his long-awaited, immersive journey through Concord in the age of Emerson and Thoreau, The Transcendentalists and Their World.One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of 2021Why Concord? How did a small and seemingly quiet village in the hinterlands of Boston become, by popular reckoning, the birthplace of two revolutions-the American War of Independence that began with shots fired by the local Minutemen, and the American Renaissance of literature and thought that began with the Transcendentalists' challenge to established pieties? In The Transcendentalists and Their World, the distinguished historian Robert A. Gross gives a rich and beautifully detailed account of the town that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called home. Their Concord, he shows, was primed for revolt, and was hardly a sleepy, bucolic place fit only for poets and philosophers.The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived in an age of transformation. A place of more than two thousand souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, one whose small, ordered society, founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen, was dramatically unsettled by the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy while the town became more tightly integrated with the wider world. These changes posed a challenge to a society built on inherited institutions and involuntary associations as citizens placed a new premium on autonomy and choice. Concord was ripe for Emerson and Thoreau.The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a town and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the reaches of the universe for spiritual truths-and took stock of the rapidly changing contours of their surroundings. It shows us familiar literary figures alongside their neighbors-white and Black, devout and blasphemous, and situated at every level of the social order-and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community has been recovered so richly and located so meaningfully within the larger American story.

The "beautifully written" (The Washington Post) first novel by Alice McDermott, National Book Award-winning author of Charming Billy and Someone.Elizabeth Connelly, editor at a New York vanity press, sells the dream of publication (admittedly, to writers of questionable talent). Stories of true emotional depth rarely cross her desk. But when a young writer named Tupper Daniels walks in, bearing an unfinished novel, Elizabeth is drawn to both the novelist and his story-a lyrical tale about a man in love with more than one woman at once. Tupper's manuscript unlocks memories of her own secretive father, who himself may have been a bigamist. As Elizabeth and Tupper search for the perfect dénouement, their affair, too, approaches a most unexpected and poignant coda.A brilliant debut from one of our most celebrated authors, A Bigamist's Daughter is "a wise, sad, witty novel about men and women, God, hope, love, illusion, and fiction itself" (Newsweek).

"Enthralling . . . breathtaking . . . Metazoa brings an extraordinary and astute look at our own mind's essential link to the animal world." -The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)"A great book . . . [Godfrey-Smith is] brilliant at describing just what he sees, the patterns of behaviour of the animals he observes." -Nigel Warburton, Five BooksThe scuba-diving philosopher who wrote Other Minds explores the origins of animal consciousnessDip below the ocean's surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom-the Metazoa-they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.In his acclaimed 2016 book, Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus-the closest thing to an intelligent alien on Earth. In Metazoa, Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective experience with the assistance of far-flung species. As he delves into what it feels like to perceive and interact with the world as other life-forms do, Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the animal body well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path. In accessible, riveting prose, he charts the ways that subsequent evolutionary developments-eyes that track, for example, and bodies that move through and manipulate the environment-shaped the subjective lives of animals. Following the evolutionary paths of a glass sponge, soft coral, banded shrimp, octopus, and fish, then moving onto land and the world of insects, birds, and primates like ourselves, Metazoa gathers their stories together in a way that bridges the gap between mind and matter, addressing one of the most vexing philosophical problems: that of consciousness.Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our high-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding our minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and active bodies. The story that results is as rich and vibrant as life itself.

Barrett Brown went to prison for four years for leaking intelligence documents. He was released to Trump's America. This is his story.After a series of escapades both online and off that brought him in and out of 4chan forums, the halls of power, heroin addiction, and federal prison, Barrett Brown is a free man. He was arrested for his part in an attempt to catalog, interpret, and disseminate top-secret documents exposed in a security lapse by the intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011. An influential journalist who is also active in the hacktivist collective Anonymous, Brown recounts exploits from a life shaped by an often self-destructive drive to speak truth to power. With inimitable wit and style, palpable anger and conviction, he exposes the incompetence and injustices that plague media and politics, reflects on the successes and failures of the transparency movement, and shows the way forward in harnessing digital communication tools for collective action.But My Glorious Defeats is more than just the tale of the clever and hilarious Brown; it's also a rigorously researched dissection of our decaying institutions and of human nature itself. As Brown makes clear, institutions are made of people-people with personal ambitions and personal vices-and it is people, just like him, just like us, who hold power. As optimistic as it is heartbreaking, My Glorious Defeats is an entertaining and illuminating manual for insurgency in the information age.

A Los Angeles Times BestsellerA Lit Hub | Chicago Review | Ms. Magazine March pick A Lambda Literary Most Anticipated BookIn this perceptive and provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America's search for meaningWhen Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, "just naturally reverent," a fact that didn't change when she-much to her own confusion-lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: "You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé." A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner's work. Her celebrated essay "Thin Places" (Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith? Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author's past and present preoccupations.

One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All TimeWinner of the 2020 Pacific Northwest Book Award | Winner of the 2020 Washington State Book Award | Named a 2019 Southwest Book of the Year | Shortlisted for the 2019 Brooklyn Public Library Literary PrizeWhat happens when an undocumented teen mother takes on the U.S. immigration system?When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby U.S. border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida's mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one of the most heavily policed sites in America.Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. She learned English, watched Friends, and, after having a baby at sixteen, dreamed of teaching dance and moving with her son to New York City. But life had other plans. Following a misstep that led to her deportation, Aida found herself in a Mexican city marked by violence, in a country that was not hers. To get back to the United States and reunite with her son, she embarked on a harrowing journey. The daughter of a rebel hero from the mountains of Chihuahua, Aida has a genius for survival-but returning to the United States was just the beginning of her quest.Taking us into detention centers, immigration courts, and the inner lives of Aida and other daring characters, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez reveals the human consequences of militarizing what was once a more forgiving border. With emotional force and narrative suspense, Aaron Bobrow-Strain brings us into the heart of a violently unequal America. He also shows us that the heroes of our current immigration wars are less likely to be perfect paragons of virtue than complex, flawed human beings who deserve justice and empathy all the same.

Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award in Creative NonfictionFinalist for the Chautauqua Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN USA Literary Center Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace PrizeIn the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses. He keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes.Following her award-winning memoir The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father, Bee Yang, the song poet-a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America's Secret War. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. The songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a St. Paul housing project and on the factory floor, until, with the death of Bee's mother, they leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has burnished a life of poverty for his children, polishing their grim reality so that they might shine.

"An essential document of our time." -Charles D'Ambrosio, author of LoiteringIn search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead.Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing "watershed discipleship" in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming-guns into ploughshares. She watches the world's greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again. Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.