-
Ladyparts: A Memoir
A frank, witty, and dazzlingly written memoir of one woman trying to keep it together while her body falls apart--from the "brilliant mind" (Michaela Coel, creator of I May Destroy You) behind Shutterbabe "The most laugh-out-loud story of resilience you'll ever read and an essential road map for the importance of narrative as a tool of healing."--Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE
I'm crawling around on the bathroom floor, picking up pieces of myself. These pieces are not a metaphor. They are actual pieces.
Twenty years after her iconic memoir Shutterbabe, Deborah Copaken is at her darkly comedic nadir: battered, broke, divorcing, dissected, and dying--literally--on sexism's battlefield as she scoops up what she believes to be her internal organs into a glass container before heading off to the hospital . . . in an UberPool.
Ladyparts is Copaken's irreverent inventory of both the female body and the body politic of womanhood in America, the story of one woman brought to her knees by the one-two-twelve punch of divorce, solo motherhood, healthcare Frogger, unaffordable childcare, shady landlords, her father's death, college tuitions, sexual harassment, corporate indifference, ageism, sexism, and plain old bad luck. Plus seven serious illnesses, one atop the other, which provide the book's narrative skeleton: vagina, uterus, breast, heart, cervix, brain, and lungs. Copaken bounces back from each bum body part, finds workarounds for every setback--she transforms her home into a commune to pay rent, sells her soul for health insurance, turns FBI informant when her sexual harasser gets a presidential appointment--but in her slippery struggle to survive a steep plunge off the middle-class ladder, she is suddenly awoken to what it means to have no safety net. Side-splittingly funny one minute, a freak horror show the next, quintessentially American throughout, Ladyparts is an era-defining memoir. -
Rules for Visiting
"An elegant and deeply moving meditation on friendship, family, and life on earth. Rules for Visiting is a wonderful novel." --Emily St. John Mandel, author of Sea of Tranquility, The Glass Hotel, and Station Eleven The national bestseller and an Indie Next List pick Name a Best Book of the Year by O Magazine - Good Housekeeping - Real Simple - Vulture - Chicago Tribune Named a Best Book of the Summer by The Today Show - Good Morning America - Wall Street Journal - San Francisco Chronicle - Southern Living Shortlisted for the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize Long-listed for the 2020 Tournament of Books Dry, witty, and unapologetic, May Attaway loves literature and her work as a botanist for the university in her hometown. More at home with plants than people, May begins to suspect she isn't very good at friendship and wonders if it's possible to improve with practice. Granted some leave from her job, she sets out on a journey to spend time with four long-neglected friends. Smart, funny, and full of compassion, Rules for Visiting is the story of a search for friendship in the digital age, a singular look at the way we stay in touch. While May travels, she studies her friends' lives and begins to confront the pain of her own. With simplicity and honesty, Jessica Francis Kane has crafted an exquisite story about a woman trying to find a new way to be in the world. This nourishing book, with its beautiful contemplation of travel, trees, family, and friendship, is the perfect antidote to our chaotic times.
-
The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Autobiography
A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees.
Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis. -
By Any Other Name
Two women, centuries apart--one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare's plays--are both forced to hide behind another name to make their voices heard. In 1581, Emilia Bassano--like most young women of her day--is allowed no voice of her own. But as the Lord Chamberlain's mistress, she has access to all theater in England, and finds a way to bring her work to the stage secretly. And yet, creating some of the world's greatest dramatic masterpieces comes at great cost: by paying a man for the use of his name, she will write her own out of history. In the present, playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. Although the challenges are different four hundred years later, the playing field is still not level for women in theater. Would Melina--like Emilia--be willing to forfeit her credit as author, just for a chance to see her work performed? Told in intertwining narratives, this sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire asks what price each woman is willing to pay to see their work live on--even if it means they will be forgotten. -
The Nest
*SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE*
Instant New York Times Bestseller; named a Best Book of 2016 by People, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Refinery29, NPR and LibraryReads.
"Hilarious and big-hearted, The Nest is a stellar debut." -- People
A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.
Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs' joint trust fund, "The Nest," which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest's value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.
Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can't seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the futures they've envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.
This is a story about the power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one another and the ways we let one another down. In this tender, entertaining, and deftly written debut, Sweeney brings a remarkable cast of characters to life to illuminate what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of time, and the fraught yet unbreakable ties we share with those we love. -
Poukahangatus: Poems
An acclaimed young poet explores her identity as a twenty-first-century Indigenous woman. Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation. Intimate, moving, virtuosic, and hilarious, Tayi Tibble is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. In Poūkahangatus (pronounced "Pocahontas"), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies--Greek, Māori, feminist, kiwi--peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies, and Twilight to exquisite renderings of the natural world and precise emotions ("The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard"). Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics correlate to the overflowing beauty, irony, and ruination of her surroundings. These are warm, provocative, and profoundly original poems, written by a woman for whom diving into the wreck means taking on new assumptions--namely, that it is not radical to write from a world in which the effects of colonization, land, work, and gender are obviously connected. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and how she as a Māori woman fits into trends, stereotypes, and popular culture. With language that is at once colorful, passionate, and laugh-out-loud funny, Poūkahangatus is the work of one of our most daring new poets. -
One Two Three
From Laurie Frankel, the New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is, a Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine Book Pick, comes One Two Three, a timely, topical novel about love and family that will make you laugh and cry...and laugh again.
In a town where nothing ever changes, suddenly everything does... Everyone knows everyone in the tiny town of Bourne, but the Mitchell triplets are especially beloved. Mirabel is the smartest person anyone knows, and no one doubts it just because she can't speak. Monday is the town's purveyor of books now that the library's closed--tell her the book you think you want, and she'll pull the one you actually do from the microwave or her sock drawer. Mab's job is hardest of all: get good grades, get into college, get out of Bourne. For a few weeks seventeen years ago, Bourne was national news when its water turned green. The girls have come of age watching their mother's endless fight for justice. But just when it seems life might go on the same forever, the first moving truck anyone's seen in years pulls up and unloads new residents and old secrets. Soon, the Mitchell sisters are taking on a system stacked against them and uncovering mysteries buried longer than they've been alive. Because it's hard to let go of the past when the past won't let go of you. Three unforgettable narrators join together here to tell a spellbinding story with wit, wonder, and deep affection. As she did in This Is How It Always Is, Laurie Frankel has written a laugh-out-loud-on-one-page-grab-a-tissue-the-next novel, as only she can, about how expanding our notions of normal makes the world a better place for everyone and how when days are darkest, it's our daughters who will save us all. -
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death
In this astonishing memoir, the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet shares the seventeen near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers. Here, O'Farrell stiches together these discrete encounters to tell the story of her entire life. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, she captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself. -
No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM, THE HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD, AND THE LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST * ABA SILVER GAVEL AWARD FINALIST * KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY: Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, BookRiot, Economist, New York Times Staff Critics "A seminal and breathtaking account of why home is the most dangerous place to be a woman . . . A tour de force." --Eve Ensler "Terrifying, courageous reportage from our internal war zone." --Andrew Solomon "Extraordinary." --New York Times,"Editors' Choice" "Gut-wrenching, required reading." --Esquire "Compulsively readable . . . It will save lives." --Washington Post "Essential, devastating reading." --Cheryl Strayed, New York Times Book Review The book that changed the conversation about domestic violence--an award-winning journalist's intimate investigation of the abuse that happens behind closed doors, now with a new afterword by the author. We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a "global epidemic." In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths--that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it. -
Lee Miller: Photographs
Photojournalist, war correspondent, model, and surrealist muse, Lee Miller was one of the most important women photographers of the twentieth century, working in the fields of photojournalism, fashion, portraiture, and advertising. This book presents over one hundred of Miller's finest works in a single volume.
Introduced to photography at an early age, Miller honed her craft in Paris, where she associated with the surrealists and other avant-garde artists, including Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. Together with Man Ray, she discovered the distinctive technique of solarization to create mesmerizing halo effects. After establishing her own photographic studio in New York, where she became a prominent commercial photographer, she then moved to the Middle East and Europe before becoming the official war photographer for Vogue, a period during which she took many of her most iconic photographs.
This evocative book collects Miller's most famous documentary, fashion, and war works, as well as photographs of Miller. They are all carefully compiled by her son, photographer Antony Penrose, with a foreword by actress Kate Winslet, who will star as Miller in the film Lee.
-
The Girls We Sent Away
"An important and vital story"-- Donna Everhart, USA Today bestselling author of The Saints of Swallow Hill
A searing book club read for fans of Ellen Marie Wiseman and The Girls with No Names set in the Baby Scoop Era of 1960s and the women of a certain condition swept up in a dark history.
It's the 1960s and Lorraine Delford has it all - an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and a white picket fence home in North Carolina. Yet every time she looks through her father's telescope, she dreams of the stars. It's ambitious, but Lorraine has always been exceptional.
But when this darling girl-next-door gets pregnant, she's forced to learn firsthand the realities that keep women grounded.
To hide their daughter's secret shame, the Delfords send Lorraine to a maternity home for wayward girls. But this is no safe haven - it's a house with dark secrets and suffocating rules. And as Lorraine begins to piece together a new vision for her life, she must decide if she can fight against the powers that aim to take her child or submit to the rules of a society she once admired.
Powerful and affecting, The Girls We Sent Away is a timely novel that explores autonomy, belonging, and a quest for agency when the illusions of life-as-you-know-it fall away.
-
The Interestings
"Remarkable . . . With this book [Wolitzer] has surpassed herself."--The New York Times Book Review "A victory . . . The Interestings secures Wolitzer's place among the best novelists of her generation. . . . She's every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn't women's fiction. It's everyone's."--Entertainment Weekly (A) The New York Times-bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer that has been called "genius" (The Chicago Tribune), "wonderful" (Vanity Fair), "ambitious" (San Francisco Chronicle), and a "page-turner" (Cosmopolitan), which The New York Times Book Review says is "among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot." The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules's now-married best friends, become shockingly successful--true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken. Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life. -
Sold outNew Animal
* 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, Longlist.
* ABA "Indie Next List" pick for March 2022.
* 2022 Best Young Australian Novelists awards, Winner.
* Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Shortlist.
* "A Best Book of 2022" --Glamour, NYLON, Glamour, Refinery29 UK, Harpers BAZAAR UK
* "A Most Anticipated Book" --Lit Hub, The Millions
New Animal is a poignant, darkly comedic look at human connection from a biting and original new voice in Ella Baxter.Amelia Aurelia is approaching thirty and her closest relationships -- other than her mother -- are through her dating apps. She works at the family mortuary business as a cosmetic mortician with her eccentric step-father and older brother, whose throuple's current preoccupation is with what type of snake to adopt. When Amelia's affectionate mother passes away without warning, she is left without anchor. Fleeing the funeral, she seeks solace with her birth-father in Tasmania and stumbles into the local BDSM community, where her riotous attempts to belong are met with confusion, shock, and empathy.
Hilarious and heartfelt, New Animal reveals hard-won truths as Amelia struggles to find her place in the world without her mother, with the help of her two well-intentioned fathers and adventures at the kink club.
Sold out -
Days of Wonder
A New York Times bestselling author delivers a tantalizing, courageous story about mothers and daughters, guilt and innocence, and the lengths we go for love. As a teenager, for a moment, Ella Fitchburg found love--yearning, breathless love--that consumed both her and her boyfriend, Jude, as they wandered the streets of New York City together. But her life was unexpectedly upended when she was accused of trying to murder Jude's father, an imperious superior court judge, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. When she learns she's pregnant shortly after sentencing, she reluctantly decides to give up the child. Ella is released after serving only six years. While she is desperate to turn the page on a new life, she can't seem to let go of her past. With only an address as a possible lead, she moves to Ann Arbor, Michigan, determined to get her daughter back. Forced to hide her identity and complicated past and live in a constant state of deception, she finds that what she's been searching for all along is a way to uncover and live with the truth. Yet a central mystery endures: neither Jude nor Ella can remember the events leading up to the attempted murder--that fateful night which led to Ella's conviction. For fans of Miranda Cowley Heller's The Paper Palace and Allegra Goodman's Sam, Caroline Leavitt's Days of Wonder is a gripping high-drama page-turner about the elusive nature of redemption and the profound reach of love. -
Rhythm and Clues: The Record Shop Mysteries
The rhythm is gonna get you.
It's been five whole months since the last murder in Cedar River, Texas, and Juni Jessup and her sisters Tansy and Maggie have been humming along when disaster strikes again. Their struggling vinyl records shop/coffee nook, Sip & Spin Records, is under pressure from predatory investors, though the Jessup sisters aren't ready to face the music and admit defeat. But the night after their
meeting, the sketchy financier is killed outside their shop during a torrential Texas thunderstorm that washes out all the roads in and out of town. Now the sisters find themselves trapped in Cedar River with a killer, and Juni is determined to solve the case. When the river spits out an unexpected surprise, Detective Beau Russell asks for Juni's help, never predicting her investigation will spin her into danger. Up until now, the Jessup sisters have been playing it by ear, but with
the whole town watching, can they catch a killer before he strikes again?Sold out -
In the Time of Our History: A Novel of Riveting and Evocative Fiction
"Beautifully written. . . . I'm still thinking about the women who inhabited these pages, the choices they made, and the love between them." -Lisa See, New York Times bestselling author of The Island of Sea Women "I fell in love with this jewel of a novel from the first page." -Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club Indie Next List Pick Target Book Club PickPublisher's Marketplace Buzz Books Selection San Francisco Bay Time Top of Your Stack Selection Booklist Queen Most Popular Book Releases Bar/Heart Substack 18 New Books to Read Literally by Scribd Best New Books and Audiobooks Inspired by her own Iranian-American heritage, the acclaimed author weaves a beautifully crafted story of mothers and daughters, secrets and lies, and defying expectations--even when those choices come with an irrevocable cost. Twelve months after her younger sister Anahita's death, Mitra Jahani reluctantly returns to her parents' home in suburban New Jersey to observe the Iranian custom of "The One Year." Ana is always in Mitra's heart, though they chose very different paths. While Ana, sweet and dutiful, bowed to their domineering father's demands and married, Mitra rebelled, and was banished. Caught in the middle is their mother, Shireen, torn between her fierce love for her surviving daughter and her loyalty to her husband. Yet his callousness even amid shattering loss has compelled her to rethink her own decades of submission. And when Mitra is suddenly forced to confront hard truths about her sister's life, and the secrets each of them hid to protect others, mother and daughter reach a new understanding--and forge an unexpected path forward. Alive with the tensions, sacrifices, and joys that thrum within the heart of every family, In the Time of Our History is also laced with the richness of ancient and modern Persian culture and politics, in a tale that is both timeless and profoundly relevant. "Luminous." - Publishers Weekly "A sprawling story of loss and healing in the immigrant experiences of an Iranian American family... This vibrant story is told in intricate, heartfelt detail." - Foreword Reviews "[An] immersive tale of a first-generation immigrant determined to blaze her own path." - Booklist