Nonfiction

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

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$18.99
The "intimate and expansive" (Time) memoir of "one of the most important artists working in the world today" (Financial Times), telling a remarkable history of China over the last hundred years while also illuminating his artistic process

"Poignant . . . An illuminating through-line emerges in the many parallels Ai traces between his life and his father's."--The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, BookPage, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews

Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation's most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as "Little Siberia," where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist--and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.

Ai Weiwei's sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his life story and that of his father, whose creativity was stifled.

At once ambitious and intimate, Ai Weiwei's 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780553419481
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12 Birds to Save Your Life: Nature's Lessons in Happiness

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$19.95
Discover the healing power of nature through the stories of these characterful birds, whose song is never far away . . .

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE

'A lyrical and life-affirming book that teaches us as much about birds as it does ourselves - a balm for the soul' Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path

'Totally absorbing and completely engaging on so many levels . . . Charlie has opened my eyes to the constant joy of the sights and sounds of the birds that surround us. It is a book that really will save lives' Dr Richard Shepherd, author of Unnatural Causes
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After the tragic loss of his mother, Charlie Corbett felt trapped by his pain. Having lost all hope and perspective he took to the countryside in search of solace. There, he heard the soaring, cascading song of the skylark - a sound that pulled him from the depths of despair and into the calm of the natural world.

Weaving his journey through grief with a remarkable portrait of the birds living right on our doorstep, 12 Birds to Save Your Life is an invitation to stop, step outside, and listen.

By following Charlie's path, opening your eyes and ears to what has been there all along, you will discover how nature can set you free.

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9781405949217
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Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression

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$28.00
A literary sensation in Brazil, Luiz Schwarcz's brave and tender memoir interrogates his ordeal of bipolar disorder in the context of a family story of murder, dispossession, and silence--the long echo of the Holocaust across generations

When Luiz Schwarcz was a child, he was told little about his grandfather and namesake, Láios--"Luiz" in Hungarian. Only later in life did he learn that his grandfather, a devout Hungarian Jew, had defied his country's Nazi occupiers by holding secret religious services in his home. After being put on a train to a German death camp with his son André, Láios ordered André to leap from the train to freedom at a rail crossing, while Láios himself was carried on to his death. What Luiz did know was that his father André, who had emigrated to Brazil, was an unhappy and silent man. Young Luiz assumed responsibility for his parents' comfort, as many children of trauma do, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding: he blossomed into the family prodigy, eventually growing into a groundbreaking literary publisher in São Paulo. He found a home in the family silence--a home that he filled with books and with reading.

But then, at a high point of outward success, Luiz was brought low by a devastating mental breakdown. The Absent Moon is the story of his journey to that point and of his journey back from it, as Luiz learned to forge a more honest relationship with his own mind, with his family, and with their shared past. The culmination of that path is this extraordinary book, which is beautiful, tragic, noble, piercingly honest, and ultimately redemptive--the product of a lifetime's reflection, given powerful literary shape in the refiner's fire by a master storyteller.

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9780593490723
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Ada's Algorithm: How a Twenty-One-Year-Old Launched the Digital Age through the Poetry of Numbers

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$15.95

Ada's Algorithm tells the extraordinary story of Ada Lovelace, who wrote the world's first algorithm over two hundred years ago. Unlike her male contemporaries, she foresaw its immense potential to create the digital age James Essinger argues. Based on exhaustive archival research, this riveting biography beautifully captures the brilliance of her mind. From her turbulent parents Lord and Lady Byron, to leading scientists and world-famous novelists, such as Charles Dickens and Walter Scott, her life was full of fascinating characters. Even so, this inspirational scientist only narrowly escaped oblivion.

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9781783340712
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Against My Father's Will: A Memoir

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$19.99
"A son is a son until he takes a wife. A daughter's a daughter all of her life." When Jane Morgan Barry attends her mother's funeral, she steps through the church doors as a PhD in English Literature, successful businesswoman, wife, and mother. But she's also an outcast long fallen from grace; the troublesome black sheep of the family. Once the head cheerleader at her school, cheering only for the boys, and the apple of her father's eye, adult Jane has morphed into something so hideous and inflammatory it brooks a wave of averted gazes as she walks down the aisle. FEMINIST. AGAINST MY FATHER'S WILL is an intimate, bittersweet account of Jane's fight for equality and against 'eternal daughterhood': a fight that would lead to lawsuits, media attention, a strained relationship with her parents and an act so hurtful it leaves her reeling. It's also the story of Jane discovering that the greatest enemy can exist within, and that even the deepest hurts can be healed by an act of love and grace.
ISBN/SKU: 
9780578567228
0
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Agatha Christie

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$19.95
An informed, engaging and accessible introduction to the Christie phenomenon, examining all her novels and short stories, aupdated to include new material on all recent film, TV and literary adaptations.

Since her debut in 1920 withThe Mysterious Affair At Styles, Agatha Christie has become the chief proponentoftheEnglishvillagemurdermystery.Althoughshecreatedtwoenormouslypopular characters - the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, and the inquisitive elderly spinster and amateur sleuth Miss Jane Marple of St Mary Mead - it is not generally acknowledged that she wrote in many different genres: comic mysteries (Why Didn't They Ask Evans?), atmospheric whodunnits (Murder On The Orient Express), espionage thrillers (N or M?), romances (under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott), plays (The Mousetrap) and poetry. She was never afraid to break the rules either, and provoked a storm of controversy with the unorthodox resolution ofThe Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, now acclaimed as one of the classics of British crime fiction.
Christie wrote complex whodunnits in a clear, readable style, which is why her books are as popular now as they were when she first wrote them. Exemplary film and TV adaptations (Kenneth Branagh, John Malkovich, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet as Poirot; Margaret Rutherford and Joan Hickson as Miss Marple), have also encouraged new readers to search out her work.

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9780857305152
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Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman

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$29.95
A new, fascinating account of the life of Agatha Christie from celebrated literary and cultural historian Lucy Worsley.

"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was."

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness.

So why--despite all the evidence to the contrary--did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?

She was born in 1890 into a world that had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was--truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

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9781639362523
0
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Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy

$32.00
The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022
Booklist, Best Books of 2022

Singer. Actress. Beauty. Spy. During WWII, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France.

Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the highest-paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all "negroes and Jews." Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight, she went from performer to Resistance spy.

In Agent Josephine, bestselling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little-known history of the famous singer's life. During the war years, as a member of the French Nurse paratroopers--a cover for her spying work--Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities and emerged as a formidable spy. In turn, she was a hero of the three countries in whose name she served--the US, France, and Britain.

Drawing on a plethora of new historical material and rigorous research, including previously undisclosed letters and journals, Lewis upends the conventional story of Josephine Baker, explaining why she fully deserves her unique place in the French Panthéon.

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9781541700666
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All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir

$26.00
Winner of the 2022 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature - Named a Best Book of 2022 by Kirkus, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness - Named a Best Book of July by Buzzfeed - A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read - Observer Book of the Week

"The most beautiful prose I've read in years."--Alexander Chee, The Atlantic -

"Rapturous...Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own."--Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review - "Exquisitely written."--Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine

When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis.

All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.

Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and spectres of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty.

Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honours the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt's dauntless footsteps.

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9780593300084
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All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

$18.99

The INSTANT New York Times Bestseller

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award
Winner of the Chautauqua Prize
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award
Finalist for the Plutarch Award

A New York Times Notable Book of 2021
A New York Times BookReview Editors' Choice
A New York Times Critics' Top Pick of 2021

Wall Street Journal 10 Best Books of 2021
Time Magazine 100 Must-Read Books of 2021
Publishers Weekly Top Ten Books of 2021
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A New York Post Best Book of the Year
A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year

Oprah Daily Best New Books of August
A New York Public Library Book of the Week

In this "stunning literary achievement," Donner chronicles the extraordinary life and brutal death of her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during WWII--"a page-turner story of espionage, love and betrayal" (Kai Bird, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography)

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment--a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Her coconspirators circulated through Berlin under the cover of night, slipping the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.

Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now.

Harnack's great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors' testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780316561709
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Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me

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$27.00
A staggering memoir from New York Times-bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier.

As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own.

The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it.

In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780802159786
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American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville

$30.00

Little known in America but venerated as a martyr in Iran, Howard Baskerville was a twenty-two-year-old Christian missionary from South Dakota who traveled to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 for a two-year stint teaching English and preaching the gospel. He arrived in the midst of a democratic revolution--the first of its kind in the Middle East--led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country into a fully self-determining, constitutional monarchy, one with free elections and an independent parliament.

The Persian students Baskerville educated in English in turn educated him about their struggle for democracy, ultimately inspiring him to leave his teaching post and join them in their fight against a tyrannical shah and his British and Russian backers. "The only difference between me and these people is the place of my birth," Baskerville declared, "and that is not a big difference."

In 1909, Baskerville was killed in battle alongside his students, but his martyrdom spurred on the revolutionaries who succeeded in removing the shah from power, signing a new constitution, and rebuilding parliament in Tehran. To this day, Baskerville's tomb in the city of Tabriz remains a place of pilgrimage. Every year, thousands of Iranians visit his grave to honor the American who gave his life for Iran.

In this rip-roaring tale of his life and death, Aslan gives us a powerful parable about the universal ideals of democracy--and to what degree Americans are willing to support those ideals in a foreign land. Woven throughout is an essential history of the nation we now know as Iran--frequently demonized and misunderstood in the West. Indeed, Baskerville's life and death represent a "road not taken" in Iran. Baskerville's story, like his life, is at the center of a whirlwind in which Americans must ask themselves: How seriously do we take our ideals of constitutional democracy and whose freedom do we support?

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9781324004479
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An Indelible Journey

$18.00
Tells the story of Ankie Foell, born of Dutch parents in a small Sumatran village in the former Dutch East Indies. She takes us through a childhood in the tropics, interrupted by three and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp, followed by a challenging transition and adolescence in the Netherlands, with another painful separation from her parents. Never feeling completely at home in the Netherlands, she emigrated to the United States, where she found her niche and career as a concert pianist and pedagogue and the opportunity to live and perform throughout the world, even in her birth country, now known as Indonesia. Woven through this story is Ankie's reflection and introspective analysis of how her life and identity have been influenced by her many journeys through Europe, Asia and North America, and particularly her childhood in the tropics.
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9780578894362
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Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend

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$16.99
Anna May Wong remains one of Hollywood's best-known Chinese American actors.

Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong starred in over fifty movies, sharing billing with stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Ramon Novarro, and Warner Oland. Her life, though, is the prototypical story of an immigrant's difficult path through the prejudices of American culture.

Born in Los Angeles in 1905, she was the second daughter of seven children born to a laundryman and his wife. Childhood experience fueled her fascination with Hollywood. By 1919 she secured a small part in her first film, The Red Lantern, and she continued to act up until her death. Her most famous film roles were in The Toll of the Sea, Peter Pan, The Thief of Baghdad, Old San Francisco, and Shanghai Express.

But discrimination against Asiana, in both in the film industry and society, was commonplace, and when it came time to make a film version of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, she was passed over for the Chinese female lead role, which was ultimately given to the white actor Luise Rainer.

In a narrative that recalls the pathos of life in Los Angeles's Chinese neighborhoods and the glamour of Hollywood's pleasure palaces, Graham Russell Gao Hodges recovers the life of a Hollywood legend.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781641608831
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Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us

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$20.00

"An eye-opening and enchanting book by one of our major scientist-explorers." --Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wife

Nicknamed the "Real-Life Lorax" by National Geographic, the biologist, botanist, and conservationist Meg Lowman--aka "CanopyMeg"--takes us on an adventure into the "eighth continent" of the world's treetops, along her journey as a tree scientist, and into climate action

Welcome to the eighth continent!

As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn't monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees.

Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world's foremost arbornauts, known as the "real-life Lorax." She planned one of the first treetop walkways and helps create more of these bridges through the eighth continent all over the world.

With a voice as infectious in its enthusiasm as it is practical in its optimism, The Arbornaut chronicles Lowman's irresistible story. From climbing solo hundreds of feet into the air in Australia's rainforests to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States, from searching the redwoods of the Pacific coast for new life to studying leaf eaters in Scotland's Highlands, from conducting a BioBlitz in Malaysia to conservation planning in India and collaborating with priests to save Ethiopia's last forests, Lowman launches us into the life and work of a field scientist, ecologist, and conservationist. She offers hope, specific plans, and recommendations for action; despite devastation across the world, through trees, we can still make an immediate and lasting impact against climate change.

A blend of memoir and fieldwork account, The Arbornaut gives us the chance to live among scientists and travel the world--even in a hot-air balloon! It is the engrossing, uplifting story of a nerdy tree climber--the only girl at the science fair--who becomes a giant inspiration, a groundbreaking, ground-defying field biologist, and a hero for trees everywhere.

Includes black-and-white illustrations

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9781250849182
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Asylum: A Memoir & Manifesto

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$26.99
A "moving...dramatic" (David Ebershoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Danish Girl), and urgent call to action for immigration justice by a Nigerian asylee and global gay rights and immigration activist Edafe Okporo.

On the eve of Edafe Okporo's twenty-sixth birthday, he was awoken by a violent mob outside his window in Abuja, Nigeria. The mob threatened his life after discovering the secret Edafe had been hiding for years--that he is a gay man. Left with no other choice, he purchased a one-way plane ticket to New York City and fled for his life. Though America had always been painted to him as a land of freedom and opportunity, it was anything but when he arrived just days before the tumultuous 2016 Presidential Election.

Edafe would go on to spend the next six months at an immigration detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. After navigating the confusing, often draconian, US immigration and legal system, he was finally granted asylum. But he would soon realize that America is exceptionally good at keeping people locked up but is seriously lacking in integrating freed refugees into society.

Asylum is Edafe's "powerful, eye-opening" (Dr. Eric Cervini, New York Times bestselling author of The Deviant's War) memoir and manifesto, which documents his experiences growing up gay in Nigeria, fleeing to America, navigating the immigration system, and making a life for himself as a Black, gay immigrant. Alongside his personal story is a blaring call to action--not only for immigration reform but for a just immigration system for refugees everywhere. This book imagines a future where immigrants and asylees are treated with fairness, transparency, and compassion. It aims to help us understand that home is not just where you feel safe and welcome but also how you can make it feel safe and welcome for others.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781982183745
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Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir

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$15.00

An eerily dreamlike memoir, and the first work of nonfiction by one of our most inventive novelists.

Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can "try on personae like dresses." She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions--Woolf, Durrell, Bergman--sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, "climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling."

Kathryn Davis's hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings. The preoccupations that mark Davis's fiction are recognizable here--fateful voyages, an intense sense of place, the unexpected union of the magical and the real--but the vehicle itself is utterly new.

Aurelia, Aurélia explodes the conventional bounds of memoir. It is an astonishing accomplishment.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781644450789
0
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Autoportrait

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$20.00
Nominated for the Chicago Review of Books Award

A work of unflinching honesty, Autoportrait is a hypnotic memoir of reflection, loss, and everyday joy from one of America's best contemporary novelists

Jesse Ball has produced fourteen acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers readers his first memoir, one that showcases his "humane curiosity" (James Wood) and invites the reader into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Levé put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant young authors.

The subtle power of Ball's voice conjures the richness of everyday life. On each page, half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs--and the mistakes and humiliations, too--that somehow tell us who we are, why we are here. Held at the same height as tragic accounts of illness or death are moments of startling beauty, banality, or humor: I wake in the morning, I sit, I walk long distances. If there is somewhere to swim, I may swim. If I have a bicycle, I will ride it, especially to meet someone. There is no more preparing for me to do, other than preparing for death, and I do that by laughing. Not laughing at death, of course. Laughing at myself.

An extraordinary memoir that reminds us what is possible and builds to the kind of power one might feel reading Anne Carson's Glass Essay, or Joe Brainard's I Remember. Autoportrait will leave you feeling utterly invigorated, inspired, and a little afraid.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781646221387
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B.F.F.: A Memoir of Friendship Lost and Found

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$28.00
From the author of Group, a New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club Pick, comes a moving, heartwarming, and powerful memoir about Christie Tate's lifelong struggle to sustain female friendship, and the friend who helps her find the human connection she seeks.

After more than a decade of dead-end dates and dysfunctional relationships, Christie Tate has reclaimed her voice and settled down. Her days of agonizing in group therapy over guys who won't commit are over, the grueling emotional work required to attach to another person tucked neatly into the past.

Or so she thought. Weeks after giddily sharing stories of her new boyfriend at Saturday morning recovery meetings, Christie receives a gift from a friend. Meredith, twenty years older and always impeccably accessorized, gives Christie a box of holiday-themed scarves as well as a gentle suggestion: maybe now is the perfect time to examine why friendships give her trouble. "The work never ends, right?" she says with a wink.

Christie isn't so sure, but she soon realizes that the feeling of "apartness" that has plagued her since childhood isn't magically going away now that she's in a healthy romantic relationship. With Meredith by her side, she embarks on a brutally honest exploration of her friendships past and present, sorting through the ways that debilitating shame and jealousy have kept the lasting bonds she craves out of reach--and how she can overcome a history of letting go too soon. But when Meredith becomes ill and Christie's baggage threatens to muddy their final days, she's forced to face her deepest fears in honor of the woman who finally showed her how to be a friend.

Poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, and emotionally satisfying, B.F.F. explores what happens when we finally break the habits that impair our ability to connect with others, and the ways that one life--however messy and imperfect--can change another.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781668009420
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Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist

$24.99

"Sesali Bowen is poised to give Black feminism the rejuvenation it needs. Her trendsetting writing and commentary reaches across experiences and beyond respectability. I and so many Black girls still figuring out who they are in this world will gain so much from whatever she has to say."--Charlene A. Carruthers, activist and author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

"Sesali perfectly vocalizes the inner dialogue, and daily mantras needed to be a Bad Bitch."--Gabourey Sidibe, actor, director, and author of This is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare

"A powerful call for a more inclusive and 'real' feminism."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Bowen writes from an authentic space for Black women who are often left out of feminist conversations due to respectability politics, but who are just as deserving of the same voice and liberation."--Booklist (starred review)

From funny and fearless entertainment journalist Sesali Bowen, Bad Fat Black Girl combines rule-breaking feminist theory, witty and insightful personal memoir, and cutting cultural analysis for an unforgettable, genre-defining debut.

Growing up on the south side of Chicago, Sesali Bowen learned early on how to hustle, stay on her toes, and champion other Black women and femmes as she navigated Blackness, queerness, fatness, friendship, poverty, sex work, and self-love.

Her love of trap music led her to the top of hip-hop journalism, profiling game-changing artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Janelle Monae.But despite all the beauty, complexity, and general badassery she saw, Bowen found none of that nuance represented in mainstream feminism. Thus, she coined Trap Feminism, a contemporary framework that interrogates where feminism meets today's hip-hop.

Bad Fat Black Girl offers a new, inclusive feminism for the modern world. Weaving together searing personal essay and cultural commentary, Bowen interrogates sexism, fatphobia, and capitalism all within the context of race and hip-hop. In the process, she continues a Black feminist legacy of unmatched sheer determination and creative resilience.

Bad bitches: this one's for you.

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9780063028708
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Bad Vibes Only: (and Other Things I Bring to the Table)

$27.00
NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking--called "a gift" by The New York Times--a raw and humorous essay collection in the spirit of Jenny Lawson and Samantha Irby.

Nora McInerny does not dance like no one is watching. In fact, she dances like everyone is watching, which is to say, she does not dance at all. A bestselling author and host of the beloved podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking, she has captured the hearts of millions with her disarming and earnest approach to discussing grief and loss. Now, with Bad Vibes Only, she turns her eye on our aggressively, oppressively optimistic culture, our obsession with self-improvement, and what it really means to live authentically in the online age.

In essays that revisit her cringey past and anticipate her rapidly approaching, early middle-aged future, McInerny lays bare her own chaos, inviting us to drop the façade of perfection and embrace the truth: that we are all--at best--slightly unhinged. Socrates claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Bad Vibes Only is for people who have taken that dictum a bit too far--the overthinkers, the analyzers, the recovering Girl Bosses, and the burned-out personal brand--reminding us that a life worth living is about more than just "good vibes."

ISBN/SKU: 
9781982186715
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Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life

$17.99

"An intimate look at the making of a man, an actor, an advocate--and most importantly--a happy human being. A wonderful book that is funny, honest, fearless, and generous in its vulnerability." --Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain

There is absolutely no logical reason why I am here. The life trajectory my nationality and class and circumstances portended for me was not even remotely close to the one I now navigate. But logic is a science and living is an art.

The release I felt in writing my first memoir, Not My Father's Son, was matched only by how my speaking out empowered so many to engage with their own trauma. I was reminded of the power of my words and the absolute duty of authenticity.

But...

No one ever fully recovers from their past. There is no cure for it. You just learn to manage and prioritize it. I believe the second you feel you have triumphed or overcome something - an abuse, an injury to the body or the mind, an addiction, a character flaw, a habit, a person - you have merely decided to stop being vigilant and embraced denial as your modus operandi. And that is what this book is about, and for: to remind you not to buy in to the Hollywood ending.

Ironically maybe, much of Baggage chronicles my life in Hollywood and how, since I recovered from a nervous breakdown at 28, work has repeatedly whisked me away from personal calamities to sets and stages around the world. It is also about marriage(s): starting with the break-up of my first (to a woman) and ending with the ascension to my second (to a man) with many kissed toads in between! But in everything, each failed relationship or encounter with a legend (Liza! X Men! Gore Vidal! Kubrick! Spice Girls!), in every bad decision or moment of sensual joy I have endeavored to show what I have learned and how I've become who I am today: a happy, flawed, vulnerable, fearless middle-aged man, with a lot of baggage.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780062435798
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Ballad of Tommy LiPuma

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$24.95

Captures seven hit-making decades during the American recording industry's glittering, freewheeling years.

Tommy LiPuma was one of America's most successful record producers whose work with seminal artists like Miles Davis, Diana Krall, Barbra Streisand, Rickie Lee Jones, George Benson, and Willie Nelson went on to sell over seventy-five million records. It is also a picaresque journey that opens with the murder of a man on a dirt path in Sicily and concludes with five trips up the Grammy red carpet. The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma is real-life Horatio Alger adventure storied with bootleggers, gangsters, artists, hipsters, set in a revolutionary time in music history that changed popular culture around the world. Finally, it's a deeply personal account of how music saved one man's life, and how he went on to affect the lives of millions of others.

"Tommy was my best friend, my creative partner, my mentor, my confidant, and my producer for twenty-four years. As time goes on, I realize just how special he was."--Diana Krall

"Tommy was a fantastic producer. He always had a great sense of humour . . . he would sit in the studio with us musicians and make every session a complete joy."--Paul McCartney

"Tommy was always looking for ways to bring authentic jazz and blues to a larger audience."--Donald Fagen

"He leaves a great legacy of great music that's going to stand the test of time . . . . I miss him every day."--Al Schmitt

"Tommy was a great producer and a real friend."--Willie Nelson

I don't think that it's been noticed enough what he's done. He's been the most successfulperson, commercially, in the history of jazz."--Randy Newman

ISBN/SKU: 
9780578556604
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Be My Baby: A Memoir

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$27.99

"Do I have to tell you that Ronnie's got one of the greatest female rock-and-roll voices of all time? She stands alone."
--Keith Richards

Be My Baby is the behind-the-scenes story--newly updated, and with an especially timely message--of how the original bad girl of rock and roll, Ronnie Spector, survived marriage to a monster and carved out a space for herself amid the chaos of the 1960s music scene and beyond.

Ronnie's first collaboration with producer Phil Spector, "Be My Baby," shot Ronnie and the Ronettes to stardom. No one sounded like Ronnie, with her alluring blend of innocence and knowing, but her voice would soon be silenced as Spector sequestered her behind electric gates, guard dogs, and barbed wire.

It took everything Ronnie had to escape her prisonlike marriage and wrest back control of her life, her music, and her legacy. And as shown in this edition, which includes a 2021 postscript from Ronnie, her life became proof that our challenges do not define us and there is always the potential to forge a fuller life.

In Be My Baby, the incomparable Ronnie Spector offered a whirlwind account of the ever-shifting path of an iconic artist. And, more than anything else, she gave us an inspiring tale of triumph.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781250837196
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Beatle Who Vanished

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$19.95
HOW COULD DRUMMER JIMMIE NICOL SIMPLY VANISH AFTER PLAYING WITH THE BEATLES IN 1964? The Beatle Who Vanished is the first historical account of Jimmie Nicol, an unknown drummer whose journey from humble beginnings to saving The Beatles' first world tour was only one part of his legend. Though his 13 days of fame made headlines, the true mystery of Nicol's story is riddled with blacklisting, betrayal, drugs, divorce, bankruptcy and an eventual disappearance that led many to question whether he is dead or alive. Discover the incredible details of a Beatles story never before revealed! *Draws on new documentary evidence *Interviews with The Beatles, Nicol and eyewitnesses *Inner circle tour accounts of Nicol and The Beatles *Uncovers the secrets behind his post-Beatles career and disappearance *Over 100 rare archival photographs and memorabilia illustrations * Features a Foreword by Former Beatles Bass Player, Chas Newby
ISBN/SKU: 
9781494223991
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