New Non-Fiction Shelves: 800s - Literature
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Writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers Amber Ruffin writes with her sister Lacey Lamar with humor and heart to share absurd anecdotes about everyday experiences of racism. Now a writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers and host of The Amber Ruffin Show, Amber Ruffin lives in New York, where she is no one's First Black Friend and everyone is, as she puts it, "stark raving normal." But Amber's sister Lacey? She's still living in their home state of Nebraska, and trust us, you'll never believe what happened to Lacey. From racist donut shops to strangers putting their whole hand in her hair, from being mistaken for a prostitute to being mistaken for Harriet Tubman, Lacey is a lightning rod for hilariously ridiculous yet all-too-real anecdotes. She's the perfect mix of polite, beautiful, petite, and Black that apparently makes people think "I can say whatever I want to this woman." And now, Amber and Lacey share these entertainingly horrifying stories through their laugh-out-loud sisterly banter. Painfully relatable or shockingly eye-opening (depending on how often you have personally been followed by security at department stores), this book tackles modern-day racism with the perfect balance of levity and gravity.
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A timely exploration of what Shakespeare's plays reveal about our divided land. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar, James Shapiro, traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare's four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year & National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.
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In this second edition of his popular guidebook, Paul Silvia offers fresh advice to help you overcome barriers to writing and use your time more productively. After addressing some common excuses and bad habits, he provides practical strategies to motivate students, professors, researchers, and other academics to become better and more prolific writers.
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A new book of poetry from internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author Margaret Atwood In Dearly, Margaret Atwood's first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived. While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood's fiction--including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others--she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry. This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.
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Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, "one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature" (The New York Times Magazine), selected by London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers. "She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be." --New Yorker Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books--selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude--have been described as "virtuoso performances," and "small masterpieces." From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated--and mordantly funny.ISBN: 9781526621900Publication Date: 2021-04-20
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A searing and exhilarating new collection from the award-winning author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville, who "honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life" (Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award-winner for The Friend) With Festival Days, Jo Ann Beard brings us nine pieces in which she captures both the small, luminous moments of daily existence and those instants when life and death hang in the balance. An unforgettable collection destined to be embraced and debated by readers and writers, teachers and students.
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves--and our world today. "One of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of a writer that I've ever read."--Parul Sehgal, The New York Times For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, "We're going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn't fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art--namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?" He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.
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Poems of heartbreak and sex, self-care and self-critique, urban adventures and love on the road from the millennial quarantine queen and comedy sensation.
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From a writer celebrated for her "chops, ambition, and killer instinct" (John Powers, Fresh Air), a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. Rachel Kushner has established herself as "the most vital and interesting American novelist working today" (Michael Lindgren, The Millions) and as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times--and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. In nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. These pieces, new and old, are electric, phosphorescently vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers. "Kushner writes with startling detail, imagination, and gallows humor," said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly, and, from Paula McLain in the Wall Street Journal: "The authority and precision of Kushner's writing is impressive, but it's the gorgeous ferocity that will stick with me." "[Kushner] seems to work with a muse and a nail gun, so surprisingly yet forcefully do her sentences pin reality to the page." --Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine "Kushner can really write. Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of Robert Stone and Joan Didion." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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Set mainly in Greenwich Village and Harlem, James Baldwin's 1962 novel, Another Country, is a groundbreaking work of sexual, racial and artistic passions that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality. Award winning author and essayist, Kim McLarin, shares her appreciation of this seminal novel, demonstrating how its myriad themes mirror many of her own life experiences and, by extension, contemporary society.
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A new collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and "America's favorite poet" (The Wall Street Journal) Billy Collins's new collection brings together more than fifty poems and showcases his deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made him one of our country's most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins's reputation as one of America's most interesting and durable poets.
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A literary coming-of-age poetry collection, an ode to the places we call home, and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.
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How Far You Have Come: Musings on Beauty and Courage by How Far You Have Come is an exquisitely illustrated collection of poetry and essays from bestselling artist and writer Morgan Harper Nichols. In the midst of the hurt and the mundane, the questions and the not yets, you can forget just how far you have come. Morgan weaves together personal reflections with her signature poems, encouraging you to reclaim moments of brokenness, division, and pain and re-envision them as experiences of reconciliation, unity, and hope. As Morgan reflects on the moments that shaped her, she invites you to: Awaken your heart and recognize how your own history has made you who you are today Into a deeper understanding of pressing on and pressing in, of transformation and surrender, of meaning in the losses and wild anticipation for the splendor ahead Reclaim moments of brokenness, division, and pain and re-envision them as experiences of reconciliation, unity, and hope Become who you are in the moment you hold right now A Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly bestselling author, Morgan has cultivated a loyal online community, over a million Instagram followers, and an in-person following as she shares her unique message around the country. How Far You Have Come is an excellent gift for college and high school graduations, faith celebrations and anniversaries, life transitions, and birthdays or simply a gift for yourself.ISBN: 9780310456599Publication Date: 2021-04-27
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David Sedaris's best stories and essays, spanning his remarkable career--as selected and read by the author himself. Featuring fresh and classic recordings, including a new essay and an interview exclusive to the audiobook. For more than twenty-five years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. Now, for the first time collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most memorable work. In these stories,
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A vividly rendered and empathetic exploration of how two of the greatest poets of the 20th century--Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton--became bitter rivals and, eventually, friends. Based on in-depth research and unprecedented archival access, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz is a remarkable and unforgettable look at two legendary poets and how their work has turned them into lasting and beloved cultural figures.
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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A memoir in essays about so many things--growing up in an abusive cult, coming of age as a lesbian in the military, forced out by homophobia, living on the margins as a working class woman and what it's like to grow into the person you are meant to be. Hough's writing will break your heart." --Roxane Gay Searing and extremely personal essays, shot through with the darkest elements America can manifest, while discovering light and humor in unexpected corners.
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From the celebrated author of Inward comes a new collection of poetry and short prose focused on understanding how past wounds impact our present relationships. In Clarity & Connection, Yung Pueblo describes how intense emotions accumulate in our subconscious and condition us to act and react in certain ways. In his characteristically spare, poetic style, he guides readers through the excavation and release of the past that's required for growth.
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