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"Tracy K. Smith's poetry is an awakening itself." --Vogue Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith's four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith's signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even--and especially--in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief. Such Color collects the best poems from Smith's award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America's historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred--urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith's place as one of the twenty-first century's most treasured poets.
The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays. "Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores "what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self." When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks' short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman--Tom's brilliant assistant Sooki--with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both. A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer's eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo's children's books (author of the upcoming The Beatryce Prophecy) to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz's Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author's grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark--and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
With unwavering humanity and light-footed humor, this intimate account of the interminable year of 2020 offers commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic, protests for racial justice, the U.S. presidential election, and more, all with a miraculous dose of groundedness in head-spinning times. From the award-winning book critic and best-selling author. "This book is so funny and so true. Charles Finch unpacks a year of plague, fear, shameless venality, and dizzying stupidity with an irrepressible wit and surgically precise cultural observations. I didn't know how badly I needed exactly this. Maybe you do too?" --Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: As California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. The result is What Just Happened. In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: taking long evening walks near his home in L.A., listening to music, and keeping virtual connections with friends across the country as they each experience the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he chronicles one endless year with delightful commentary on current events, and the things that distract him from current events: Murakami's novels, reality television, the Beatles. What Just Happened is a work of empathy and insight, at once of-the-moment and timeless--a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.
By acclaimed Forward Prize winner, novelist, and poet, Kei Miller's linked collection of essays blends memoir and literary commentary to explore the silences that exist in our conversations about race, sex, and gender. In a deeply moving, critical and lyrical collection of interconnected essays, award-winning writer Kei Miller explores the silences in which so many important things are kept. Miller examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it -- "to risk words, to risk truth; and through the body and the histories those bodies inherit" the crimes that haunt them, and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice from a black, male, queer perspective. An almost disarmingly personal collection, Kei dissects his experiences in Jamaica and Britain, working as an artist and intellectual, making friends and lovers, discovering the possibilities of music and dance, literary criticism, culture, andstorytelling. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels,Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of innovation and beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why, "our actions, defense mechanisms, imaginations and interactions" and those of the world around us.
A vibrant collection of sharp and essential modern pieces on the perennially controversial Lolita, by a wide range of celebrated writers, edited by the daughter of Lolita's original publisher. A vibrant collection of sharp and essential modern pieces on Vladimir Nabokov's perennially provocative book-with original contributions from a stellar cast of prominent twenty-first century writers. In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was published in the United States to immediate controversy and bestsellerdom. More than sixty years later, this phenomenal novel generates as much buzz as it did when originally published. Central to countless issues at the forefront of our national discourse-art and politics, race and whiteness, gender and power, sexual trauma-Lolita lives on, in an afterlife as blinding as a supernova. Lolita in the Afterlife is edited by the daughter of Lolita's original publisher in America. WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY Robin Givhan. Aleksandar Hemon. Jim Shepard. Emily Mortimer. Laura Lippman. Erika L. Sanchez. Sarah Weinman. Andre Dubus III. Mary Gaitskill. Zainab Salbi. Christina Baker Kline. Ian Frazier. Cheryl Strayed. Sloane Crosley. Victor LaValle. Jill Kargman. Lila Azam Zanganeh. Roxane Gay. Claire Dederer. Jessica Shattuck. Stacy Schiff. Susan Choi. Kate Elizabeth Russell. Tom Bissell. Kira Von Eichel. Bindu Bansinath. Dani Shapiro. Alexander Chee. Lauren Groff. Morgan Jerkins
"[A] glorious mash-up of memoir, love note, and cookbook. . . Every sentence is as sensuous as the first bite into a cold, juicy plum."--Hillary Kelly,Vulture "[A] dazzling, thorny new essay collection."--Samin Nosrat,The New York Times Inspired by twenty-six fruits, the essayist, poet, and pie lady Kate Lebo expertly blends natural, culinary, medical, and personal history. A is for aronia, berry member of the apple family, clothes-stainer, superfruit with reputed healing power.D is for durian, endowed with a dramatic rind and a shifting odor--peaches, old garlic.M is for medlar, name-checked by Shakespeare for its crude shape, beloved by gardeners for its flowers.Q is for quince, which, when fresh, gives off the scent of "roses and citrus and rich women's perfume," but if eaten raw is so astringent it wicks the juice from one's mouth. In a work of unique invention, these and other difficult fruits serve as the central ingredients of twenty-six lyrical essays (with recipes). What makes a fruit difficult? Its cultivation, its harvest, its preparation, the brevity of its moment for ripeness, its tendency toward rot or poison, the way it might overrun your garden. Here, these fruits will take you on unexpected turns and give sideways insights into relationships, self-care, land stewardship, medical and botanical history, andso much more. What if the primary way you show love is through baking, but your partner suffers from celiac disease? Why leave in the pits for Willa Cather's plum jam? How can we rely on bodies as fragile as the fruits that nourish them? Kate Lebo's unquenchable curiosity promises adventure: intimate, sensuous, ranging, bitter, challenging, rotten, ripe. After readingThe Book of Difficult Fruit, you will never think of sweetness the same way again.
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.
The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
The Instant New York Times Bestseller From Andy Cohen, the New York Times bestselling author and host of Watch What Happens Live comes an inspiring collection of daily quotes from the larger-than-life women that defined his life, offering inspiration, affirmation, and (just enough) intoxication to make any day shine bright - the perfect gift for the holidays! Andy Cohen has made a career, and a life, out of making the ordinary extraordinary. The inspiration for this fabulous view of the world has always come from the incredible women (from his mother to Madonna) he loves. In Glitter Every Day Andy shares his most needed words of wisdom from his favorite icons for every day, just in time to kick off the new year! Andy not only gathers 365 sayings and quotes from the icons, thought leaders, Real Housewives and legendary celebs that fuel his fun, he writes about the people and experiences that have made him live one of the most joyous lives that any little boy growing up in St. Louis could dream of so that you can, too. And like Andy himself, Glitter Every Day is irresistible, infusing your day with a laugh, a pep talk and a shot(ski) of fun. So pour a drink, put on your heels, and always remember to let yourself shine.
*National Bestseller* New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers--the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote's ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his "swans." "There are certain women," Truman Capote wrote, "who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich." Barbara "Babe" Paley, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Slim Hayward, Pamela Churchill, C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy's sister)--they were the toast of midcentury New York, each beautiful and distinguished in her own way. Capote befriended them, received their deepest confidences, and ingratiated himself into their lives. Then, in one fell swoop, he betrayed them in the most surprising and startling way possible. Bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer delves into the years following the acclaimed publication of Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1958 and In Cold Blood in 1966, when Capote struggled with a crippling case of writer's block. While enjoying all the fruits of his success, he was struck with an idea for what he was sure would be his most celebrated novel...one based on the remarkable, racy lives of his very, very rich friends. For years, Capote attempted to write Answered Prayers, what he believed would have been his magnum opus. But when he eventually published a few chapters in Esquire, the thinly fictionalized lives (and scandals) of his closest female confidantes were laid bare for all to see, and he was banished from their high-society world forever. Laurence Leamer re-creates the lives of these fascinating swans, their friendships with Capote and one another, and the doomed quest to write what could have been one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
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
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.
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.
Explores the vulnerable ways we articulate and reckon with fear: fear of intergenerational trauma and the silent, hidden histories of families. What does it mean to grow up in a take-out restaurant, surrounded by food, just a generation after the Great Leap Forward famine in 1958-62? Full of elegy and resilient joy, these poems speak across generations of survival.
Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, New York Times Book Review), poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch now turns to the story of modern Jewish literature. From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the creation of Israel, the twentieth century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writing: the novels, plays, poems, and memoirs of Jewish writers provided intimate access to new worlds of experience. Kirsch surveys four themes that shaped the twentieth century in Jewish literature and culture: Europe, America, Israel, and the endeavor to reimagine Judaism as a modern faith. With discussions of major books by over thirty writers?ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Elie Wiesel to Tony Kushner, Hannah Arendt to Judith Plaskow?he argues that literature offers a new way to think about what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. With a wide scope and diverse, original observations, Kirsch draws fascinating parallels between familiar writers and their less familiar counterparts. While everyone knows the diary of Anne Frank, for example, few outside of Israel have read the diary of Hannah Senesh. Kirsch sheds new light on the literature of the Holocaust through the work of Primo Levi, explores the emergence of America as a Jewish home through the stories of Bernard Malamud, and shows how Yehuda Amichai captured the paradoxes of Israeli identity. An insightful and engaging work from "one of America's finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal), The Blessing and the Curse brings the Jewish experience vividly to life.
"An outstanding showcase of contemporary Latinx authors exploring identity through the conventions of sci-fi, fantasy, and magical realism. Themes of family, migration, and community resonate throughout these 38 masterful stories. ... This is a knockout." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) In a tantalizing array of new works from some of the most exciting Latinx creators working in the speculative vein today, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers extends the project begun with a previous anthology, Latinx Rising (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), to showcase a new generation of writers. Spanning diverse forms, settings, perspectives, and styles, but unified by their drive to imagine new Latinx futures, these stories address the breadth of contemporary Latinx experiences and identities while exuberantly embracing the genre's ability to entertain and surprise. With new work for new audiences in their teens and up, and especially for Latinx people navigating their identities in the ever-shifting, sometimes perilous, but always promising cultural landscape of the US, this book is for dreamers--and DREAMers--everywhere. Contributors: Grisel Y. Acosta, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Frederick Luis Aldama, William Alexander, Nicholas Belardes, Louangie Bou-Montes, Lisa M. Bradley, Eliana Buenrostro, Diana Burbano, Pedro Cabiya, Steve Castro, Fernando de Peña, Scott Russell Duncan, Samy Figaredo, Tammy Melody Gomez, J. M. Guzman, Ernest Hogan, Pedro Iniguez, Ezzy G. Languzzi, Patrick Lugo, Roxanne Ocasio, Daniel Parada, Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, Reyes Ramirez, Julia Rios, Sara Daniele Rivera, Roman Sanchez, Tabitha Sin, Alex Temblador, Rodrigo Vargas, Laura Villareal, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
A stunning new collection of essays from the award-winning author of Happiness, The Window Seat explores border crossings both literal and philosophical, our relationship with the natural world, and the stories that we tell ourselves. Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. In this elegantly rendered and wide-ranging collection of new and previously published essays, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world. Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, "The Window Seat," she reveals the unexpected enchantments of commercial air travel. In "Obama and the Renaissance Generation," she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama's exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In "The Last Vet," time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society's treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In "Crossroads," she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in "Power Walking" she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman's body and in "The Watch" she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over. Deeply meditative and written with a wry humor, The Window Seat confirms that Forna is a vital voice in international letters.
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.
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.
On the heels of his much-lauded debut collection, Raymond Antrobus continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory in All The Names Given, while simultaneously breaking new ground in both form and content. The collection opens with poems about the author's surname--one that shouldn't have survived into modernity--and examines the rich and fraught history carried within it. As Antrobus outlines a childhood caught between intimacy and brutality, sound and silence, and conflicting racial and cultural identities, the poem becomes a space in which the poet reckons with his own ancestry, and bears witness to the indelible violence of the legacy wrought by colonialism. The poems travel through space--shifting fluidly between England, South Africa, Jamaica, and the American South--and brilliantly move from an examination of family history into the wandering lust of adolescence and finally, vividly, into a complex array of marriage poems--matured, wiser, and more accepting of love's fragility. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, in which the art of writing captions attempts to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems as well as moments inside and outside of them. Formally sophisticated, with a weighty perception and startling directness, All The Names Given is a timely, tender book full of humanity and remembrance from one of the most important young poets of our generation.
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An O, The Oprah Magazine LGBTQ Book "Changing the Literary Landscape" A gorgeously illustrated collection of essays written by today's queer heroes--featuring contributions from Elton John, Tan France, Gus Kenworthy, Paris Lees, Russell Tovey, Munroe Bergdorf, and many others. The Queer Bible is a celebration of LGBTQ+ history and culture, edited by model, performer, and GQ contributing editor Jack Guinness. Our queer heroes write about theirs. In 2016, model and queer activist Jack Guinness decided that the LGBTQ+ community desperately needed to be reminded of its long and glorious history of stardom--and he was spurred to action. The following year, QueerBible.com was born, an online community devoted to celebrating queer heroes, both past and present. "So much queer history is hidden or erased," says Guinness. "The Queer Bible is a home for all those personal stories and histories." In this book, contemporary queer heroes pay homage to those who helped pave their paths. Contributors include Vogue columnist Paris Lees (writing on Edward Enninful), singer and songwriter Elton John (writing on Divine), comedian Mae Martin (writing on Tim Curry), author Joseph Cassara (writing on Pedro Almodóvar), and many others, honoring timeless queer icons such as Susan Sontag, David Bowie, Sylvester, RuPaul, and George Michael through illuminating essays paired with stunning illustrations. The Queer Bible is a powerful and intimate essay collection of gratitude, and an essential, enduring love letter to the queer community. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Now we praise their names.
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.
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.
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.
"[A] glorious mash-up of memoir, love note, and cookbook. . . Every sentence is as sensuous as the first bite into a cold, juicy plum."--Hillary Kelly,Vulture "[A] dazzling, thorny new essay collection."--Samin Nosrat,The New York Times Inspired by twenty-six fruits, the essayist, poet, and pie lady Kate Lebo expertly blends natural, culinary, medical, and personal history.
