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"This memoir's beauty is in its fierce intimacy." --Roy Hoffman, The New York Times Book ReviewOne of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2019From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother's decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora.Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation. As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother's journey-from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer's-she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother's memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a U.S. Mexican diaspora, its indigenous origins, and an American story of cultural loss.Poetically wrought and filled with insight into intergenerational trauma, Native Country of the Heart is a reckoning with white American history and a piercing love letter from a fearless daughter to the mother she will never lose.

A New York Times bestsellerThe definitive account of the infectious diseases threatening humanity by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Laurie Garrett"Prodigiously researched . . . A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesAfter decades spent assuming that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent, people on all continents now find themselves besieged by AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, cholera that defies chlorine water treatment, and exotic viruses that can kill in a matter of hours. Relying on extensive interviews with leading experts in virology, molecular biology, disease ecology, and medicine, as well as field research in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, Central America, and the United States, Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague takes readers from the savannas of eastern Bolivia to the rain forests of the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo on a harrowing, fifty year journey through the history of our battles with microbes. This book is a work of investigative reportage like no other and a wake-up call to a world that has become complacent in the face of infectious disease-one that offers a sobering and prescient warning about the dangers of ignoring the coming plague.

"Beyond the Sea is frightening but beautiful." --M John Harrison, The GuardianThe haunting story of two men stranded at sea pushing against their physical and mental limits to stay aliveBased partly on true events, Paul Lynch's haunting and sublime novel Beyond the Sea tells the story of two South American fishermen, Bolivar and Hector, who go to sea before a catastrophic storm. Needing cash, Bolivar convinces his boss to let him fish despite the weather. His fishing partner is nowhere to be found, so he brings Hector, a sullen and inexperienced teenager. The storm arrives, and though the two men survive, they've been blown hundreds of miles out in the Pacific Ocean with little hope for rescue. Coming to terms with their new reality, they are forced to accept their separation from the modern world, their sudden and inescapable intimacy, and the possibilities and limits of faith, hope, and survival. As the days go by, they grapple with the mistakes of their pasts, the severity of their present, and the uncertainty of their future. And though Bolivar and Hector fight to maintain their will to live, nothing in the barren seascape or in their minds promises that they will make it. Ambitious and profoundly moving, Beyond the Sea explores what it means to be a man, a friend, and a sinner in a fallen world. With evocative prose, Lynch crafts a suspenseful drama that refuses sentimentality or easy answers. Instead, Beyond the Sea is a hard-won and intimate rendering of the extremities of human life, both physical and mental.

Winner of the 2008 AWP Award for the NovelFrom 1941 to 1947, eighteen thousand Italian prisoners of war were sent to Australia. The Italian surrender that followed the downfall of Mussolini had created a novel circumstance: prisoners who theoretically were no longer enemies. Many of these exiles were sent to work on isolated farms, unguarded.The Paperbark Shoe is the unforgettable story of Gin Boyle-an albino, a classically trained pianist, and a woman with a painful past. Disavowed by her wealthy stepfather, her unlikely savior is the farmer Mr. Toad-a little man with a taste for women's corsets. Together with their two children, they weather the hardship of rural life and the mockery of their neighbors. But with the arrival of two Italian prisoners of war, their lives are turned upside down. Thousands of miles from home, Antonio and John find themselves on Mr. and Mrs. Toad's farm, exiles in the company of exiles. The Paperbark Shoe is a remarkable novel about the far-reaching repercussions of war, the subtle violence of displacement, and what it means to live as a captive-in enemy country, and in one's own skin.

"One of our most interesting and bold writers . . . [offers] a characteristically wild effort that defies genre distinctions, flits from the profound to the mundane with fierce intelligence and searching restlessness, and at its best, delves deep into the recesses of the human heart with courageous abandon . . . An intoxicating blend of humor and pathos." -Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe "Eerie, profound, and daring, this is a book only the inimitable Hunt could write."-Adrienne Westenfeld, EsquireFrom Samantha Hunt, the award-winning author of The Dark Dark, comes The Unwritten Book, her first work of nonfiction, a genre-bending creation that explores the importance of books, the idea of haunting, and messages from beyond I carry each book I've ever read with me, just as I carry my dead-those things that aren't really there, those things that shape everything I am. A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt's The Unwritten Book explores ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting, in the broadest sense of each. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying. Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we'll never have time to read or write. Hunt, like a mad crossword puzzler, looks for patterns and clues. Through literary criticism, history, family history, and memoir, inspired by W. G. Sebald, James Joyce, Ali Smith, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and many others, Hunt explores motherhood, hoarding, legacies of addiction, grief, how we insulate ourselves from the past, how we misinterpret the world. Nestled within her inquiry is a very special ghost book, an incomplete manuscript about people who can fly without wings, written by her father and found in his desk just days after he died. What secret messages might his work reveal? What wisdom might she distill from its unfinished pages? Hunt conveys a vivid and grateful life, one that comes from living closer to the dead and shedding fear for wonder. The Unwritten Book revels in the randomness, connectivity, and magic of everyday existence. And at its heart is the immense weight of love.

Winner of the Medical Journalists' Association's Tony Thistlethwaite AwardA Finalist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science BooksRecipient of the International OCD Foundation's Illumination AwardAn intimate look at the power of intrusive thoughts, how our brains can turn against us, and living with obsessive compulsive disorderWhat might lead a schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece, or a man to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that he and his brother have compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts?David Adam-an editor at Nature and an accomplished science writer-has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn't Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. In this riveting and intimate blend of science, history, and memoir, Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind and explains how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion. Told with fierce clarity, humor, and urgent lyricism, The Man Who Couldn't Stop is a haunting story of a personal nightmare that shines a light into the darkest corners of our minds.

Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, the founders of the exciting new discipline of neuromagic, have convinced some of the world's greatest magicians to allow scientists to study their techniques for tricking the brain. The implications of neuromagic go beyond illuminating our behavior; early research points to new approaches for everything from the diagnosis of autism to marketing techniques and education. Fun and accessible, Sleights of Mind is "a tour through consciousness, attention, and deception via the marriage of professional magic and cognitive neuroscience" (Vanessa Schipani, The Scientist).

A bestselling literary sensation in Brazil, a powerful debut short-story collection about favela life in Rio de JaneiroIn The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins recounts the experiences of boys growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on his childhood and adolescence, Martins uses the rhythms and slang of his neighborhood dialect to capture the texture of life in the slums, where every day is shadowed by a ubiquitous drug culture, the constant threat of the police, and the confines of poverty, violence, and racial oppression. And yet these are also stories of friendship, romance, and momentary relief, as in "Rolézim," where a group of teenagers head to the beach. Other stories, all uncompromising in their realism and yet diverse in narrative form, explore the changes that occur when militarized police occupy the favelas in the lead-up to the World Cup, the cycles of violence in the narcotics trade, and the feelings of invisibility that define the realities of so many in Rio's underclass.The Sun on My Head is a work of great talent and sensitivity, a daring evocation of life in the favelas by a rising star rooted in the community he portrays.

The newest essay collection from the New York Times bestselling author John Waters, reflecting on how to overcome newfound respectability and rebel in the autumn of your years.No one knows more about everything-especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling-than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world's great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste, from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: "Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all."Studded with cameos, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from the author's personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters' most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book-another instant Waters classic.Praise for John Waters"Waters doesn't kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird . . . [Waters] has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent." -Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post"Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America's desolate freeway nodes-though they're brilliantly evoked-but of American fame itself." -Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SIEDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION, THE 2022 LAMBDA LITERARY PRIZE FOR TRANSGENDER FICTION, AND THE 2023 PUBLISHING TRIANGLE EDMUND WHITE AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION"These breathlessly imaginative stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about men and women." -The New York Times Book ReviewMorgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopher.Fear of Black Consciousness is an original and a bold intervention in the cultural and political conversation about systemic racism. Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and antiblackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized blackness, the problems racialization produces, and the many creative responses from black and nonblack communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom.As he skillfully navigates the difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of white narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates. He illuminates the different forms of invisibility that define black life, and he exposes the bad faith at the heart of many discussions about race and racism, not only in North America but also across the globe, including in countries where discussants regard themselves as "colorblind." Gordon reveals that these lies about race and its supposed irrelevance confer upon many white people an inherited sense of being extraordinary. More than being privileged or entitled, they act with a license to do as they please. But for many if not most blacks, living an ordinary life in a white-dominated society is an extraordinary achievement.Informed by Gordon's upbringing in Jamaica and the Bronx, and taking as touchstones the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence, Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking book that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action. It is sure to provoke, challenge, and inspire.

One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May"A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two." -Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street JournalA captivating study of Napoleon's plundering of Europe's art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from VeniceCynthia Saltzman's Plunder recounts the fate of Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of a young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563, the Renaissance picture had been immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had spread the scene across the end wall of the monastery's refectory and filled it with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the biblical banquet was taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once it was pulled from its frame, the canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder, bound for Paris; soon after, artworks commandeered in Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought to the French capital. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution, in the former palace of the French kings.As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon's looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals defining traits of his character: his desire for greatness and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the paintings and sculptures they had seized. Nevertheless, the French resisted sending The Wedding Feast at Cana back to Venice, and the painting remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly opposite the Mona Lisa.Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art-appropriation campaigns in history, shedding light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the world's great museums.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity.In April of 1994, the government of Rwanda called on everyone in the Hutu majority to kill everyone in the Tutsi minority. Over the next three months 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy of the killings in Rwanda, a vivid history of the genocide's background, and an unforgettable account of what it means to survive in its aftermath.

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

Winner of the Nero Wolfe AwardIt is 1921 and Mary Russell--Sherlock Holmes's brilliant apprentice, now an Oxford graduate with a degree in theology--is on the verge of acquiring a sizable inheritance. Independent at last, with a passion for divinity and detective work, her most baffling mystery may now involve Holmes and the burgeoning of a deeper affection between herself and the retired detective. Russell's attentions turn to the New Temple of God and its leader, Margery Childe, a charismatic suffragette and a mystic, whose draw on the young theology scholar is irresistible. But when four bluestockings from the Temple turn up dead shortly after changing their wills, could sins of a capital nature be afoot? Holmes and Russell investigate, as their partnership takes a surprising turn in A Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King.