Search results for ""Farrar Straus and Giroux""

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia-and sought to transform their lives.How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black?These questions animate Aaron Robertson's exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit-the city where he was born, and where one of the country's most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its member

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From the Pulitzer Prize winner Eliza Griswold, Circle of Hope is an intimate portrait of a church, its radical mission, and its riveting crisis. The revolution I wanted to be part of was in the church. Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for-and finding-more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such radical outpost of Jesus followers dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia's Circle of Hope grew for forty years, planted four congregations, and then found itself in crisis.The story that follows is an American allegory full of questions with urgent relevance for so many of us, not just the faithful: How do we commit to one another and our bet

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The essential coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. Kincaid''s novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie''s voiceurgent, demanding to be heardis one that will not soon be forgotten by readers.An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence, who is the very center of the little girl''s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother''s benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, It was in such a paradise that I lived. When she turns twelve, however, Annie''s life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing

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A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could give the dead a voice, make them sing (Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city's queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draw

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The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion yearsmost of our planet's history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organismsbacteria, animals, plants, and the restdone in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another sidewhen we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results

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Rowan Ricardo Phillips's fourth collection is a book as lustrous as the metal of its title. This beautiful, slender collectionsmall and weighted like a coinis Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. Not the meaning, Phillips writes, but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza rima, rhyme royal, translation, rap), Silver reimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end, Silver is a collection that reflects Phillips's guiding principlepart physics, part faith, part voidthat all is reflected in poetry and poetry is reflected in all.This is work that brings into acute focus the singular and glorious power of po

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