Search results for ""farrar straus giroux""

It's almost time for Christmas, and Maria is travelling with her mother and younger brother, Juan, to visit their grandmother on the border of California and Mexico. For the few minutes they can share together along the fence, Maria and her brother plan to exchange stories and Christmas gifts with the grandmother they haven't seen in years. But when Juan's gift is too big to fit through the slats in the fence, Maria has a brilliant idea. She makes it into a kite that soars over the top of the iron bars. Here is a heartwarming tale of multicultural families, and the miracle of love.

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Miriam Makeba, a Grammy Award-winning South African singer, rose to fame in the hearts of her people at the pinnacle of apartheid—a brutal system of segregation similarto American Jim Crow laws. Mama Africa, as they called her, raised her voice to help combat these injustices at jazz clubs in Johannesburg; in exile, at a rally beside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; and before the United Nations. Set defiantly in the present tense, this biography offers readers an intimate view of Makeba's fight for equality. Kathryn Erskine's call-and-response style text and Charly Palmer's bold illustrations come together in a raw, riveting duet of protest song and praise poem. A testament to how a single voice helped to shake up the world - and can continue to do so.

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When a new red tractor named Daisy joins the team at Stony Meadow Farm, she has trouble adjusting to all of the different chores that must be done. She realizes that she has much to learn. Can she do all of the work on her own? Luckily, Tractor Mac and his friends chop, pull, haul, and drag alongside Daisy until she gets the hang of it. With the help of everyone on the farm, Daisy thinks she will fit right in!

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Tractor Mac sees Plane Jane swooping across through the clouds, and he wonders what it would be like to be able to give hayrides in the sky. He even talks to birds to try to learn how they fly. Then one day Tractor Mac is driving downhill too fast, his wheels lift off the ground, and he can finally fly! But when Tractor Mac has a crash landing, he learns that he is better suited to life on the ground.

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Just how many things can "one" be? One box of crayons. One batch of cookies. One world. One family. From veteran picture book author George Shannon and up-and-coming artist Blanca Gomez comes a playful, interactive book that shows how a family can be big or small and comprised of people of a range of genders and races.

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When Putsata Reang was eleven months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending twenty-three days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. Holding what appeared to be a lifeless baby in her arms, Ma resisted the captain's orders to throw her bundle overboard. Instead, on landing, Ma rushed her baby into the arms of American military nurses and doctors, who saved the child's life. "I had hope, just a little, you were still alive," Ma would tell Put in an oft-repeated story that became family legend. Over the years, Put lived to please Ma and make her proud, hustling to repay her life debt by becoming the consummate good Cambodian daughter, working steadfastly by Ma's side in the berry fields each summer and eventually building a successful career as an award-winning journalist. But Put's adoration and efforts are no match for Ma's expectations. When she comes out to Ma in her twenties, it's just a phase. When she fails to bring home a Khmer boyfriend, it's because she's not trying hard enough. When, at the age of forty, Put tells Ma she is finally getting married-to a woman-it breaks their bond in two. In her startling memoir, Reang explores the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial duty. With rare clarity and lyric wisdom, Ma and Me is a stunning, deeply moving memoir about love, debt, and duty.

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The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers. "Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others," Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details, the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling. Taking his firmly imbedded memories-the "shimmering details" that give this work its title-as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings-all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. In order to avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too-moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light. In Shimmering Details, Volume I, Nádas probes the history of his family from the late 19th century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.

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I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg's first story collection since her acclaimed and prizewinning Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and mind like rotten, fragrant fruit. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg's trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Spain, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the thoughts we reveal to no one but ourselves. In "Lizards," a man mutes his wife's anxieties by giving her a La Croix-like seltzer laced with sedatives. In the title story, a woman poses as her more successful sister during a botched Italian holiday, a choice that brings about strange and violent consequences, while in "Karolina," a woman discovers her prickly ex-sister-in-law in the aftermath of an earthquake and is forced to face the truth about her violent brother. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what's left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too close. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of "Slumberland," "that border between magic and annihilation," and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.

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Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war.The Way That Leads Among the Lost reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City's tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico's most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond themthe intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.

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Heir to Mallarmé and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul Valéry was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks. Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 27,000 pages of notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valéry's lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary "exercise of thought," a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject. The Idea of Perfection shows both sides of Valéry: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential poetic works-Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms-with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes with the prose poem "The Angel." Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century.

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Southern Chile was an open frontier when the beloved poet Pablo Neruda was born there in 1904. A motherless, pensive child in the wild, he began writing poems long before quitting the countryside for Santiago, where he spent his bohemian student years. From there, his memoir follows his travels as a globetrotting Chilean consul-including a stint in Spain during its civil war, and in Mexico, where he attracted attention for aiding a man suspected of conspiring to assassinate Leon Trotsky-and his short-lived service as a Chilean senator. Neruda, a communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback over the Andes, then to Europe and Asia. The memoirs conclude shortly after the coup in 1972 that overthrew his close friend Salvador Allende, Chile's first democratically elected president, as Neruda himself battled cancer. Now expanded to include newly discovered material, The Complete Memoirs is the definitive edition of Neruda's classic memoir-a moving, revealing record of his life as a poet, a patriot, and one of the twentieth century's true men of conscience.

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Seventh grader Freya June Sun has always believed in the Chinese superstitions spoon-fed to her since birth - but ever since her dad’s death a year ago, she’s become obsessed, believing that her father is sending her messages through signs from the beyond. Like how, on her way to an orchestra concert where she’s dreading her viola solo, a pair of lucky red birds appear, a sure indication that Dad wants Freya to stick with the instrument and make him proud. Then Freya is partnered with Gus Choi, a goofy and super annoying classmate, for a home economics project. To her surprise, as they experiment with recipes and get to know each other, Freya finds that she loves baking much more than music. It may be time for a big change in her life, even though her dad hasn’t sent a single sign that it’s something he approves of. But with the help of her family, Gus (who might not be so annoying after all), and two maybe-magical birds, Freya learns that to be her own person, she might just have to make her own luck.

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A contemporary young adult novel about one life-altering year of a biracial Black and white teen boy, showing a raw glimpse into the systemic inequality in racialized communities.Zay's ma always said his mouth would get him in trouble. Sure enough, it got him into his first and only fight in his junior year of high school. Expelled from his district, Zay's only hope for redemption is to transfer to Broadlawn Alternative School and complete the year. Zay isn't thrilled about the disgusting school lunch and classroom trailers at Broadlawn, and boarding with his aunt Mel and her live-in boyfriend isn't the greatest. But he'd rather be there than in the city dealing with his estranged father, his overbearing mother, and the fallout from his fight. Besides, Broadlawn has Feven, the beautiful new student Zay is starting to get to knowand fall for. Still, first love is rarely a fairy tale, and as Zay's time in Broadlawn comes to an end, he learns that shaping

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Jin loves the aromas and the bubbly chatter coming from his kitchen. He loves to breathe in the bright citrusy notes of kaffir lime leaves and the zesty tang of lemongrass as his aunties float around as they dice, slice, and cook for the New Year. There's nothing he wants more than to learn about the history of his family's cooking, and lend them a helping hand. But his aunties try to shoo him away, claiming that he'll just get bored or be in the way. Luckily, his grandma intervenes and asks Jin to help her prepare their special New Year's dinner, creating a delicious tale filled with sweetness and spice that aims to warm the heart (and the stomach). A heartfelt celebration of family, honouring one's culture, and traditions, old and new.

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From Christie Matheson and Anuska Allepuz comes a radiant picture book with a powerful message: you're never too small to make a difference. Featuring dreamy artwork, this makes for a beautiful gift for kids or graduates!Mouse feels all alone one dark and dreary night. She wonders if anybody else feels lonely, too. She's not sure if a single person can make a difference, but she decides to try.Mouse lit one lightAnd the result is magical. One by one, others in the neighborhood follow Mouse's lead. With each new spark, the stormy night becomes less gloomy. This luminous story is a brilliant and tender call to action, encouraging readers to spread kindness and create change in the world one light at a time.

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Eighteen-year-old Roshan is out for justice. Abandoned by her parents at birth and taken in by Jwala's most notorious bandit, she is now leader of the Shadow Clan, a gang impoverished by the Jwalian government's atrocities. Her goal: expose the government's corruption to Queen Bhairavi of Jwala, and earn back rights for her people. Second in line for the throne, Prince Navin has always felt like an outcast. When a night out drinking with friends leads to his capture by the Shadow Clan, Navin plots to befriend Roshan and use her to buy back his freedom—and he has no intention of sympathizing with her cause. The closer Navin and Roshan get, the harder it becomes to fight against their growing attraction. But can love be enough to overpower injustice, deceit, and even death?

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On his way to a party, Mr. Fish bumps into his friend Willa Whale, who is frozen in worry. What if no one wants to talk to her? What if she forgets the words to the birthday song? Using simple steps, Mr. Fish teaches Willa how to breathe and make a plan whenever her worries start bubbling up. After all, worry isn't bigger than a whale! In this newest installment of the New York Times-bestselling series, little guppies will swim with Mr. Fish and his friend as they discover that they can overcome even their biggest worries.

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Sure to bring a smile to the faces of even the grumpiest readers, this laugh-out-loud picture book from #1 New York Timesbestselling author Jory John and internationally acclaimed illustrator Olivier Tallec is hilarious enough to come back to again and again.Attention, reader: You're going to LOVE this book!No, really, you are. It's got everything you could ever want: comedy, drama, action, heart. Plusare you ready? It's got homework! Ahh yeah! And a trip to the best place ever, the dentist! Ahhhh yeahhh! Additionallybrace yourselfit's got raisins! Nature's candy. AHH YEAHHH! This book is so great, you won't be able to stop reading it. I DARE you not to have fun.

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The world already knows Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, Calvin O'Keefe, and the three Mrs--Who, Whatsit, and Which--the memorable and wonderful characters who fight off a dark force and save our universe in the Newbery award-winning classic "A Wrinkle in Time." But in 50 years of publication, the book has never been illustrated. Now, Hope Larson takes the classic story to a new level with her vividly imagined interpretations of tessering and favorite characters like the Happy Medium and Aunt Beast. Perfect for old fans and winning over new ones, this graphic novel adaptation is a must-read.

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Before the indie-pop duo Tegan & Sara took the world by storm, Tegan and Sara Quin were identical twins trying to find their place in a new home and new school. From first crushes to the perils of puberty, surviving junior high is something the sisters plan to face side-by-side, just like they always have. But growing up also means growing apart, as Tegan and Sara make different friends and take separate paths to understanding their queerness. For the first time ever, they ask who one sister is without the other. Set in the present-day, this fictionalized autobiography offers a glimpse at Tegan and Sara before they became icons, exploring their shifting sisterhood, their own experiences coming out, and the first steps of their musical journey. A prequel of sorts to their New York Times-bestselling adult memoir High School, it’s the story of the people they are now, and how so many of the trials they faced in their youth not only brought them to music stardom, but to a rock-solid relationship with each other.

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Mr. Fish is feeling tired, but he can't seem to snooze. He's got a bad case of the can't-sleep blues! His friends give good advice, and Mr. Fish tries his best. But their methods don't work! Will he ever get some rest? Swim along with Mr. Fish as he has trouble falling asleep one night. With help from his friends, he just might figure out a bedtime routine of his own.

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Mr. Fish and his pals are having fun at the park until they're interrupted by a bully of a shark! Will their day be ruined by the Bully-Bully Shark's mean words? Or will Mr. Fish find the courage to stand up for himself and his friends, and make respect-and-kindness rules everyone can follow - even sharks? Turn little pouts into big smiles with this board book conversion of a Pout-Pout Fish favourite!

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Jasmine's best friend, Linnie, has just gotten a puppy. And now Jasmine wants a pet of her own - a flamingo! So when her grandmother sends Jasmine a daruma doll as a surprise gift, Jasmine colours in one doll eye and wishes for a flamingo to keep. Next, Jasmine tries to convince her parents that she’s responsible enough for a pet. She cleans her room, brushes her teeth, takes out the trash, and, most importantly, researches everything she can about flamingos. But soon it becomes clear that her wish may never come true! Will Jasmine's daruma doll ever get its second eye? Luckily her big sister, Sophie, has a surprise planned that fulfills Jasmine’s wish beyond her wildest dreams. Debbi Michiko Florence is at her best in this sweet, special story of sisterhood and new responsibilities!

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One teenager in a skirt. One teenager with a lighter. One moment that changes both of their lives forever. If it weren't for the 57 bus, Sasha and Richard never would have met. Both were high school students from Oakland, California, one of the most diverse cities in the country, but they inhabited different worlds. Sasha, a white teen, lived in the middle-class foothills and attended a small private school. Richard, a black teen, lived in the crime-plagued flatlands and attended a large public one. Each day, their paths overlapped for a mere eight minutes. But one afternoon on the bus ride home from school, a single reckless act left Sasha severely burned, and Richard charged with two hate crimes and facing life imprisonment. The case garnered international attention, thrusting both teenagers into the spotlight.

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Bonjour! Escargot is a beautiful French snail who wants only two things: 1. To be your favourite animal. 2. To get to the delicious salad at the end of the book. But when he gets to the salad, he discovers that there's a carrot in it. And Escargot hates carrots. But when he finally tries one - with a little help from you! - he discovers that it's not so bad after all.

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A short and sweet mini-adventure especially created to introduce the youngest guppies to the popular Pout-Pout Fish. Swim along with Mr. Fish as he shows his friends just how much he loves them. Deborah Diesen and Dan Hanna's best-selling Pout-Pout Fish comes flippering and swishing into the hearts and minds of very young children with this compact and fun new tale sure to delight the sweetest little guppies.

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At the outset of World War II, Denmark did not resist German occupation. Deeply ashamed of his nation's leaders, fifteen-year-old Knud Pedersen resolved with his brother and a handful of schoolmates to take action against the Nazis if the adults would not. Naming their secret club after the fiery British leader, the young patriots in the Churchill Club committed countless acts of sabotage, infuriating the Germans, who eventually had the boys tracked down and arrested. But their efforts were not in vain: the boys' exploits and eventual imprisonment helped spark a full-blown Danish resistance. Interweaving his own narrative with the recollections of Knud himself, here is Phil Hoose's inspiring story of these young war heroes.

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"Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941," Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, "Greta Garbo is in people's minds, hearts, and dreams." Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, she managed, in this short time, to infiltrate the world's subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was thirty-six, only made her more irresistible. She was a phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world, but she was also a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, naïve, and always on her guard. In Garbo, the acclaimed critic and editor Robert Gottlieb offers a vivid and thorough retelling of her life, beginning in the slums of Stockholm and proceeding through her struggle to elude the attention of the world. He takes us through the films themselves, from her several European features to M-G-M's early melodramas to the artistic heights of Camille and Ninotchka. And he sketches the life she led as a very wealthy woman in New York-"a hermit about town"-and the life she led in Europe among the Rothschilds and men like Onassis and Churchill. In addition to offering his rich account of her life, Gottlieb, in what he calls "A Garbo Reader," brings together a remarkable assembly of glimpses of Garbo from other people's memoirs and interviews. Most extraordinary of all are the pictures-more than 250 of them, all reproduced here in superb duotone. Garbo is a biography of remarkable insight and breadth, written in the hope of capturing the woman only the camera really knew.

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A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the iconic musical Sunday in the Park with George Putting It Together chronicles the two-year odyssey of creating the iconic Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George. In 1982, James Lapine, at the beginning of his career as a playwright and director, met Stephen Sondheim, nineteen years his senior and already a legendary Broadway composer and lyricist. Shortly thereafter, the two decided to write a musical inspired by Georges Seurat's nineteenth-century painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Through conversations between Lapine and Sondheim, as well as most of the production team, and with a treasure trove of personal photographs, sketches, script notes, and sheet music, the two Broadway icons lift the curtain on their beloved musical. Putting It Together is a deeply personal remembrance of their collaboration and friend - ship and the highs and lows of that journey, one that resulted in the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning classic.

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Sweet and Sour is a dill-ightfully silly and heartfelt picture book about two rival pickles fermenting their way to friendshipperfect for fans of Stick and Stone and The Day the Crayons Quit. Sweet and Sour are in a serious pickle. Opposites in almost every way, they are next-door neighbors who just can't seem to get along. As competition between them ramps up, it may be that their backyard battles will consume them. Or can these persnickety personalities find something better to do with all their misspent energy?Flavored with a tangy text by Brian Yanish and tart art from Stacy Ebert, this tale about second chances, overcoming differences, and celebrating what unites us is sure to pickle the fancy of readers young and old.

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Named a Most Anticipated Book by TIME, Oprah Daily, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Marie Claire, ELLE, Bustle, and Lit Hub. An Apple Best Book of July.A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems. Mona Awad, author of RougeAt once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida''s psychogeography and a creepy story about ghosts, missing people, cults, and technology. Don''t miss it. Gabino Iglesias, NPRA heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida's underbelly from the celebrated Laura van den BergIt's another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowi

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Emma is hitchhiking across the United States, trying to outrun a violent, tragic past, when she meets Lowell, the hot-but-dumb driver she hopes will take her as far as the Badlands. But Lowell is not as harmless as he seems, and a vicious scuffle leaves Emma bloody and stranded in an abandoned town in the Black Hills with an out-of-gas van, a loaded gun, and a snowstorm on the way. The town is eerily quiet and Emma takes shelter in a diner, where she stumbles across Earl, a strange little boy in a tinfoil mask who steals her gun before begging her to help him get rid of “George.” As she is pulled deeper into Earl’s bizarre, menacing world, the horrors of Emma’s past creep closer, and she realises she can’t run forever. Tinfoil Butterfly is a seductively scary, chilling exploration of evil - how it sneaks in under your skin, flaring up when you least expect it, how it throttles you and won't let go. The beauty of Rachel Eve Moulton's ferocious, harrowing, and surprisingly moving debut is that it teaches us that love can do that, too.

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I'm a song, changing. I'm a light rain falling through a vast darkness toward a different darkness. Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an "ongoing quest"; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips's work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, "Among the Trees," and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures. Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.

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Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer - perhaps none - do so with his urgency and eloquence. Wiman, the author of My Bright Abyss and an award-winning poet, lays the motion of his mind on the page in this genre-defying work, an indivisible blend of poetry, criticism, theology, and searing memoir. As Marilynne Robinson wrote, “[Wiman's] poetry and his scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world . . . It enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader’s surprise and assent are one and the same.” Zero at the Bone begins with Wiman’s preoccupation with despair, and through fifty brief pieces, framed by two more, he unravels its seductive appeal. The book is studded with the poetry and prose of writers who inhabit Wiman’s thoughts, and the voices of Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and more join his own. At its heart and Wiman’s, however, are his family - his young children (who ask their own invaluable questions, like “Why are you a poet? I mean why?”), his wife, and those he grew up with in West Texas. Wiman is the rare thinker who takes up the mantle of our greatest mystics and does so with an honest, profound, and contemporary sensibility. Zero at the Bone is a revelation.

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Named a Most Anticipated Book by Vulture, Elle, Chicago Tribune, The Millions, and Lit Hub "Comedy Book changes the way we talk about an art form that is more diverse and exciting than ever before." -Seth Meyers "A sharp, loving, well written exploration and analysis of the art form that makes us smile, helps us relate, and is perpetually mysterious." -Jenny Slate From a beloved comedy critic, a wisecracking, heartfelt, and overdue chronicle of comedy's boom-and its magic. Comedy is king. From multimillion-dollar TV specials to sold-out stand-up shows and TikTok stardom, comedy has never been more popular, democratized, or influential. Comedians have become organizing forces across culture-as trusted as politicians and as fawned-over as celebrities-yet comedy as an art form has gone under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a cultural force. In Comedy Book, Jesse David Fox-the country's most definitive voice in comedy criticism and someone who, in his own words, "enjoys comedy maybe more than anyone on this planet"-tackles everything you need to know about comedy. Weaving together history and analysis, Fox unravels the genre's political legacy through an ode to Jon Stewart, interrogates the divide between highbrow and lowbrow via Adam Sandler, and unpacks how marginalized comics create spaces for their communities. Along the way, Fox covers everything from comedy in the age of political correctness and Will Smith's slap to the right wing's relationship with comedy and, for Fox, comedy's ability to heal personal tragedy. With memorable cameos from Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, Ali Wong, Kate Berlant, and countless others, Comedy Book is an eye-opening education in how to engage with our most omnipresent art form, a riotous history of American pop culture, and a love letter to laughter.

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A stunning, intimate collection by the late, great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. . . . I think I sought wisdom (without resignation) in poems and also a certain calm madness. I found, much later, a moment's joy and melancholy's dark contentment. In True Life, Adam Zagajewski, one of the most gifted poets of our time and a revolutionary Polish writer and thinker, turns his gaze to the past with piercing clarity and a tone of wry, lyrical melancholy. He captures the rhythms of a city street on the page and the steady beat of the passage of time against it ("Roads cannot be destroyed // Even if peonies cover them / smelling like eternity") and writes of the endless struggle between stasis and change, between movement and stillness ("We knew / it would be the same / as always // It would all go back to normal"). Mary Oliver called Zagajewski "the most pertinent, impressive, meaningful poet of our time," and Philip Boehm wrote in The New York Times Book Review that his poems "pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence." True Life, first published in Polish in 2019 and fluidly translated into English by Clare Cavanagh, reveals the astonishing depth of his insight and artistry.

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In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. "It's interesting for sure," Styles said later, adding, "a little niche, maybe." But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternative universe: stan culture. In Everything I Need I Get from You, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band members' allergies, internet typos, and hairstyles. In the process, Tiffany makes a convincing, and often moving, argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today, effectively making One Direction the first internet boyband. "Before most people were using the internet for anything," Tiffany writes, "fans were using it for everything." With humor, empathy, and an expert's eye, Everything I Need I Get from You reclaims internet history for young women, establishing fandom not as the territory of hysterical girls but as an incubator for digital innovation, art, and community. From alarming, fandom-splitting conspiracy theories about secret love and fake children, to the interplays between high and low culture and capitalism, Tiffany's book is a riotous chronicle of the movement that changed the internet forever.

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