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Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2022 A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 PEN AMERICA OPEN BOOK AWARD A Times Book of the Month One of Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club Picks 'A feat of monumental thematic imagination' - The New York Times Book Review 'An elegantly layered, beautifully rendered tour de force that is not to be missed' - Roxane Gay Libertie Sampson was named by her father as he lay dying, in honour of the bright, shining future he was sure was coming. The only daughter of a prosperous Black woman physician, she was born free in a country still blighted by slavery. But she has never felt free. Shrinking from her mother's ambitions for her future, Libertie ventures beyond her insulated community, hoping that somehow, somewhere, she will create a life that feels like her own. Immersive, lyrical and deeply moving, Libertie is a novel about legacy and longing, the story of a young woman struggling to discover what freedom truly means - for herself, and for generations to come.
A FINALIST FOR THE 2016 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE 2017 YOUNG LIONS AWARD “A terrifically auspicious debut.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Smart, timely and powerful . . . A rich examination of America’s treatment of race, and the ways we attempt to discuss and confront it today.” —The Huffington Post The Freeman family--Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie--have been invited to the Toneybee Institute to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected because they know sign language; they are supposed t...
It's been decades since Mara's family was last together, decades since the day her sister Allison drowned at Silver Beach. After the family tragedy, Mara's father took her to the opposite end of the country, where she made a tidy life for herself in western Massachusetts, with a good education, stable job, and loving girlfriend. Her half-sister, Shannon, was left behind with their mother in San Diego. Surviving on disability checks and handouts from family, Shannon can't remember a time when Linda wasn't drunk. When a heart attack lands Linda in the hospital, Shannon's first impulse is to skip town—to finally escape her mother's orbit and make her sister step up. While Mara gave up on Linda years ago and couldn't have less in common with her sister, an unemployed stoner, it's time for her to stop running from everything that makes her have feelings. This is a novel about the persistent, mystifying ties of family, the extravagant mess of addiction, and what it means to actually live inside your own life.
This truly intersectional collection of essays, fiction, and poetry sound the voices of black, Latinx, Asian, queer, and trans writers and says "me too" 22 times. Whether reflecting on their teenage selves or their modern-day workplaces, each contributor approaches the subject with unforgettable authenticity and strength.
Beneath the original Venetian glass and rosewood case at La Specola in Florence lies Clemente Susini's Anatomical Venus (c. 1790), a perfect object whose luxuriously bizarre existence challenges belief. It - or, better, she - was conceived of as a means to teach human anatomy without need for constant dissection, which was messy, ethically fraught and subject to quick decay. This life-sized wax woman is adorned with glass eyes and human hair and can be dismembered into dozens of parts revealing, at the final remove, a beatific foetus curled in her womb. Sister models soon appeared throughout Europe, where they not only instructed the specialist students, but also delighted the general public...
Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. A high schooler finds her drawings corrupted by a haunted stone she inherits from a suicidal underground cartoonist. A video game addict discovers a vast, hidden dimension to colonize in the walls of his girlfriend's apartment. A philosophy student seeks anonymous Craigslist sex with the ubiquitous devil that stalks her. In this short fiction collection from Jeanne Thornton, author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam (a Lambda Literary Award finalist), reality and relationships blur, creating a queer pulp experience with a literary sensibility, a hallucinatory journey into despair... and, possibly, toward hope. "The gorgeousness of Thornton's writings help sustain the wor...
1901. In Washington, Ruth and Aubrey take in a baby left in a tree.
THE USA TODAY BESTSELLER! "An exquisitely detailed journey through the harrowing field of medicine in mid-19th century London."—Tracey Enerson Wood, USA Today bestselling author of The Engineer's Wife and The War Nurse An unforgettable historical fiction novel about one woman who believed in scientific medicine before the world believed in her. London, 1845: Raised by the eccentric surgeon Dr. Horace Croft after losing her parents to a deadly pandemic, the orphan Nora Beady knows little about conventional life. While other young ladies were raised to busy themselves with needlework and watercolors, Nora was trained to perfect her suturing and anatomical illustrations of dissections. Women ...
A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity. When you turn the music off, and suddenly you feel an unbearable sadness, that means turn the music back on, right? When you still feel the sadness, even with the music, that means there's something wrong with this music. Sometimes I feel like sex without context isn't sex at all. And sometimes I feel like sex without context is what sex should always be.--The Freezer Door The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life. Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.
“Courageous and inspiring.”—Karen Armstrong, author of The Case for God “James Carroll takes us to the heart of one of the great crises of our times.”—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve An eloquent memoir by a former priest and National Book Award–winning writer who traces the roots of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal back to the power structure of the Church itself, as he explores his own crisis of faith and journey to renewal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY James Carroll weaves together the story of his quest to understand his personal beliefs and his relationship to the Catholic Church with the history of the Church itself. From his first ...