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After her father’s heart attack and subsequent surgery, Helen Atherton returns to her hometown of Washington, D.C., to help take care of him and, perhaps more honestly, herself. She’s been living in Los Angeles, trying to work in Hollywood, slowly spiraling into a depression fueled by hours spent watching C-SPAN---her obsession with politics a holdover from a childhood interrupted by her father’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. The rest of the world might have forgotten it, but the Atherton family never quite recovered. With sharp, witty, and suspenseful prose, All the Houses reveals their story, as Helen pieces together the political moves that pulled her family apart.
Nick Lasseter is in a slump--as a reporter for the Waterloo Weekly, and in every other part of his life as well. When he grudgingly agrees to write a piece about a rising female Republican legislator, he stumbles onto a political fight in which the good guys and bad guys start to seem interchangeable. And not even the deceased can be relied upon to stick to their stories when Nick gets involved with a political insider. As they search the dim depths of a civic past that's anything but dead and buried, they find that some things never change--things like the moral ambiguity of practical politics and the sad, hilarious cluelessness of young men in love. Bittersweet and biting, elegiac and sharply observed, Waterloo is a portrait of a generation in search of itself--and a love letter to the slackers, rockers, hustlers, hacks, and hangers-on who populate Austin, Texas--from a formidable new intelligence in American fiction.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE An award-winning, thrillingly provocative international bestseller - adapted to a major motion picture starring Riz Ahmed and Kiefer Sutherland - from the author of Exit West 'Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America . . . ' So speaks the mysterious stranger at a Lahore cafe as dusk settles. Invited to join him for tea, you learn his name and what led this speaker of immaculate English to seek you out. For he is more worldly than you might expect; better travelled and better educated. He knows the West better than you do. And as he tells you his story, of how he embrace...
Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance. Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were ...
For Black, a mural artist in East L.A., the city's tumbledown landscape is his canvas. Residing in a ramshackle apartment above 'The Ugly Store', he lives for his art and obsesses over Sweet Girl, the transvestite stripper who serves as his muse. Black navigates life alongside the Los Angeles River, 'iridescent in its concrete sleeve', enlisting his friends - Iggy, the beautiful tattoo artist who has beguiled Hollywood's elite, and Bomboy, a wealthy Rwandan butcher - as he confronts his past and struggles to find his place in the world. Chris Abani touches on the far reaches of psychic pain, religious and sexual, and takes the reader on an unforgettable journey.
Simone Weil: famous French philosopher, writer, political activist, mystic and sister to André, one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. For Karen Olsson, who studied mathematics at Harvard only to turn to writing as a vocation, the lives and obsessions of these two extraordinary siblings returned her to the intellectual passions of her youth. When Olsson got hold of the 1940 letters between Simone and André, she discovered that André's pursuit of his studies became increasingly incomprehensible to his sister, leading to Simone directly questioning him about the value of such rarefied knowledge as it applied to the lived experience. Struck by this conflict, Olsson revisits her own time at university, how she came to be consumed by mathematics, and the unexpected similarities that can be found between two seemingly opposed subjects. At the core of the book lies her curiosity about the inception of creative thought - that flash of insight - experienced by writers and mathematicians alike.
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Winner, The 2018 Victorian Prize for Literature, and the Prize for Non-Fiction Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife... But as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less. A woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for forty years. A man who bled quietly to death in his loungeroom. A woman who lives with rats, random debris and terrified delusion. The still life of a home vacated by accidental overdose. Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sand...
To most Americans, Texas has been that love-it-or-hate it slice of the country that has sparked controversy, bred presidents, and fomented turmoil from the American Civil War to George W. Bush. But that Texas is changing—and it will change America itself.Richard Parker takes the reader on a tour across today's booming Texas, an evolving landscape that is densely urban, overwhelmingly Hispanic, exceedingly powerful in the global economy, and increasingly liberal. This Texas will have to ensure upward mobility, reinvigorate democratic rights, and confront climate change—just to continue its historic economic boom. This is not the Texas of George W. Bush or Rick Perry.Instead, this is a Texas that will remake the American experience in the twenty-first century—as California did in the twentieth—with surprising economic, political, and social consequences. Along the way, Parker analyzes the powerful, interviews the insightful, and tells the story of everyday people because, after all, one in ten Americans in this century will call Texas something else: Home.
Faith in African Lived Christianity – Bridging Anthropological and Theological Perspectives offers a comprehensive, empirically rich and interdisciplinary approach to the study of faith in African Christianity. The book brings together anthropology and theology in the study of how faith and religious experiences shape the understanding of social life in Africa. The volume is a collection of chapters by prominent Africanist theologians, anthropologists and social scientists, who take people’s faith as their starting point and analyze it in a contextually sensitive way. It covers discussions of positionality in the study of African Christianity, interdisciplinary methods and approaches and a number of case studies on political, social and ecological aspects of African Christian spirituality.