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Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • Southwest Review • Electric Literature Perfect for fans of Barbarian Days, this memoir in essays follows one man's decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and explores how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old. In January 2012, creative writing professor and novelist Kyle Beachy published one of his first essays on skate culture, an exploration of how Nike’s corporate strategy successfully gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. Beachy has since established himself as skate culture's freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice...
At once an offbeat love story, a moving portrait of a family in crisis, and a darkly funny American comedy, Kyle Beachy’s arresting debut novel—written in prose that is swift, stunning, and sweet—heralds the arrival of a remarkable new voice in fiction. Potter Mays retreats immediately after college graduation to the safe house of his childhood home. Like clockwork each morning, his mother makes him eggs, lovingly fried into hollowed-out pieces of toast. His father, in the midst of a campaign to revitalize downtown St. Louis, promises to “poke around” for gainful employment for his son. Potter’s best friend, Stuart—an “Independent Thought Contractor” working out of his pare...
Skateboarding is both a sport and a way of life. Creative, physical, graphic, urban and controversial, it is full of contradictions – a billion-dollar global industry which still retains its vibrant, counter-cultural heart. Skateboarding and the City presents the only complete history of the sport, exploring the story of skate culture from the surf-beaches of '60s California to the latest developments in street-skating today. Written by a life-long skater who also happens to be an architectural historian, and packed through with full-colour images – of skaters, boards, moves, graphics, and film-stills – this passionate, readable and rigorously-researched book explores the history of skateboarding and reveals a vivid understanding of how skateboarders, through their actions, experience the city and its architecture in a unique way.
A hauntingly insightful new short story collection from the Man Booker International Prize shortlisted author This is a collection resplendent with longing. In these pages, people meet without actually connecting, travellers set off but never seem to find home. We encounter them on the fjords of Norway, in the bustle of Los Angeles, and among the lights of Copenhagen. Outsiders yearn to be on the inside, insiders are desperate to be free. A writer befriends an ex-lover's mother. An elderly man offers his body to aging women. A woman's childhood memories of wild swimming draw her back to the water. In prose that is both elegantly spare and saturated with emotion, Dorthe Nors shines a light in...
A "must read" debut collection of poetic, linked essays investigating the past and present state of California, its conflicting histories and their impact on a writer's family and life (Los Angeles Times). California has been advertised as a destiny manifested for those ready to pull up their bootstraps and head west across to find wealth on the other side of the Sierra Nevada since the 19th century. Across the seven essays in the debut collection by José Vadi, we hear from the descendants of those not promised that prize. Inter State explores California through many lenses: an aging obsessed skateboarder; a self-appointed dive bar DJ; a laid-off San Francisco tech worker turned rehired contractor; a grandson of Mexican farmworkers pursuing the crops they tilled. Amidst wildfires, high speed rail, housing crises, unprecedented wealth and its underlying decay, Inter State excavates and roots itself inside those necessary stories and places lost in the ever-changing definitions of a selectively golden state.
Forty very short stories that reimagine the genre of crime writing from some of today’s most imaginative and thrilling writers “An intriguing take on crime/noir writing, this collection of 40 very short stories by leading and emerging literary voices—Amelia Gray, Brian Evenson, Elizabeth Hand, Carmen Maria Machado, Benjamin Percy, Laura van den Berg and more—investigates crimes both real and imagined. Despite their diminutive size, these tales promise to pack a punch.” —Chicago Tribune, 1 of 25 Hot Books for Summer Tiny Crimes gathers leading and emerging literary voices to tell tales of villainy and intrigue in only a few hundred words. From the most hard–boiled of noirs to th...
During the winter of 1972, a woman spends a single night with a young Chilean poet before he departs New York, leaving her his desk. It is the only time they ever meet. Two years later, he is arrested by Pinochet's secret police and never seen again. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers a lock of hair among her papers that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer has spent a lifetime reassembling his father's study, plundered by the Nazis from Budapest in 1944; now only one item remains to be found. Connecting these lives is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. And as t...
A wise and funny collection of modern-day parables about the ties between humans and their gods Imagine you are Poseidon at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The oceans are dying and sailors have long since stopped paying tribute. They just don't don't need you anymore. What do you do? Perhaps, seeking answers, you go exploring. Maybe you end up in Wisconsin and discover the pleasures of the iced latte. And then, perhaps, everything goes wrong. Anders Nilsen, author of Big Questions and Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, explores questions like these in his newest work, a darkly funny meditation on religion and faith with a modern twist. Rage of Poseidon brings all of the philosophical d...
“Terse and intense and new...I loved it.” —Tommy Orange, author of There There “Fuccboi is its generation’s coming of age novel…Utterly of its moment, of this moment.”—Jay McInereny, Wall Street Journal A fearless and savagely funny examination of masculinity under late capitalism from an electrifying new voice. Set in Philly one year into Trump’s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe’s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn’t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves—cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer—he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write,...
For as long as Kyle Egan can remember, he has wanted only one thing: to run his own boat charter company. Not that he has much to complain about, as the lead charter boat captain at the Indigo Royal Resort in St. Thomas USVI. He gets to spend his days out on the water, never has to wear a tie, and works alongside his best friend, Drea Miller, who happens to be the only other thing he wants.Drea Miller has been crushing on her best friend Kyle since the moment she saw him five years ago. Unfortunately, she is fully aware that he doesn't see her as more than a friend- oh, and the niece of his bosses. Working for the family-owned resort with her three annoyingly overprotective uncles has always been what she wanted, but lately she's started to wonder what else life might hold. If she can't have the guy she wants, maybe it's time that she makes another dream a reality.When an encounter with a guest brings out the truth, Kyle and Drea are left trying to navigate their feelings, but can their new love survive a revelation they never saw coming?