A guide to understanding the major genres of the story world by the legendary writing teacher and author of The Anatomy of Story, John Truby.Most people think genres are simply categories on Netflix or Amazon that provide a helpful guide to making entertainment choices. Most people are wrong. Genre stories aren't just a small subset of the films, video games, TV shows, and books that people consume. They are the all-stars of the entertainment world, comprising the vast majority of popular stories worldwide. That's why businesses-movie studios, production companies, video game studios, and publishing houses-buy and sell them. Writers who want to succeed professionally must write the stories these businesses want to buy. Simply put, the storytelling game is won by mastering the structure of genres.The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works is the legendary writing teacher John Truby's step-by-step guide to understanding and using the basic building blocks of the story world. He details the three ironclad rules of successful genre writing, and analyzes more than a dozen major genres and the essential plot events, or "beats," that define each of them. As he shows, the ability to combine these beats in the right way is what separates stories that sell from those that don't. Truby also reveals how a single story can combine elements of different genres, and how the best writers use this technique to craft unforgettable stories that stand out from the crowd. Just as Truby's first book, The Anatomy of Story, changed the way writers develop stories, The Anatomy of Genres will enhance their quality and expand the impact they have on the world.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020A Human Behavior & Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world.Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you're rather psychologically peculiar.Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves-their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations-over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries?In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition-laying the foundation for the modern world.Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history. Includes black-and-white illustrations.
The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. National BestsellerNew Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year"A new masterpiece of American literature." -Dennis Lehane, Entertainment Weekly"A Prayer for the Dying reads like the amazing, unrelenting love child of Shirley Jackson and Cormac McCarthy. It's twisted proof that God will do worse to test a faithful man than the devil would ever do to punish a sinner." -Chuck PalahniukSet in Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying tells of a horrible epidemic that is suddenly and gruesomely killing the town's residents and setting off a terrifying paranoia. Jacob Hansen, Friendship's sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, is soon overwhelmed by the fear and anguish around him, and his sanity begins to fray. Dark, poetic, and chilling, Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying examines the effect of madness and violence on the morality of a once-decent man.
Ganador del Kirkus Prize para Literatura No Ficción
Considered the "big bang" of Roberto Bolaño's universe, Antwerp is his first novel--or perhaps the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely solitary, so strange, that he didn't share it with any publishers at the time; yet, decades later, he called it the only novel that didn't embarrass him. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a deserted highway, a seaside campground, an abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere, just beyond reach, a young, fevered writer named Roberto Bolaño drifts in and out of view. A haunting, radical, and utterly singular effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño's oeuvre.
One of NPR's Best Books of 2023. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. 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 "Energetic and wise . . . Comedy Book is not the definitive history of the past three-plus decades. It's Fox's history, and better for it." -The New York Times Book ReviewFrom a beloved comedy critic, a wisecracking, heartfelt, and overdue chronicle of comedy's boom-and its magic.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, an art form that has been under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a cultural force. 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 topics ranging from comedy in the age of political correctness and Will Smith's slap, to the right wing's relationship with comedy, to comedy's ability to heal in the wake of 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.
The "revelatory" (The New York Review of Books) story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home. Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.As Mr. Potter's narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, damaged community. Amid his surroundings, he struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters-one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.In Mr. Potter, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any other in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.
Jamaica Kincaid's collected writings for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" record her first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York.Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," composed during the time when she first arrived in the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid developed a unique voice, both in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite magazine and (though unsigned) all her own-wonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. The book also reflects Kincaid's development as a young writer-the newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors.
An NPR Best Book of 2013Laura van den Berg's gorgeous new book, The Isle of Youth, explores the lives of women mired in secrecy and deception. From a newlywed caught in an inscrutable marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, the characters in these bewitching stories are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless, and they will do what it takes to survive. Each tale is spun with elegant urgency, and the reader grows attached to the marginalized young women in these stories-women grappling with the choices they've made and searching for the clues to unlock their inner worlds. This is the work of a fearless writer whose stories feel both magical and mystical, earning her the title of "sorceress" from her readers. Be prepared to fall under her spell.
A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions-not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans' lives.A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become "well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Drew forged a path of her own-one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman's life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.Includes black-and-white images
The nationally bestselling author and streetwear entrepreneur Bobby Hundreds's manifesto about NFTs, the future of creativity, and bringing his brand and community into the modern digital space.Bobby Hundreds has spent twenty years building his streetwear company, The Hundreds, to be as much a community as a brand. So when Bobby discovered NFTs in 2020, he knew that the technology had the makings of a revolution. Now fans could not only directly support artists and creators but also have a genuine stake in the success of the work. Here, Bobby saw a way for the Hundreds community to participate in the brand as never before. But was this a good idea? Are NFTs truly the future of creativity? Or just a fad? Are they a scam? Maybe they are all those things. In NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future, Bobby digs deep into these questions and more: Are NFTs fashion? A cult? Already over? Just beginning? None of the answers are simple, and Bobby works through each with the thoughtfulness and hard-earned insight that have made him a fervently sought-after voice in conversations about creativity, commerce, and community in the digital age. Over the course of just a few years, NFTs have been celebrated and derided; fortunes have been made and lost, empires built and toppled, and Bobby has been, and remains, in the thick of it. For the reader sitting on a collection of NFTs, this is an obvious must-read. For those wondering what's been going on-and why it's worth paying attention to-it is the perfect primer.
"I read everything Ivy Pochoda writes. Her capture of the complexities, diversities, and insanities of today's life and culture is next to none. I loved Sing Her Down. The world will too." -Michael Connelly, author of Desert StarNo Country for Old Men meets Killing Eve in this gritty, feminist Western thriller from the award-winning author of These Women.Florence "Florida" Baum is not the hapless innocent she claims to be when she arrives at the Arizona women's prison-or so her ex-cellmate Diosmary Sandoval keeps insinuating. Dios knows the truth about Florida's crimes, understands what Florence hides even from herself: that she was never a victim of circumstance, an unlucky bystander misled by a bad man. Dios knows that darkness lives in women too, despite the world's refusal to see it. And she is determined to open Florida's eyes and unleash her true self.When an unexpected reprieve gives both women their freedom, Dios's fixation on Florida turns into a dangerous obsession, and a deadly cat-and-mouse chase ensues from Arizona to the desolate streets of Los Angeles. With blistering, incisive prose, the award-winning author Ivy Pochoda delivers a razor-sharp Western. Gripping and immersive, Sing Her Down is a spellbinding thriller setting two indelible women on a path to certain destruction and an epic, stunning showdown.
From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.A story of mourning and return-to one's native country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself-Carlos Fonseca's Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.
"A hair-raising, head-banging, meet-the-Devil epic tale of love, youth, and rock 'n' roll." -Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less Is LostKip, Leslie, and Kira are outliers-even in the metal scene they love. In arch-conservative Gulf Coast Florida in the late 1980s, just listening to metal can get you arrested, but for the three of them the risk is well worth it, because metal is what leads them to one another.Different as they are, Kip, Leslie, and Kira form a family of sorts that proves far safer, and more loving, than the families they come from. Together, they make the pilgrimage from Florida's swamp country to the fabled Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But in time, the delicate equilibrium they've found begins to crumble. Leslie moves home to live with his elderly parents; Kip struggles to find his footing in the sordid world of LA music journalism; and Kira, the most troubled of the three, finds herself drawn to ever darker and more extreme strains of metal. On a trip to northern Europe for her twenty-second birthday, in the middle of a show, she simply vanishes. Two years later, the truth about her disappearance reunites Kip with Leslie, who in order to bring Kira home alive must make greater sacrifices than they could ever have imagined.In his most absorbing and ambitious novel yet, John Wray dives deep into the wild, funhouse world of heavy metal and death cults in the 1980s and '90s. Gone to the Wolves lays bare the intensity, tumult, and thrill of friendship in adolescence-a time when music can often feel like life or death.
"[A] master class in American cultural and intellectual history." -Sarah E. Igo, The New York Times Book Review"Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus." -Cornel WestA master historian's retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today.In Animal Spirits, the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual's spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the "Poughkeepsie Seer") and the "New Thought" pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the "god within-rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors' "animal spirits," these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition-permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos.Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images
"A serious, frequently brilliant novel with a sustained intensity that is rare in fiction. It's the most promising first novel that I've encountered this year." ¿Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal"[A] searching, emotionally resonant first novel . . . [Nobody Is Ever Missing] impressed me, and held me to my chair. There's significant talent at work here." ¿Dwight Garner, The New York TimesThe 10th anniversary reissue of Catherine Lacey's beloved, star-making debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing: a mordant, uncanny, and unputdownable journey into one woman's attempt to break free of her life.Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.Her perilous and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing wrong. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose, Lacey whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. A sensation upon its release in 2014 and the introduction to a singular literary talent, Lacey's debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing radiates the same intensity and invention it did upon its publication, and remains an unrelenting, unputdownable search for the dark heart of the self.
"Superb . . . [The] final, splendid, most personal work of [Janet Malcolm's] long career." -Charles Finch, The New York Times Book ReviewFor decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life-a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be.Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing a memoir from memories that pose questions of their own. Still Pictures begins with the image of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague for New York at the age of five in 1939. From her fitful early loves, to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House, to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Still Pictures delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama. Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like few others in our literature.
"A riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book." -Robert Kolker, The Washington Post"[A] moving and superbly reported book." -Jessica Winter, The New Yorker"A harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book." -Jennifer Szalai, The New York TimesA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceThe shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children-and a searing indictment of the American foster care system.On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children. Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian's We Were Once a Family is a revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian sought out the children's birth families and put them at the center of the story. We follow the lives of the Harts' adopted children and their birth parents, and the machinations of the state agency that sent the children far away. Asgarian's reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as young people of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America's most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.
The World and All That It Holds-in all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical glory-showcases Aleksandar Hemon's celebrated talent at its pinnacle. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction.As Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can't put in perspective.And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto's introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller; Pinto's protector and lover.Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, tangle with spies and Bolsheviks. Over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto's love for Osman-with the occasional opiatic interlude-that keeps him going.
The Wonder Paradox offers a lively, practical, and transcendent road map to meaning and connection through poetry.Where do we ¿nd magic? Peace? Connection?We have calendars to mark time, communal spaces to bring us together, bells to signal hours of contemplation, öcial archives to record legacies, the wisdom of sages read aloud, weekly, to map out the right way to live-in kindness, justice, morality. These rhythms and structures of society were all once set by religion. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show.So how then to celebrate milestones? Find rules to guide us? Figure out which texts can focus our attention but still öer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can't be said? Where, really, are truth and beauty? The answer, says The Wonder Paradox, is in poetry.In twenty chapters built from years of questions and conversations with those looking for an authentic and meaningful life, Jennifer Michael Hecht öers ways to mine and adapt the useful aspects of tradition and to replace what no longer feels true. Through cultures and poetic wisdom from around the world-Sappho, Rumi, Shakespeare, Issa, Tagore, Frost, Szymborska, Angelou, and others-she blends literary criticism with spiritual guidance rooted in the everyday. Linking our needs to particular poems, she helps us better understand those needs, our very being, and poetry itself.Our capacity for wonder is one of the greatest joys of being human; The Wonder Paradox celebrates that instinct and that yearning.
Miller's ingenious second novel is "transgressive, terrifying, tough, and very, very funny" (Tony Kushner).In Rebecca Miller's dazzling second novel, we meet characters separated by time but united in their desire to live a life of their own choosing, free from the constraints of community and tradition.In eighteenth-century Paris, Jacob Cerf is a Jewish street peddler burdened by a disastrous young marriage but determined to raise himself up by whatever means he can. His richly observed life in Paris's Jewish ghetto is radically altered when he gains entrance to the opulent world of the aristocracy and the freedom to create his own identity. More than two hundred years later, Jacob reappears in surprising form in the suburbs of Long Island. He soon becomes obsessed by a young Orthodox Jewish woman with a secret ambition. Determined to change her fate, Jacob takes it upon himself to entangle her with a conflicted volunteer fireman. As Jacob's mischievous plans unfold, the burdens of duty and the pull of desire will twist the lives of all three.Rebecca Miller explores the hold of the past on the present, the power of private hopes and dreams, and the collision of fate and free will. Transfiguring her world with a clear gaze and sharp, surprising wit, she brings Jacob's Folly vividly to life.
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERA Best Book of the Year (So Far) at The New Yorker, The BBC, Vulture, CrimeReadsA Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick"[A] savagely satirical thriller." -PeopleThe Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries brings us Birnam Wood, a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleidoscopic insight into what drives us to survive.Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island, cutting ö the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam's founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He's intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they're poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both in¿uences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, un¿inching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
The intellectual autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.From its origins, the liberal doctrine has represented the most advanced forms of democratic culture, and it is what has most defended us from the inextinguishable "call of the tribe." This book hopes to make a modest contribution to that indispensable project.In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel laureate, "tireless in his quest to probe the nature of the human animal" (Marie Arana, The Washington Post), maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and his alienation from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth.The works of Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel helped the author enormously during those uneasy years. They showed him another school of thought, one that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class, or party and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa's engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal ideology.
National Bestseller. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Named a best book of March by Apple Books and Amazon, and a most anticipated book by The New York Times, Esquire, The Guardian, Time, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Chicago Review of Books"A major novel, and a notably audacious one." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times "It feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X, Catherine Lacey somehow-magically-makes the nearly impossible look easy." -Lauren GroffFrom one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.When X-an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter-falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone's good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife's deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.
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