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A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceAll the characters in Evgenia Citkowitz's first collection of short fiction are connected by the quest for identity-some are poised at crossroads, while others teeter on the edge of a moral precipice. In "Leavers' Events," a teenage girl awaits exam results and has a sexual encounter with a teacher that she hopes will define her. In "Sunday's Child," a middle-aged actress evicts a homeless woman from her garden, precipitating a crisis of conscience. And in the title novella, "Ether," a blocked writer plagiarizes his own life with devastating consequences. Unexpected and startlingly original, Citkowitz depicts her characters with a mordant humor and tenderness that never diminishes their complexity.

Timely and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist In Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams's fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America's public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy. She asks: "How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?"We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation. Here, Williams bravely and brilliantly explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. She examines the dire cultural and environmental implications of the gutting of Bear Ears National Monument-sacred lands to Native Peoples of the American Southwest; of the undermining of the Endangered Species Act; of the relentless press by the fossil fuel industry that has led to a panorama in which "oil rigs light up the horizon." And she testifies that the climate crisis is not an abstraction, offering as evidence the drought outside her door and, at times, within herself.These essays are Williams's call to action, blazing a way forward through difficult and dispiriting times. We will find new territory-emotional, geographical, communal. The erosion of desert lands exposes the truth of change. What has been weathered, worn, and whittled away is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.Erosion is a book for this moment, political and spiritual at once, written by one of our greatest naturalists, essayists, and defenders of the environment. She reminds us that beauty is its own form of resistance, and that water can crack stone.

The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the MachineThe last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution.Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology's loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn't. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years-and the next twenty.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | Winner of the New Deal Book AwardAn immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression-and employed some of the biggest names in American lettersThe plan was as idealistic as it was audacious-and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states-along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns-while also gathering reams of folklore, narratives of formerly enslaved people, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities. All this was the singular purview of the Federal Writers' Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers, from once-bestselling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified. The FWP took up the lofty goal of rediscovering America in words and soon found itself embroiled in the day's most heated arguments regarding radical politics, racial inclusion, and the purpose of writing-forcing it to reckon with the promises and failures of both the New Deal and the American experiment itself. Scott Borchert's Republic of Detours tells the story of this raucous and remarkable undertaking by delving into the experiences of key figures and tracing the FWP from its optimistic early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We observe notable writers at their day jobs, including Nelson Algren, broke and smarting from the failure of his first novel; Zora Neale Hurston, the most widely published Black woman in the country; and Richard Wright, who arrived in the FWP's chaotic New York City office on an upward career trajectory courtesy of the WPA. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, and other future literary stars found encouragement and security on the FWP payroll. By way of these and other stories, Borchert illuminates an essentially noble enterprise that sought to create a broad and inclusive self-portrait of America at a time when the nation's very identity and future were thrown into question. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, this book's lessons are urgent and strong.

WINNER: The 2019 Lillian Smith Book Award, 2018 McGannon Center Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social JusticeAstra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "The single most important book about technology you will read this year."Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read."A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination?and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equityThe State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years-because a new computer system interprets any mistake as "failure to cooperate." In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems-rather than humans-control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

One of The Irish Times "Best debuts of 2017" One of New York Magazine's "45 New Books to Read This Fall"One of The Millions' "Most Anticipated" for the second half of 2016One of The Huffington Post's "20 New Books You'll Need For Your Shelf in Fall 2016"One of The Boston Globe's "most anticipated" for Fall 2016One of Bookriot's "16 Books to Read This Fall"One of Harper's Bazaar's "16 Books You Need to Read in November"Set in the American South, at the crossroads of a world that is both secular and devoutly Christian, April Ayers Lawson's stories mine the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings. In the title story, Jake grapples with the growing chasm between him and his wife, Sheila, who was a virgin when they wed. In "Three Friends in a Hammock" the tension and attraction is palpable between three sexy, insecure young women as they tug and toe the rope of their shared sack. "The Way You Must Play Always" invites us into the mind of Gretchen, young-looking even for thirteen, as she attends her weekly piano lesson, anxiously anticipating her illicit meeting with Wesley, her instructor's adult brother who is recovering from a brain tumor. Conner, the cynical sixteen-year-old narrator of "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," escorts his mink-wearing mother to the funeral of her best friend, Charlene, a woman who was once a man. And in "Vulnerability" we accompany a young married painter to New York City, lured there by an art dealer and one of his artists. Both are self-involved and have questionable intentions, but nevertheless she is enticed.Nodding to the Southern Gothic but channeling an energy all its own, Virgin and Other Stories is a mesmerizing debut from an uncannily gifted young writer. With self-assurance and sensuality, April Ayers Lawson unravels the intertwining imperatives of intimacy-sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire-eyeing, unblinkingly, what happens when we succumb to temptation.

Winner of the 2022 Hillman Prize for Book JournalismA groundbreaking, urgent report from the front lines of "dirty work"-the work that society considers essential but morally compromisedDrone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the "kill floors" of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of the United States' most violent and abusive prisons. In Dirty Work, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society's most ethically troubling jobs. As Press shows, we are increasingly shielded and distanced from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name.The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn unprecedented attention to essential workers, and to the health and safety risks to which workers in prisons and slaughterhouses are exposed. But Dirty Work examines a less familiar set of occupational hazards: psychological and emotional hardships such as stigma, shame, PTSD, and moral injury. These burdens fall disproportionately on low-income workers, undocumented immigrants, women, and people of color.Illuminating the moving, sometimes harrowing stories of the people doing society's dirty work, and incisively examining the structures of power and complicity that shape their lives, Press reveals fundamental truths about the moral dimensions of work and the hidden costs of inequality in America.

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody warPlotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict.Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale."Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided-a time that still resonates in ours.

Winner of The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism - 2019When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city's water supply to a source that corroded Flint's aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives.It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that time, twelve people had died and Flint's children had suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun.In the first full account of this American tragedy, Anna Clark's The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint's poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail-and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

Using the scaffolding of Isadora Duncan's life and the stuff of her spirit, Amelia Gray's breakout novel delivers an incredibly imaginative portrait of the artist, resulting in "a stunning meditation on art and grief by one of America's most exciting young authors" (NPR).As dynamic, enthralling, and powerful as the visionary artist it captures, Amelia Gray's Isadora is a relentless and living portrayal of a woman who shattered convention, even in the darkest days of her life. In 1913, Isadora Duncan was known as much for her stunning dance performances as for her eccentric and salacious personal life - her lovers included poets, directors, and the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. But when her two children drowned in Paris, she found herself taking on a role she had never dreamed of. The tragedy brought the gossips out in full force, and the grieving mother wanted nothing more than to escape it all. Fleeing the very life she had worked so hard to build, she left her sister, Elizabeth, holding the reins of the artistic empire along with Elizabeth's lover, Max, who had his own ideas for greatness. For two years Isadora cast about prewar Europe, living on credit on islands in Greece and in shuttered beachfront dwellings in Italy. She lashed out at her dearest lovers and friends, the very people who held her up. But life had cracked her spirit in two: on one side, the brilliant young talent who captivated audiences the world over; on the other, a heartbroken mother spinning dangerously on the edge of sanity.

The award-winning author Nicola Griffith's brilliant, lush, sweeping historical novel about the rise of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages: Hild.In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king's youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby.But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world-of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing her surroundings closely and predicting what will happen next-that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.Her uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the king's seer. And she is indispensable-unless she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, for her family, for her loved ones, and for the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future.Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early Middle Ages-all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith's luminous prose. Working from what little historical record is extant, Griffith has brought a beautiful, brutal world to vivid, absorbing life.

When Ellen Ullman's memoir of her life as a software engineer was published in 1997, it was greeted as a revelatory meditation on the dawn of the digital era. Now, twenty-five years later, Close to the Machine is a true classic, a touchstone work that illuminates our time and our future life in technology.It is the story of a woman whose life is spinning out of control. Technology becomes her unlikely lifeline. As she navigates this socially flawed and male-dominated world, Ullman shows us the struggle of translating the messiness of human thought into algorithms, and also discovers unexpected beauty in the logic of code.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer's first novel, Veniss Underground, takes readers on a journey to a labyrinthine city of tunnels, and the dangers lurking behind each turn. This paperback edition features the bonus novella "Balzac's War."In a dark and decadent far future, the city of Veniss persists beside a dead ocean. Earth has become a desert wasteland ravaged by climate change. Veniss endures on the strength of its innovative tech of almost Boschian intensity, but at what cost? Where does the line between "made creature" and "person" lie?Against this backdrop, Veniss Underground spins the tale of Nicholas, an aspiring, struggling Artist; his twin sister, Nicola; and Shadrach, Nicola's former lover. A fateful trip by Nicholas to the maverick biotech Quin will have far-reaching consequences for all three-and for the fate of Veniss itself, as insurrection stirs and the oppressed begin to revolt.Veniss Underground is Jeff VanderMeer's first novel, a spectacular surreal foray into a world as influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky as by Ursula K. Le Guin. Readers of VanderMeer's later work will be enchanted and horrified by the marvels within, including the author's signature fascination with the nonhuman and the environment. By turns beautiful and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession against a backdrop of betrayal and biological mutation.This reissue includes a new introduction by the National Book Award-winning author Charles Yu and a bonus story from Jeff VanderMeer.

"Rich and moving . . . Pure Flame may be Orange's legacy. It is already her gift." -Maggie Doherty, The New York Times (Editors' Choice)During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome.So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy-in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother's many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her mother's midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called "the great unwritten story": that of the mother-daughter bond.The death of Orange's maternal grandmother at nearly ninety-six and the fear that her mother's more "successful" life will not be as long bring new urgency to her questions about the woman whose absence and anger helped shape her life. Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it. Told with warmth and rigor, Orange's account of her mother's life and their relationship is pressurized in critical and unexpected ways, resulting in an essential, revelatory meditation on becoming, selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother's daughter now.

Hemingway's deeply reflective account of his destructive Paris affair and how it affected the legendary life he rebuilt after, as told to his best friend, the writer A.E. Hotchner. In June of 1961, A. E. Hotchner visited a close friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke-three weeks later, Ernest Hemingway returned home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a saga that Hemingway had unraveled for Hotchner over years of world travel.Ernest always kept a few of his special experiences off the page, storing them as insurance against a dry-up of ideas. But after a near miss with death, he entrusted his most meaningful tale to Hotchner, so that if he never got to write it himself, then at least someone would know. In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway divulged the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he gambled and lost Hadley, the great love he'd spend the rest of his life seeking.But the search was not without its notable moments, and he told of those, too: of impotence cured in a house of God; of back-to-back plane crashes in the African bush, one of which nearly killed him, while he emerged from the other brandishing a bottle of gin and a bunch of bananas; of cocktails and commiseration with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as few have known him-humble, thoughtful, and full of regret.To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife, Mary, who was also a close friend, Hotch kept these conversations to himself for decades. Now he tells the story as Hemingway told it to him. Hemingway in Love puts you in the room with the master and invites you to listen as he relives the drama of those young, definitive years that set the course for the rest of his life and dogged him to the end of his days.

WINNER OF THE LESLIE BRADSHAW AWARD FOR YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE WINNER OF THE BANFF MOUNTAIN BOOK AWARD FOR FICTIONDave is fourteen years old, living with his family in a cabin on Oregon's Mount Hood (or as he prefers to call it, like the Multnomah tribal peoples once did, Wy'east). Dave will soon enter high school, with adulthood and a future not far off-a future away from his mother, father, his precocious younger sister, and the wilderness where he's lived all his life.And Dave is not the only one approaching adulthood and its freedoms on Wy'east that summer. Martin, a pine marten (of the mustelid family) is leaving his own mother and siblings and setting off on his own as well.As Dave and Martin set off on their own adventures, their lives, paths, and trails will cross, weave, and blend. Why not come with them as they set forth into the forest and crags of Oregon's soaring mountain wilderness in search of life, family, friends, enemies, wonder, mystery, and good things to eat?Martin Marten is a braided coming-of-age tale like no other, told in Brian Doyle's joyous, rollicking style.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020"In this superbly articulate cri de coeur, Safina gives us a new way of looking at the natural world that is radically different."-The Washington PostNew York Times bestselling author Carl Safina brings readers close to three non-human cultures-what they do, why they do it, and how life is for them.A New York Times Notable Books of 2020Some believe that culture is strictly a human phenomenon. But this book reveals cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth's remaining wild places. It shows how if you're a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too come to understand yourself as an individual within a particular community that does things in specific ways, that has traditions. Alongside genes, culture is a second form of inheritance, passed through generations as pools of learned knowledge. As situations change, social learning-culture-allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes can adapt.Becoming Wild brings readers into intimate proximity with various nonhuman individuals in their free-living communities. It presents a revelatory account of how animals function beyond our usual view. Safina shows that for non-humans and humans alike, culture comprises the answers to the question, "How do we live here?" It unites individuals within a group identity. But cultural groups often seek to avoid, or even be hostile toward, other factions. By showing that this is true across species, Safina illuminates why human cultural tensions remain maddeningly intractable despite the arbitrariness of many of our differences. Becoming Wild takes readers behind the curtain of life on Earth, to witness from a new vantage point the most world-saving of perceptions: how we are all connected.

The Definitive Cult, Postmodern Novel-a Shocking Blend of Violence, Transgression, and EroticismReissued with a New Introduction from Zadie SmithWhen J. G. Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of autoerotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash-a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant, and iconic celebrity.First published in 1973, Crash remains one of the most shocking novels of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg.