As a young girl, she was the victim of a horrifying act of violence that changed her life and would strongly influence her career as a writer. In her 2017 memoir Hunger, she addressed that trauma head-on, writing with bracing honesty about her body and the ways that food can be used both to bury pain and make oneself disappear. The response to Hunger by some critics who seemed to take perverse pleasure in highlighting Gay’s vulnerabilities was itself a fresh wound. By exploring trauma publicly, Gay suffered more of it.In her Scribd Original Writing into the Wound, Gay not only talks openly about trauma in her personal life—from her fraught time as an undergraduate at Yale to the stress of returning there as a visiting professor to the fallout from Hunger—but also about the collective trauma we’ve experienced this past year. COVID-19, racial and economic inequality, political strife, imminent environmental disaster, and more: Gay catalogs it all with her trademark candor and authority. To make sense of our pain, she suggests, we need to explore it fully, even as we’re still in the midst of it. Just as she writes her way through her own traumas and coaches her students to do the same, she urges us to take a long, hard look at the wounds we all share: “The world as we knew it has broken wide open. There is a before and an after, and the world will never again be what it once was. That sounds terrifying, but it is an opportunity.”“To change the world, we need to face what has become of it,” she writes. “To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.” Full of wisdom and rage and grace, Writing into the Wound is a remarkable consideration of where we are, and where we need to go, by one of the finest authors and cultural critics of her generation.

    Most women carry some form of mental load--about their work, household responsibilities, financial obligations, and personal life, but what makes up that burden and how it's distributed within households and understood in offices is not always equal or fair. In her strips, Emma deals with themes ranging from maternity leave (it is not a vacation!), domestic violence, the clitoris, the violence of the medical world on women during childbirth, and other feminist issues, and she does so in a straightforward way that is both hilarious and deadly serious. Her comics also address the everyday outrages and absurdities of immigrant rights, income equality, and police violence.

    Based on the wildly popular eponymous Tumblr, Deep Dark Fears explores our odd, creepy, and hilariously singular fears. Animator, illustrator, and cartoonist Fran Krause brings these fears to life in vividly illustrated comics based on real fears submitted by readers (plus a few of his own). These "deep dark fears" run the gamut from unlikely but plausible to completely ridiculous, highlighting both our deeply human similarities and our peculiar uniquenesses.

    A Slip of the Keyboard brings together for the first time the finest examples of Pratchett's non fiction writing, both serious and surreal: from musings on mushrooms to what it means to be a writer (and why banana daiquiris are so important); from memories of Granny Pratchett to speculation about Gandalf's love life, and passionate defences of the causes dear to him.With all the humour and humanity that have made his novels so enduringly popular, this collection brings Pratchett out from behind the scenes of the Discworld to speak for himself - man and boy, bibliophile and computer geek, champion of hats, orang-utans and Dignity in Dying.

    She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

    The easy-to-use, two-step NotSorry Method for mental decluttering will help you unleash the power of not giving a f*ck about: Family dramaHaving a "bikini body"IcelandCo-workers' opinions, pets, and childrenAnd other bullsh*t! And it will free you to spend your time, energy, and money on the things that really matter. So what are you waiting for? Stop giving a f*ck and start living your best life today!

    . . if you wear a business suit to job interviews but pajamas to the grocery store . . . if you have your own apartment but no idea how to cook or clean . . . it's OK. But it doesn't have to be this way.Just because you don't feel like an adult doesn't mean you can't act like one. And it all begins with this funny, wise, and useful book. Based on Kelly Williams Brown's popular blog, ADULTING makes the scary, confusing "real world" approachable, manageable-and even conquerable. This guide will help you to navigate the stormy Sea of Adulthood so that you may find safe harbor in Not Running Out of Toilet Paper Bay, and along the way you will learn:What to check for when renting a new apartment-Not just the nearby bars, but the faucets and stove, among other things.When a busy person can find time to learn more about the world- It involves the intersection of NPR and hair-straightening.How to avoid hooking up with anyone in your office -- Imagine your coworkers having plastic, featureless doll crotches. It helps.The secret to finding a mechanic you love-Or, more realistically, one that will not rob you blind.From breaking up with frenemies to fixing your toilet, this way fun comprehensive handbook is the answer for aspiring grown-ups of all ages.New York Times Bestseller.

    In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer’s Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship to power—and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template. With personal reflections on her own online experiences with sexism, Beard asks: If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine? And how many more centuries should we be expected to wait?

    Larissa MacFarquhar digs deep into the psychological roots and existential dilemmas motivating those rare individuals practicing lives of extreme ethical commitment. The donor who offers up her kidney to a complete stranger; the activist who abandons possessions to devote himself to the cause; the foster parent who adopts dozens of children: such do-gooders inspire us but also force us to question deep-seated notions about what it means to be human. How could these do-gooders value strangers as much as their own loved ones? What does it really take to live a life of extreme virtue? Might it mean making choices as heartbreaking as the one in the old philosophy problem: abandoning a single family member to drown so that two strangers might live? Strangers Drowning combines real-life stories of unimaginable selflessness along with deep meditations on the shocking implications of these ethical acts.

    How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport?Or be told that, as an actress, the part you’re most fitted to play is ‘wife of a terrorist’? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go ‘home’ to India when your home is really London? What is it like to feel you always have to be an ambassador for your race? How does it feel to always tick ‘Other’?Bringing together 21 exciting black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain today, The Good Immigrant explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be ‘other’ in a country that doesn’t seem to want you, doesn’t truly accept you – however many generations you’ve been here – but still needs you for its diversity monitoring forms.Inspired by discussion around why society appears to deem people of colour as bad immigrants – job stealers, benefit scroungers, undeserving refugees – until, by winning Olympic races or baking good cakes, or being conscientious doctors, they cross over and become good immigrants, editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and – most importantly – real.

    When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

    In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.

    On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford presents a wonderfully articulated call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world.

    From adjectives and exclamation points to dialect and hoopetedoodle, Elmore Leonard explains what to avoid, what to aspire to, and what to do when it sounds like "writing" (rewrite).Beautifully designed, filled with free-flowing, elegant illustrations and specially priced, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is the perfect writer's—and reader's—gift.

     In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world's top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems.  It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.