In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. In form, and in substance.This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own.McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how—when you’re in the thick of it—the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.Thick --In the name of beauty --Dying to be competent --Know your whites --Black is over (or, special black) --The price of fabulousness --Black girlhood, interrupted --Girl 6 --Notes

    Researched for months and even years on end, they explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning. He searches for tigers in India, and uncovers a multigenerational mystery involving an oil tycoon and his niece turned stepdaughter turned wife in the Oklahoma town where he grew up. Through each adventure, Phillips's remarkable voice becomes a character itself--full of verve, rich with offhanded humor, and revealing unexpected vulnerability.Dogged, self-aware, and radiating a contagious enthusiasm for his subjects, Phillips is an exhilarating guide to the confusion and wonder of the world today. If John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead was the last great collection of New Journalism from the print era, Impossible Owls is the first of the digital age.

    This is a powerful true story of one young girls struggle to survive the state care system in the 70's and 80's. Amelia has just one wish, to make it to adulthood, to hold her destiny in her own hands. This is a harrowing true story, one of survival and human strength. Amelia has been separated from all her siblings never to see them again for many years, she is moved from one children's home to another, until finally it's just too much for her to bear. Amelia starts to wonder about the peace and finality of her own death.

    What would this reading trajectory say about you? With passion, humor, and insight, the editor of The New York Times Book Review shares the stories that have shaped her life.Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for twenty-eight years – carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand, from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully removed from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk – reliable if frayed, anonymous-looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob.Bob is Paul’s Book of Books, a journal that records every book she’s ever read, from Sweet Valley High to Anna Karenina, from Catch-22 to Swimming to Cambodia, a journey in reading that reflects her inner life – her fantasies and hopes, her mistakes and missteps, her dreams and her ideas, both half-baked and wholehearted. Her life, in turn, influences the books she chooses, whether for solace or escape, information or sheer entertainment.But My Life with Bob isn’t really about those books. It’s about the deep and powerful relationship between book and reader. It’s about the way books provide each of us the perspective, courage, companionship, and imperfect self-knowledge to forge our own path. It’s about why we read what we read and how those choices make us who we are. It’s about how we make our own stories.

    They remove the books that patrons no longer check out. And they put back the books they treasure. Annie Spence, who has a decade of experience as a Midwestern librarian, does this not only at her Michigan library but also at home, for her neighbors, at cocktail parties—everywhere. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, she addresses those books directly. We read her love letters to The Goldfinch and Matilda, as well as her snarky break-ups with Fifty Shades of Grey and Dear John. Her notes to The Virgin Suicides and The Time Traveler’s Wife feel like classics, sure to strike a powerful chord with readers. Through the lens of the books in her life, Annie comments on everything from women’s psychology to gay culture to health to poverty to childhood aspirations. Hilarious, compassionate, and wise, Dear Fahrenheit 451 is the consummate book-lover's birthday present, stocking stuffer, holiday gift, and all-purpose humor book.

    Afraid of looking like an idiot? Alexandra Petri lost Jeopardy! by answering “Who is that dude?” on national TV. Afraid of bad jokes? Alexandra Petri won an international pun championship.Petri has been a debutante, reenacted the Civil War, and fended off suitors at a Star Wars convention while wearing a Jabba the Hutt suit. One time, she let some cult members she met on the street baptize her, just to be polite. She’s a connoisseur of the kind of awkwardness that most people spend whole lifetimes trying to avoid. If John Hodgman and Amy Sedaris had a baby…they would never let Petri babysit it.But Petri is here to tell you: Everything you fear is not so bad. Trust her. She’s tried it. And in the course of her misadventures, she’s learned that there are worse things out there than awkwardness—and that interesting things start to happen when you stop caring what people think.

    I Don't Care About Your Band posits that lately the worst guys to date are the ones who seem sensitive. It's the jerks in nice guy clothing, not the players in Ed Hardy, who break the hearts of modern girls who grew up in the shadow of feminism, thinking they could have everything, but end up compromising constantly. The cowards, the kidults, the critics, and the contenders: these are the stars of Klausner's memoir about how hard it is to find a man--good or otherwise--when you're a cynical grown-up exiled in the dregs of Guyville. Off the popularity of her New York Times "Modern Love" piece about getting the brush-off from an indie rock musician, I Don't care About Your Band is marbled with the wry strains of Julie Klausner's precocious curmudgeonry and brimming with truths that anyone who's ever been on a date will relate to. Klausner is an expert at landing herself waist-deep in crazy, time and time again, in part because her experience as a comedy writer (Best Week Ever, TV Funhouse on SNL) and sketch comedian from NYC's Upright Citizens Brigade fuels her philosophy of how any scene should unfold, which is, "What? That sounds crazy? Okay, I'll do it." I Don't Care About Your Band charts a distinctly human journey of a strong-willed but vulnerable protagonist who loves men like it's her job, but who's done with guys who know more about love songs than love. Klausner's is a new outlook on dating in a time of pop culture obsession, and she spent her 20's doing personal field research to back up her philosophies. This is the girl's version of High Fidelity. By turns explicit, funny and moving, Klausner's debut shows the evolution of a young woman who endured myriad encounters with the wrong guys, to emerge with real- world wisdom on matters of the heart. I Don't Care About Your Band is Julie Klausner's manifesto, and every one of us can relate.

    For a full year she penned short pieces, the subjects of which were suggested by editors at the Guardian, turning the writing process into a kind of prolonged interlocution; the subjects ranged from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the adaptation of her novels to film and TV. As she said in her final column: “I have written as an author of novels, taking on matters that are important to me and that—if I have the will and the time—I’d like to develop within real narrative mechanisms.”Here, then, are the seeds of possible future novels, the ruminations of an internationally beloved author, and the abiding preoccupations of a writer who has been called “one of the great novelists of our time” (the New York Times). Gathered together for the first time in a beautiful gift edition and accompanied by an entirely new introduction written by Elena Ferrante and Andrea Ucini’s intelligent, witty, and beautiful illustrations, this is a must for all Ferrante fans.

    Her parents, however, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, "part ally, part betrayer." Her mother is given to icy bursts of temper that punctuate a deep indifference. Never sharing more than a few moments with his daughter, Fox's father allows her to be shuttled from New York City, where she lives with her passive Spanish grandmother, to Cuba, where she roams freely on a relative's sugarcane plantation, to California, where she finds herself cast upon Hollywood's seedy margins. The thread binding these wanderings is the "borrowed finery" of the title of this astonishing memoir of one writer's unusual beginnings, which was instantly recognized as a modern classic.

    . . reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates. The work’s lasting message is that love, like Jarrell’s prose, is both painful and beautiful. A stunning series of recollections with a feminist slant."―Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW“Brave, clear-eyed, compelling and powerful, I’m the One Who Got Away is a riveting story of love and survival. Andrea Jarrell is an uncommonly fine writer whose gritty realism is matched by the rigor and elegance of her prose. This is a wonderful debut.” ―Dani Shapiro, Hourglass and Still Writing“I was enthralled. Andrea Jarrell is a stunning writer, moving deftly through decades in near-cinematic prose (seriously: somebody make this book into a movie!)."―Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life and Once I Was Cool“Andrea Jarrell's beautiful memoir―her adventurous yet protective single mother; insinuating father/stranger; friends and encounters, lovers and spouse, templates of what she must move beyond, accept, or embrace to become bravely herself―is as riveting as a mystery and as filling as a feast.”―William O'Sullivan, Washingtonian magazine “Beautifully told with great wisdom and clear-eyed courage, Andrea Jarrell has mapped her personal journey in life―the fears and obstacles and losses as well as the joys and comforts of love and finding her own sense of home. I could not put it down.”―Jill McCorkle, Life After Life and Going Away ShoesWhen Andrea Jarrell was a girl, her mother often told her of their escape from Jarrell's dangerous, cunning father as if it was a bedtime story. In this real-life Gilmore Girls story, mother and daughter develop an unusual bond, complicated by a cautionary tale of sexual desire and betrayal. Once grown, Jarrell thinks she's put that chapter of her life behind her--until a woman she knows is murdered, and she suddenly sees how her mother's captivating story has also held her captive, influencing her choices in lovers and friends. Set in motion by this murder, Jarrell's compact memoir is about the difficulty that daughters have separating from--while still honoring--their mothers, and about the perils of breaking the hereditary cycle of addiction. It's also about Jarrell's quest to make a successful marriage and family of her own--a journey first chronicled in her "Modern Love" essay for The New York Times. Without preaching or prescribing, I'm the One Who Got Away is a life-affirming story of having the courage to become both safe enough and vulnerable enough to love and be loved.

    Funny, provocative and shot through with refreshing amounts of common sense, Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse celebrates and commiserates on the state of things in our not entirely glorious nation.

    We are a bombarded generation: Facebook, billboards, Twitter, Instagram, taxes, newspapers, watches monitoring our sleep, apps that read our pulse, terrorism. There's such an onslaught to the senses these days it's a marvel any of us manage to get out of bed. I love bed. While we are overwhelmed and confused by the miasmic cloud of information, there are those that seek to take advantage: there are parking fines, hate Tweets, Nigerian email scams and Christmas newsletters from old school friends about their ugly kids. And just as we're getting round to doing something about it, we're distracted again. I, Joe Lycett, comedian, wordsmith, and professional complainer, am here to help. During my short life of doing largely nothing I've discovered solutions to many of life's problems, which I impart to you, dear Reader. Containing a centurion of complaint letters to unsuspecting celebrities, companies and anyone brave enough to clog up my phone, as well as illustrations, one-liners , jokes and life hacks, this little gem offers you a collection of tips and advice* for all manner of modern woe. By the time you have finished reading this book you will have learnt how to: - Reverse a parking fine - Manipulate the tabloid press - Navigate social media - Respond to hate mail - Out-weird internet trolls - Contest a so-called ripe avocado - Send the perfect Christmas newsletter - Defeat ISIS - Take down multi-national companiesAND MUCH, MUCH MORE! Joe Lycett x * If you are looking for guidance with taxes, quitting smoking, moving house, love, divorce, education, healthcare or anything actually important may I recommend speaking to friends or family members and not consulting a book by a comedian who eats halloumi at least twice a day.

    White himself, the essays in this volume span a lifetime of writing and a body of work without peer.  "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading," he writes in the Foreword, "alone with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." These essays are incomparable; this is a volume to treasure and savor at one's leisure.

    . . maybe while locked in a closet. What a relief it is that someone finally admits that she is afraid of nearly everything; that she is jealous even of people whose lives are on the verge of collapse; and that she has, at times, tried to pass for a gentile.

    Tired of trying so hard, Sophia finally let go of the crushing pressure to be perfect. She navigates the highs and lows of the dating world (high: being a beta tester for Bumble; low: hastily shaving her legs before a hotel hookup and getting blood all over the sheets), and walks the line between being a “chill” girl and making sure her boyfriend’s nonchalance about altitude sickness doesn’t get him killed. She learns what it means to be a feminist, how to embrace her own voice, and when to listen to women who have been through more and have been doing the work longer. With topics ranging from how to be the life of the party (even when you have crippling anxiety), to an ill-fated consultation with a dietician who deemed Sophia’s overindulgence in ketchup a serious health risk, to a masterful argument for why no one should judge you for having an encyclopedic knowledge of reality TV, Well, This Is Exhausting is not only “one of the funniest books you’ll read this year, but it’s also one of the most important” (Shondaland).