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Showing 1 - 8 of 8 items
"Here is my disconnect: the private and public self. My mind and body. The real person and curated spectacle. .…
. . Are there actual roots with which to fasten this performance to anything real?"As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, who self-harms to cope with mental illness, her love language is to feed, but daily she wishes her body would disappear. These facets of Wills' being have served as the anchors she once clung to and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be.Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. And though the experiences of accumulating this knowledge have often been shot through with pain, Wills spins these threads into priceless gold—a radical, fearless vision of kinship and family. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Wills' self, transforming them into something more—something that could be everything.
Riveting nonfiction from multi-award-winning author Lisa Moore, based on the shocking true story of a teenaged boy who endured abuse…
and solitary confinement at a reform school in Newfoundland, but survived through grit and redemptive love.Invisible Prisons is an extraordinary, empathetic collaboration between the magnificent writer Lisa Moore, best-known for her award-winning fiction, and a man named Jack Whalen, who as a child was held for four years at a reform school for boys in St John’s, where he suffered jaw-dropping abuses and deprivations. Despite the odds stacked against him, he found love on the other side, and managed to turn his life around as a husband and father. His daughter, Brittany, vowed at a young age to become a lawyer so that she could seek justice for him. Today, that is exactly what she is doing—and Jack's case is part of a lawsuit currently before the courts.The story has parallels with Unholy Orders by Michael Harris about the Mount Cashel orphanage, and with the many horrific stories about residential schools—all of which expose a paternalistic state causing harm and a larger society looking away. Yet two powerful qualities set this story apart. As much as it is about an abusive system preying on children, it is also a tender tale of love between Jack and his wife Glennis, who saw the good man inside a damaged person and believed in him. And it is written in a novelistic way by the great Lisa Moore, who makes vividly real every moment and character in these pages.
From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on…
his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him. Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.
From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on…
his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.
"Here is my disconnect: the private and public self. My mind and body. The real person and curated spectacle. .…
. . Are there actual roots with which to fasten this performance to anything real?"As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, who self-harms to cope with mental illness, her love language is to feed, but daily she wishes her body would disappear. These facets of Wills' being have served as the anchors she once clung to and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be.Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. And though the experiences of accumulating this knowledge have often been shot through with pain, Wills spins these threads into priceless gold—a radical, fearless vision of kinship and family. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Wills' self, transforming them into something more—something that could be everything.
In a deeply personal investigation, award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari takes us across three continents and back a century as she…
seeks the truth behind a family secret. Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left him, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? For Sadiya herself, uninterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations? Through her inquiry, Sadiya discovers what her daadi's life was like during that separation and she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like hers, and how the national freedoms achieved in 1947 did not extend to women’s lives. She sees the threads of this history woven through each generation after, and finds an unexpected sense of belonging in a culture that, at first blush, shuns women for wanting lives of their own.
Riveting nonfiction from multi-award-winning author Lisa Moore, based on the shocking true story of a teenaged boy who endured abuse…
and solitary confinement at a reform school in Newfoundland, but survived through grit and redemptive love.Invisible Prisons is an extraordinary, empathetic collaboration between the magnificent writer Lisa Moore, best-known for her award-winning fiction, and a man named Jack Whalen, who as a child was held for four years at a reform school for boys in St John&’s, where he suffered jaw-dropping abuses and deprivations. Despite the odds stacked against him, he found love on the other side, and managed to turn his life around as a husband and father. His daughter, Brittany, vowed at a young age to become a lawyer so that she could seek justice for him. Today, that is exactly what she is doing—and Jack's case is part of a lawsuit currently before the courts.The story has parallels with Unholy Orders by Michael Harris about the Mount Cashel orphanage, and with the many horrific stories about residential schools—all of which expose a paternalistic state causing harm and a larger society looking away. Yet two powerful qualities set this story apart. As much as it is about an abusive system preying on children, it is also a tender tale of love between Jack and his wife Glennis, who saw the good man inside a damaged person and believed in him. And it is written in a novelistic way by the great Lisa Moore, who makes vividly real every moment and character in these pages.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it&’s been misunderstood, and why it&’s our…
only chance for survival—by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny&“A rigorous and visionary argument . . . Buy or borrow this book, read it, take it to heart.&”—The GuardianTimothy Snyder has been called &“the leading interpreter of our dark times.&” As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism here and abroad. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we&’re fighting for.Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn&’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes—the habits of mind—that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions (championed by the right) but also the role of institutions (the purview of the left). Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity, and grace.