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Things in nature merely grow
By Yiyun Li. 2025
Yiyun Li's remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. "There is no…
good way to say this," Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this audiobook. "There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home." There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a timeline." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: "doing the things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is an audiobook for James, but it is not an audiobook about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, "The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now." Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li's indomitable spirit
How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty
By Bonny Reichert. 2025
A moving culinary memoir about the relationship between food and family—and sustenance and survival—from a chef, award-winning Canadian journalist, and…
daughter of a Holocaust survivor.When you’re raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head on. Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish. Tracing the defining moments of her life, from her colorful childhood in the restaurant business to the crumbling of her first marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, her decision to become a chef and that life-altering visit to Poland, the author recounts a tale of scarcity and plenty, stepping into the kitchen to connect her past to her future. Whether it's the flaky potato knishes and molasses porridge bread she learned to bake at her Baba Sarah’s elbow, the creamy vichyssoise she taught herself to cook in her tiny student apartment, or the brown butter eggs her father, now 93, still scrambles for her whenever she needs comfort, cuisine is both an anchor and an identity; a source of joy and a signifier of survival.How to Share an Egg is a journey of deep flavors and surprising contrasts. By turns sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, this is one woman's search to find her voice as a writer, chef, mother and daughter. Do the tiny dramas of her own life matter in comparison to everything her father has seen and done? This moving exploration of heritage, inheritance, and self-discovery sets out to find the answer.
Dead and Alive: Essays
By Zadie Smith. 2025
A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays.In the past two decades, few…
writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion.This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to take another look at Flannery O'Connor and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations of our troubled times.With an eye towards the past and the present, Smith examines what it means to identify with our contemporary world and the history that frames it.
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir
By Neko Case. 2025
Singer-songwriter Neko Case paints a vivid portrait of an extraordinary life—one forged through a poverty-stricken childhood, obsessive desire, bursts of…
comedy, and indispensable friendships—reflecting on the way art, music, and a deep connection to nature helped her become a beloved, Grammy-nominated artist. Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans. In THE HARDER I FIGHT THE MORE I LOVE YOU, Case brings her trademark candor and precision to a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisible girl “raised by two dogs and a space heater” in rural Washington state to her improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent. In luminous, sharp-edged prose, Case shows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel the monotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art. THE HARDER I FIGHT THE MORE I LOVE YOU is a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face. New York Times Bestseller
Dead and Alive: Essays
By Zadie Smith. 2025
A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays.In the past two decades, few…
writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion.This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith&’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to take another look at Flannery O'Connor and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations of our troubled times.With an eye towards the past and the present, Smith examines what it means to identify with our contemporary world and the history that frames it.
Things in Nature Merely Grow
By Yiyun Li. 2025
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.“There is no good…
way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.