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WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAYA collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award-winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer.Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition. Thurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time-"a master of vivisection," as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times. "When she's done with a subject, it's still living, mystery intact."

One of the top ten books of the year at The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture/New York magazineA best book of the year at Los Angeles Times, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The New Yorker, Vogue, KirkusThe acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, and illuminates the startling connections between diagnosis and identity.Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman celebrated as a saint who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children's forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn't know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv's gripping exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel-until it no longer does.Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives-and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.

"I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise is like an exquisite string of pearls: the perfect balance of elegance, style, design, and beauty. This book is inspiring, spirited, and totally absorbing." -Diane von FurstenbergThe story of Bunny Mellon, the great landscape and interior designer, becomes a revelatory exploration of extreme wealth in the American century. Bunny Mellon, whose life was marked by astonishing good fortune as well as tragedy and scandal, remains a singular figure in the annals of American design. She had her finger on the pulse of American culture and possessed a rare, once-in-a-generation sense of style and grace. Her most celebrated work-the White House Rose Garden, designed during the presidency of John F. Kennedy-demonstrated how formal restraint and the sparing use of color could be deployed to maximal effect. Later, her understated landscape design for the Kennedy grave site at Arlington National Cemetery changed the face of American public memorials.Mellon was a famously private person, and many of her greatest achievements remained concealed from public view. Her rarely seen gardens and domestic interiors at eight different properties on three continents became legends and models. At Oak Spring Farm in Virginia, the bibliographic riches of her Garden Library were twinned with the expansive flowering gardens lying below the Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building. At her home on Nantucket, she pruned back the landscape to reveal the elemental forms of nature. Mellon also ranked as one of the great art collectors of her era, encouraging her husband Paul to use his family's vast wealth to acquire hundreds of nineteenth-century French paintings, many of which were donated to the National Gallery of Art. Her own tastes ranged from Mark Rothko to Richard Diebenkorn-in quantity.In I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold-who knew Mellon personally-delves into her subject's closely guarded personal archives to construct an unrivaled portrait of a woman as complex and multifaceted as the gardens and homes on which she left her mark. Mellon tested the anodyne 1950s model of woman-as-wife-as-mother by getting a divorce, admitting candidly to her first husband that she wanted a richer one. She imperiously traded old friends for new and ultimately used her reputation, her connections, and above all her money to help fund John Edwards's short-lived presidential campaign. She led an American version of a royal court that, over the years, included Jackie Kennedy, Hubert de Givenchy, and I. M. Pei.How Mellon's character, style, and taste developed together to produce her greatest accomplishments-private and public-is the real subject of this biography.

A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year | Long-listed for the Plutarch AwardA bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes-and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself.In The Grand Affair, the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent's nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters-feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer's life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent's most daring and powerful work.Illuminating Sargent's restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

A Telegraph Best Book of 2022Faith, Hope and Carnage is a book about Nick Cave's inner life.Created from more than forty hours of intimate conversations with the journalist Seán O'Hagan, this is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave's own words, of what really drives his life and creativity.The book examines questions of belief, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws candidly on Cave's life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years.Faith, Hope and Carnage offers ladders of hope and inspiration from a true visionary.

Winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Long-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA Slate Top Ten Book of the YearA TIME Best Fiction Book of 2022Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and more.A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised-the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves-until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

Roberto Calasso, "a literary institution of one" (The Paris Review), tells the story of the eternal life of Utnapishtim, the savior of man, in the eleventh part of his great literary project.A long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans, who were making too much noise and disturbing their sleep, and they decided to send a Flood to destroy them. But Ea, the god of fresh underground water, didn't agree and advised one of his favorite mortals, Utnapishtim, to build a quadrangular boat to house humans and animals. So Utnapishtim saved living creatures from the Flood. Rather than punish Utnapishtim, Enlil, king of the gods, granted him eternal life and banished him to the island of Dilmun. Thousands of years later, Sindbad the Sailor is shipwrecked on that very same island, and the two begin a conversation about courage, loss, salvation, and sacrifice. What Utnapishtim tells Sindbad is the subject of this book, the eleventh part of Roberto Calasso's great opus that began in 1983 with The Ruin of Kasch. The Tablet of Destinies, a continuous narrative from beginning to end, delves into our earliest mythologies and records the origin stories of human civilization.

The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I is an incredibly moving and insightful book written by the talented Lindsey Fitzharris. Published by PICADOR in 2023, this compelling narrative falls under the genre of historical non-fiction. Fitzharris masterfully combines medical history and wartime narrative to bring to life the story of a visionary surgeon who dedicated his life to treating the disfigured soldiers of World War I. The Facemaker not only sheds light on the horrors of war but also the indomitable spirit of those who seek to heal amidst chaos. This is a book that will leave you with a profound appreciation for the advances in medical science and the heroes who make them possible. A must-read published by PICADOR.

"A spellbinding book." -Megha Majumdar"Akil Kumarasamy is a singular talent." -Cathy Park HongIn the near future, a young woman finds her mother's body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets out on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students beset by a drought and living at the edge of a war as they create a new way of existing to help the people around them. As she works on the translation, her life and the manuscript become entangled. Later, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project force her to question her own moral compass. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world? Written in vivid and pulsating prose that alternates between the young woman's life and passages of the translated manuscript, Akil Kumarasamy's Meet Us by the Roaring Sea is a remarkable, genre-bending exploration of memory, technology, friendship, love, consciousness, and the costs of caring for others in an age when we are caught within the swamps of our own minds.

A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell's reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell's achievement.Includes black-and-white photographs

A Woman's Battles and Transformations is a portrait of the author's mother by the acclaimed writer of the international bestsellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence.One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago. A picture of a happy young woman full of hopes and dreams. Growing up, Édouard knew only his mother's sadness, as she found herself trapped in the humdrum life of a housewife, and her struggles against the dominant world of men. What happened in those years since the photo was taken?Then, at the age of forty-five, his mother frees herself from this oppression. She leaves her husband and her old life behind to start anew in Paris.A Woman's Battles and Transformations is Édouard Louis's most tender book yet. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives, with politics and power-and with the possibility of escape. It is an exquisite and loving portrait of a mother, and an honoring of her self-discovery and liberation as she chooses to live on her own terms.

A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humaneIn the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war, with the United States exercising dominion everywhere. In Humane, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical-to ban torture and limit civilian casualties-have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier?To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics and law of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed-and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes.In the post-9/11 era, the U.S. military embraced the agenda of humane war, driven by both the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle moved from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but the war's foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends have only accelerated since. Even as the Obama and Trump administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the "forever" war.Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars become more protracted, they are also becoming more humane. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

Enter the world of the Delivery Boy, who must pedal his way to five-star customer ratings-and, perhaps, freedom-in novelist and graphic designer Peter Mendelsund's The Delivery.Countries go wrong sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country-a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong.In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped working for a company that makes its money dispatching an army of undocumented refugees to bring the well-off men and women of this confounding metropolis their dinners. Whatever he might have been at home, this citizen is now a Delivery Boy: a member of a new and invisible working class, pedaling his power-assist bike through traffic, hoping for a decent tip and a five-star rating.He is decidedly a Delivery Boy; sometimes he even feels like a Delivery Baby; certainly he's not yet a Delivery Man, though he'll have to man up if he wants to impress N., the aloof dispatcher who sends him his orders and helps him with his English.Can our hero avoid the wrath of his Supervisor, get the girl, and escape his indentured servitude? Can someone in his predicament ever have a happy ending? Who gets to decide? And who's telling this story, anyway?Harrowing and hilarious, The Delivery is a fable for and about our times: an exploration of the ways language and commerce unite and isolate every one of us, native and immigrant both.

A Best Book of 2020 at Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Refinery29 A Best Book of Summer at Vulture, Refinery29, Yahoo! Life, Alma, Subway Book Review, and Lit HubA Best Book of the Month at Entertainment Weekly, Hello Giggles, and PopSugarEDITORS' CHOICE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 CARNEGIE MEDAL and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize"Miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting." -Lauren Groff, author of Florida"A twisting, strange delight, Parakeet shimmers a soft and generous light on the darkest of a woman's innermost thoughts." -Kristen Iversen, Refinery29Acclaimed author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one.The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the Internet? Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother.In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried. A novel that does justice to the hectic confusion of becoming a woman today, Parakeet asks and begins to answer the essential questions. How do our memories make, cage, and free us? How do we honor our experiences and still become our strongest, truest selves? Who are we responsible for, what do we owe them, and how do we allow them to change? Urgent, strange, warm-hearted, and sly, Parakeet is ribboned with joy, fear, and an inextricable thread of real love. It is a startling, unforgettable, life-embracing exploration of self and connection.

The hip break-out novel from 2016 Man Booker Prize winning author, Paul Beatty, about a disaffected Los Angeles DJ who travels to post-Wall Berlin in search of his transatlantic doppelganger.Hailed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best writers of his generation, Paul Beatty turns his creative eye to man's search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic world. After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little know avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods, the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic-and spiritual-other. Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.