Archives de l’auteur : WebmasterBenisti

LUSH LIVES de J. Vanessa Lyon

A deliciously queer, whimsical and sexy novel set in the art and auction world, LUSH LIVES features a cast of bold and brilliant women who are unafraid to take big risks, challenge authority and maybe, just maybe, find love along the way.

LUSH LIVES
by J. Vanessa Lyon
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, August 2023

For Glory, inheriting her Aunt Lucille’s Harlem brownstone feels like more of a curse than a blessing. She’s a restless West Coast artist struggling to find gallery representation, who doesn’t have the money or time to look after the house of an aunt she hardly knew. She reluctantly moves East, thinking of it as a free residency, but when she decides to see if any of the house’s contents have value, the inheritance leads her to Parkie de Groot, a savvy, ambitious appraiser at a luxury auction house who is on the verge of a coveted promotion if she plays her cards right. Though they are complete opposites, Glory and Parkie form an unlikely alliance and work to unearth the origins of a rare manuscript hidden in the brownstone’s trove. In doing so, they learn more than they could ever have imagined about not only Lucille’s life but the history of Harlem and how it shaped so many artists and thinkers whose footsteps Glory and Parkie hope to walk in.
Though they have an undeniable connection, there are complications. Parkie hasn’t been in a relationship since a toxic ex shattered her belief in herself, and is reluctant to make herself vulnerable with Glory, who is as ambitious as she is passionate about making her art. As intrigued as she is by Parkie, Glory is consumed by her work, not checking her phone for days on end and holding Parkie at arm’s length though she so very much wants to pull the other woman close. When these women do get out of their own way, though, the electricity between them is fierce.
That electricity is tested, however, when Glory and Parkie start keeping secrets from each other, threatening the promise of their relationship and their journey to uncover the mysteries of the brownstone and Harlem and the women who made their lives possible. Will the truths they are searching for bring Parkie and Glory back together or just drive them further apart?
LUSH LIVES is a charming and romantic novel with a sharp enough edge to make things interesting. The prose shoots off the page and into your heart and soul.

J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of The Groves (an Audible Original). She is an art historian, former appraiser, and occasional curator who teaches at a New England liberal arts college.

THE INSECT APOCALYPSE de Brooke Jarvis

A scientific exploration of the insect world that reveals the alarming diminishment of insect life across the globe in the era of climate change.

THE INSECT APOCALYPSE
by Brooke Jarvis
Crown, March 2025

Drawn from the author’s astonishing and deeply disturbing article for the New York Times Magazine (which was downloaded over 1 million times in the first week alone), this will be a fascinating scientific exploration of the insect world that reveals, through extensive research with amateurs and entomologists in the field, the alarming diminishment of insect life across the globe in the era of climate change. The author plans to travel to different countries and environments, including Europe and Latin America, to explore the causes and urgent consequences of life on Earth without insects.

Brooke Jarvis is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, and has written for The New Yorker, Wired, The California Sunday Magazine, GQ, Harper’s, and others. She also teaches feature writing at NYU’s American Journalism Online Master’s Program and mentors young science journalists through The Open Notebook and the Northwest Science Writers Association. Jarvis’ stories have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (Houghton-Mifflin); The Best American Travel Writing (Mariner Books); Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger and Heartbreak from The Atavist Magazine (Norton); and New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s Next Generation of Great Women Journalists (The Sager Group).

ALMOST BROWN de Charlotte Gill

An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.

ALMOST BROWN: A Memoir
by Charlotte Gill
Crown, June 2023

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960’s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.
ALMOST BROWN is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving parents of two different races and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Eventually, her parents drift apart because they just aren’t compatible. But as she finds herself distancing from her father too—why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mom?—she doesn’t know if it’s because of his personality or his race. As a mixed-race child, was this her own unconscious bias favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society? ALMOST BROWN  looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people: What are you? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? And how does your relationship with your parents change as you change and grow older?
In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, “diversity,” and the idea of “race,” a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today.

Charlotte Gill is a bestselling and award-winning writer of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Ladykiller, her first book, was the recipient of the Danuta Gleed Award for short fiction. Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir, was a #1 national bestseller in Canada. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Hazlitt. Gill teaches writing in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College and is the Rogers Communications Chair of Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.

OUTLIVE de Peter Attia & Bill Gifford

Visionary thinker and renowned longevity physician Peter Attia reimagines medicine and redefines aging through his innovative science-based strategies to maximize longevity.

OUTLIVE:
The Science and Art of Longevity
by Peter Attia, MD & Bill Gifford
Crown, May 2023

To Peter Attia, longevity does not mean merely living longer. He sees longevity as the opportunity to live better for longer. But, accomplishing this requires a complete change in the way we think about and approach health and wellness. Attia proposes an exciting, new vision of Western medicine that reframes our thinking and our actions.
Attia’s goal is to shift the mindset we currently have in medicine that focuses on solving the health issue once it arises to assessing the risks and customizing treatment before they actually occur. He calls this Medicine 3.0, a new way of thinking about chronic diseases, their treatment, and how to maintain long-term health. Most books and physicians are interested in improving your lifespan (how long you live), but Peter’s focus is on improving healthspan (the quality of your life). In OUTLIVE, Attia shows readers exactly how to do this through nutritional interventions, exercise physiology, sleep physiology, emotional and mental health strategies, and pharmacology.
Dr. Attia is a sought-after speaker, is well-connected with big names like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Tim Ferriss, among others, and his podcast, The Drive, averages 150K downloads/episode and 1M monthly downloads. He will also be featured in the forthcoming Limitless with Chris Hemsworth, a series on longevity from National Geographic.

Peter Attia, MD is a physician focusing on the applied science of longevity. He trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery. He is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of the fasting app Zero. He is also on the editorial board for the journal, Aging. And has a podcast called The Drive. He is the expert that the “big names” of the world get their medical information from.

THE GOLDEN GATE de Amy Chua

A propulsive historical thriller set in the San Francisco Bay Area before and during WWII, Chua’s page-turning debut brings to life an historical era rife with turbulent social forces and groundbreaking forensic advances, when race and class defined the very essence of power, sex and justice.

THE GOLDEN GATE
by Amy Chua
Minotaur, February 2023
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

As Detective Al Sullivan attempts to solve the case of murdered presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson, shot in his suite at the fabled Claremont Hotel, he finds his investigation leading back again and again to the 1930 death of 7 year-old Iris Stafford, a descendant of the Bainbridge clan, one of San Francisco’s wealthiest families. Yet the threads connecting candidate Walter Wilkinson to the long-dead girl are tangled – and the clues obscured by the turbulent crosswinds of the ongoing war, the Japanese American internment, California’s racist legacy and simmering labor unrest.
At the center of the mystery are the three beautiful Bainbridge heiresses: sisters Nicole and Cassie, and their enigmatic cousin Isabella, sister of dead Iris. Did one of them have a reason to kill Wilkinson? Did Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, in residence in Berkeley under opaque circumstances, have something to do with his presence at the Claremont? What about the Communist labor radicals, whose hatred of Wilkinson’s establishment ties were matched only by the brutality of police repression? Caught between an ambitious D.A., the heiresses’ iron-willed grandmother, the geopolitical forces of the war, and his conflicted attraction to the fascinating Isabella, Sullivan must navigate a landscape in which his own history is a double-edged sword.

Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of previous nonfiction narratives, including A World On Fire and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.