Archives de l’auteur : WebmasterBenisti

THE HOUSE PARTY de Rita Cameron

A compulsively readable novel for fans of book club favorites like Such a Fun Age, Little Fires Everywhere, and Dear Edward that poses powerful questions about privilege and mercy, and examines how a single, irreversible event can send a seemingly tranquil town into total disarray…

THE HOUSE PARTY
by Rita Cameron
William Morrow, September 2022
(via Writers House)

The party starts out innocently enough. On a Friday afternoon, with only six weeks ‘til graduation, a few local teenagers find a garage door opener on the deck of a nearly-fully-constructed luxury home. By evening, word has gotten out, and virtually the entire the senior class is partying at the house, music blasting, booze flowing. The skaters are using the empty swimming pool as a half-pipe, some kid is selling coke in the upstairs bathroom, and the stoners are building a fire pit in the backyard. It’s a bona fide rager. Of course nobody plans to trash the house, but somehow, by the end of the night, the kitchen is flooded, there are holes in the walls, the deck is singed, and the custom glass windows are shattered. What should have been the best party of the year has become the town’s worst ever case of vandalism.
And just like that, Mae Jensen’s dream house has been destroyed, before she ever even had a chance to live in it. The house she has spent countless hours designing and obsessing over, the house that was going to be proof she had made the right choices, that she had built something beautiful out of her life. The perfect house that would compensate for her failure to have a child, the house that was going to save her marriage. All ruined. And for what?
THE HOUSE PARTY explores the fallout from this one out-of-control night, putting Mae’s marriage to the ultimate test, jeopardizing the futures of the “good kids” who have done a very bad thing, and dividing the town over questions of privilege and responsibility. As the police close in on a list of suspects, the tight-knit community begins to turn on each other, and on anyone they consider an outsider, as they attempt to protect their futures and their families.
Set against the backdrop of the 2008 mortgage crisis and recession, THE HOUSE PARTY examines how easily friendships, careers, and marriages can unravel when the differences in wealth and power that lie beneath them are forced to the surface.

Rita Cameron is the author of Ophelia’s Muse (Kensington, 2015). She studied English literature at Columbia University, and law at the University of Pennsylvania.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD d’Erik Hoel

In a sweeping intellectual narrative, award-winning neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel argues there are two fundamental perspectives on reality: the intrinsic and the extrinsic. The intrinsic perspective is that of consciousness and experience, the feelings and sensations that make up your waking world. The extrinsic perspective is that of science, which views the universe as a set of mechanisms and relations.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD:
Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science
by Erik Hoel
Avid Reader, Fall 2023
(via Writers House)

The two perspectives have had an uneasy, sometimes troubled relationship. Throughout history some cultures have emphasized one perspective more than the other, which has radically changed how humans think about and conceptualize our own selves. Technologies and media often implicitly enforce one perspective: for instance, television and movies take the extrinsic perspective, exploring the world of relations and images, while literature and novels take the intrinsic perspective, exploring the world of consciousness.
Hoel offers a whirlwind tour of the two perspectives across the ages, like how the intrinsic perspective is absent from Homeric epics and earlier eras, its historical development and ultimate culmination in the invention of the novel, the separation of the two perspectives by Galileo Galilei when he recommended science remove the observer to focus solely on the extrinsic, and the reintroduction of the intrinsic perspective to science by Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, who proposed a search for the neural correlates of consciousness that continues to this day.
Hoel shows how our picture of reality is incomplete following Galileo’s separation and emphasis on the extrinsic. The ignored intrinsic perspective sheds light on fundamental scientific questions like causation, emergence, how the brain functions, the biological purpose of dreaming, artificial intelligence, and even why humans create art. He reveals how our own culture is becoming more based in the extrinsic perspective over time, neglecting the intrinsic and forgetting the importance of human consciousness, all to its cultural, scientific, and artistic detriment.
Ultimately, the two perspectives have stood apart for too long and must be reunited. To this end Hoel proposes a way to merge the intrinsic and the extrinsic in a radical new theory of consciousness.

Erik Hoel received his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Madison-Wisconsin. He is a research assistant professor at Tufts University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the NeuroTechnology Lab, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Hoel is a 2018 Forbes “30 under 30” for his neuroscientific research on consciousness. His first novel, The Revelations, was published in April 2021 by The Overlook Press. He lives in Massachusetts.

THE KINGDOMS OF SAVANNAH de George Dawes Green

A new suspense novel from the Edgar award-winning author of The Caveman’s Valentine.

THE KINGDOMS OF SAVANNAH
by George Dawes Green
Celadon/St. Martin’s Press, July 2022
(via The Friedrich Agency)

When matriarch Morgana Musgrove calls upon her prodigal son Ransom to help her with a case, the defunct M. Musgrove & Family Detective Agency is back in business, albeit reluctantly. Tensions rise between the Musgroves and whispers of a mysterious lost “Kingdom”—descendants of the African-American soldiers who fought for King George, and afterwards formed a secret community, refusing to return to slavery—float in the sultry Savannah night. The family of investigators creeps closer and closer to exposing the city’s seedy underbelly, and a depraved history that a powerful few are determined to keep hidden, no matter the cost…

George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth and Unchained, is an internationally celebrated author. His first novel, The Caveman’s Valentine, won the Edgar Award and became a motion picture starring Samuel L. Jackson. The Juror was an international bestseller in more than twenty languages and was the basis for the movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. Ravens was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail, and many other publications. George Green grew up in Georgia and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

AMY AMONG THE SERIAL KILLERS de Jincy Willet

Jincy Willett’s most beloved characters return in this wickedly smart and funny take on the thriller genre by one of our most acclaimed literary humorists.

AMY AMONG THE SERIAL KILLERS
by Jincy Willet
St. Martin’s Press, August 2022

Carla Karolac is doing just fine. Having escaped the clutches of her controlling mother and founded a successful writing retreat in which participants are confined to windowless cells until they hit their daily word count, she lives a comfortable, if solitary, existence. If only her therapist, Toonie, would stop going on about Carla’s nonexistent love life and start addressing her writer’s block, she might be able to make some progress. But then Carla finds Toonie murdered, and suddenly her unfinished memoir is the least of her concerns. Without quite knowing why, she dials an old phone number.
Amy Gallup, retired after decades as a writing instructor, is surprised to hear from her former student Carla out of the blue, three years since they last spoke. She’s even more shocked when she finds out the reason for Carla’s call. Suddenly, she finds herself swept up in a murder investigation that soon brings her whole old writing group back together. But they’ll need all the help they can get, as one murder leads to another, and suspicions of a serial killer mount across San Diego.
Full of Jincy Willett’s trademark dark humor, an unforgettable cast of characters, and two of the most endearingly imperfect protagonists who have ever attempted to solve a murder, AMY AMONG THE SERIAL KILLERS shows us what can be gained when we begin to break down our own walls and let others inside…as long as they aren’t murderers.

Jincy Willet is the author of Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Winner of the National Book Award, and The Writing Class, which have been translated and sold internationally. Her stories have been published in Cosmopolitan, McSweeney’s Quarterly and other magazines. She frequently reviews for The New York Times Book Review.

ROSES, IN THE MOUTH OF A LION de Bushra Rehman

From acclaimed poet Bushra Rehman, who is a key figure in South Asian American literary circles, comes an unforgettable story about female friendship and queer love in a Pakistani-American community.

ROSES, IN THE MOUTH OF A LION
by Bushra Rehman
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, December 2022

Razia Mirza lives in a tight-knit Muslim neighborhood in Corona, Queens. She has known her best friend Saima since she was born. Broken into three sections, ROSES, IN THE MOUTH OF A LION first chronicles their friendship as city children who find misadventures among the wild grape vines and weeds growing in the parking lots of Queens. When the friendship ends, Razia’s grief and loss transform her forever. In the second section, Razia befriends Taslima, a new girl in the community. Together, they chafe at the restrictions imposed on them and embark on small rebellions: listening to scandalous American music, wearing mini-skirts, and cutting school to explore the city, as Razia begins to question some of the traditions her parents expect her to follow. Section three takes Razia further afield when she’s admitted to Stuyvesant, a specialized high school in Manhattan. There she meets Angela, who lives with her Bohemian mother in the East Village. Razia is attracted to Angela in a way that surprises her but fills her with a new joy of understanding. When their queer relationship is discovered by a Pakistani Aunty in the community, Razia is forced to choose between her family and her own future. Following Razia from girlhood to young adulthood, this novel beautifully chronicles her journey toward reconciling her heritage and Muslim traditions with her desire to be true to her life path. With humor and pathos, we delve into the emotional complexities of religious communities, female friendship and queer desire.

A key figure in the South Asian American literary and Women of Color feminist circle, Bushra Rehman is a writer and speaker of tremendous power. Her connection with audiences comes from years of being on the road, sharing her particular brand of storytelling, political writing, and poetry. As a young woman, Rehman coedited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, a seminal work on race and American feminism. Inspired by the writers in Colonize This! Rehman’s wrote her autobiographical novel Corona (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013), a dark comedy about Razia Mirza, a young Pakistani woman growing up in a tight-knit Muslim community in Corona, Queens. Rehman’s latest work, Marianna’s Beauty Salon (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), is a collection of poems, gathered over twenty years of her life in the South Asian queer activist scene.