Archives de l’auteur : WebmasterBenisti

HOMEBODIES de Tembe Denton-Hurst

Urgent, propulsive, and strikingly insightful, HOMEBODIES is a thrilling debut novel about a young Black writer whose world is turned upside down when she loses her coveted job in media and her searing manifesto about racism in the industry goes viral.

HOMEBODIES
by Tembe Denton-Hurst
Harper, May 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter. She has a flashy media job that makes her feel successful and a devoted girlfriend who takes care of her when she comes home exhausted and demoralized. It’s not all A-list parties and steamy romance, but Mickey’s on her way, and it’s far from the messy life she left behind in Maryland. Despite being overlooked and mistreated at work, it seems like she might finally get the chance to prove herself—until she finds out she’s being replaced.
Distraught and enraged, Mickey fires back with a detailed letter outlining the racism and sexism she’s endured as a Black woman in media, certain it will change the world for the better. But when her letter is met with overwhelming silence, Mickey is sent into a tailspin of self-doubt. Forced to reckon with just how fragile her life is—including the uncertainty of her relationship—she flees to the last place she ever dreamed she would run to, her hometown, desperate for a break from her troubles.
Back home, Mickey is seduced by the simplicity of her old life—and the flirtation of a former flame—but her life in New York refuses to be forgotten. When a media scandal catapults Mickey’s forgotten letter into the public zeitgeist, suddenly everyone wants to hear what Mickey has to say. It’s what she’s always wanted—isn’t it?
Intimate, witty, and deeply sexy, HOMEBODIES is a testament to those trying to be heard and loved in a world that refuses to make space, and introduces a standout new writer.

“I saw so much of myself in Homebodies, and in Mickey’s utterly delicious and sometimes aching story. Mickey made me look back and love my young Black woman self, and I loved her so much for returning me to that place.” —Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“HOMEBODIES is a modern marvel—Tembe Denton-Hurst’s prose is both intimate and hysterical, inflammatory and elegiac. You’ll root for Mickey as she takes on the world, questioning and searching its contours, weaving a story we can’t help but find our own worlds inside of. Denton-Hurst has written a warm, brilliant novel that’s stunning and poignant; HOMEBODIES is wonderfully witty and full of empathy and entirely original.” —Bryan Washington, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot

“HOMEBODIES is a beautiful story on becoming. Denton-Hurst’s prose is perfect with an innate attention to detail and astonishing ability to capture the shapes and colors of emotions as she brilliantly illuminates the growing pains of forging one’s own path…something which so many of us are still looking to do. This is a deeply felt, assured literary debut by a writer worth watching.” —Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of award-winning novels Here Comes the Sun and Patsy

Tembe Denton-Hurst (@tembae on the internet) is a staff writer at New York Magazine’s The Strategist, covering beauty, lifestyle, and books; she previously wrote about beauty, gender, and culture for NYLON, them., and Elle. When she’s not writing, Tembe can be found on her couch in Queens where she lives with her partner and their two cats, Stella and Dakota.

 

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING de Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard

Weaving together cultural criticism, personal narrative, historical diversions, and on-the-ground research, MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING is a search for pure, loud, vibrant sensory experience and the knowledge that can only come from that source.

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING:
In Pursuit of Sensuous Life in the Digital Age
by Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard
Ecco/HarperCollins, Summer 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

As physical life on earth grows increasingly fraught and imperiled, technology moves to take us out of our bodies and into our screens. Capital is flooding into the development of the metaverse, designed to engulf us even more fully in tech’s trackable, commodifiable sphere.
And as the influence of these newly manufactured modes of experience promises to grow more fixed and invasive, it is not hyperbole to suggest that the years ahead will require us to reckon with questions that, at first glance, may seem surreal: What is the point of physical life? What are our bodies for?
Although we are saturated by an overload of stimuli, we engage with our actual physical senses—touch, taste, sight, scent, and sound—less and less. It’s no surprise we face an epidemic of depression and disassociation; no wonder that, in an era that demands engagement, we often find ourselves numb, forgetful, and detached. We need an urgent and necessary alternative: a return to the vital purpose and pleasure of our embodied senses.
This is precisely the mission of MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING, a multi-hyphenate work of narrative non-fiction offering a radical reappraisal of the five senses in our break-neck technological world, as well as our sense of time, place, and of self.
With the improbably intermingled properties of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING is a personalized, thematically anchored quest narrative that proposes a defiant way forward for sensory life.

Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard was born in Chicago in 1992, the year Apple declared handheld devices would change the world. A 2021 finalist for the Krause Essay Prize, her work has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Paris Review Daily, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, The Idler, The White Review, The New Statesman, and elsewhere in print and online. Her research on the societal impacts of artificial intelligence has received recognition and funding from the Royal Society, the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence in Cambridge and Oxford. A graduate of Stanford and the University of Cambridge, she has, for better or worse, spent several years working in the tech industry.

SWAMP STORY de Dave Barry

The hilarious new novel set in Florida from Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and New York Times bestselling author Dave Barry.

SWAMP STORY
by Dave Barry
‎ Simon & Schuster, May 2023
(via Writers House)

Jesse Braddock is trapped, living in a tiny cabin deep in the Everglades with her infant daughter and her exboyfriend, a wannabe reality-TV star who turned out to be a lot prettier on the outside than on the inside. Broke and desperate for a way out, Jesse stumbles across a long-lost treasure, which could solve all her problems—if she can figure out how to keep it. The problem is, some very bad men are also looking for the treasure, and they know Jesse knows where it is. Meanwhile Jesse’s ex has become involved with Ken Bortle, of Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer, who has hatched an insane scheme to attract tourists to his failing store by making viral videos of a creature called the Everglades Melon Monster, which is in fact an unemployed alcoholic newspaperman named Phil wearing a repurposed Dora the Explorer costume head. Incredibly, this plan is wildly successful, which means a huge horde of Tik-Tokkers swarm into the swamp looking for the monster at the same time a variety of villains are hunting for Jesse. In the midst of this mayhem a presidential hopeful arrives in the Everglades to preside over the official launch of the Python Challenge. Needless to say it does not go as planned. In fact nothing in this story goes as planned. This is, after all, Florida.

Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, including Lessons From Lucy, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Turns 40, and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes, Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami.

THE ROUTE de Molly O’Toole

An immersive reporting and investigation into the illicit criminal networks that give rise to the smuggling of human beings across the world.

THE ROUTE
by Molly O’Toole
Crown, 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Each year, thousands of refugees hailing from far-flung origins in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa pay anywhere from $20,000 to upwards of $60,000 a head to traverse the Western Hemisphere, using the Americas as a cross-continental land bridge to the U.S.-Mexico border. They all follow a nearly identical path: Beginning in Brazil; then on to Peru; then Ecuador; followed by Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, to reach Mexico. Last stop—the United States. A broken U.S. immigration system and the largest displacement of people in modern history, with some 50 million more migrants today than even just a decade ago, have together birthed this billiondollar black market of smuggling human beings across the world to the United States’ doorstep. This is “The Route.” No journalist or writer has covered “The Route” from start to finish—Molly O’Toole will be the first to do so. THE ROUTE will tackle the inter-continental, cross-cultural, and ethical complexities of this migration phenomenon as a whole, start-to-finish—not in a vacuum, but in the context of an international system inadequate to addressing it, and Molly will take “The Route” with her own two feet, testifying to the ingenuity and resilience of the migrants who are defying the politics and the odds. By bringing readers along on THE ROUTE, Molly hopes to better inform the public about the complex intersection of U.S. security and immigration policy around the world, and by revealing the mechanisms and motives behind the migration route, to better inform more humane, sustainable solutions than each country closing its borders, building its own wall and repelling those who seek refuge.

Molly O’Toole is an immigration and security reporter based in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Foreign Policy covering the 2016 election and Trump administration, a politics reporter at the Atlantic’s Defense One and a news editor at the Huffington Post. She has covered migration and security from Mexico, Central America, West Africa, the Middle East, the Gulf and South Asia for The Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Newsweek, the Associated Press and others. She was awarded the firstever Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting in 2020 with the staff of This American Life and freelancer Emily Green for the “Out Crowd,” investigating the personal impact of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy on asylum officers and asylum seekers. She was also a 2020 finalist for the Livingston Awards for excellence in international reporting. She is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU, but will always be a Californian.

EMOTIONAL LABOR de Rose Hackman

The deeply researched and definitive account of the invisible emotional work and mental load so often shouldered by women, and the economics of how it is devalued monetarily and socially, as it relates to the workplace, relationships, sex, family life, and much more – providing a new framework and language for a 21st-century feminism, and ideas for how to better share the load.

EMOTIONAL LABOR
by Rose Hackman
‎ Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, March 2023

“Emotional labor.” The term might sound familiar, but what does it mean exactly? Originally used to describe the unacknowledged labor flight attendants did to make guests feel welcomed and safe—on top of their actual job description—the phrase has burst through to the national lexicon in recent years. The examples, whispered among friends and posted online, are endless—a woman is tasked with organizing family functions, even without volunteering; a stranger insists you “smile more,” even as you navigate a high stress environment or grating commute. Emotional labor is essential to our society and economy, but many are asked to perform this exhausting, draining work at no extra cost. In this ground-breaking, journalistic deep-dive, Rose Hackman traces the history of the term and exposes common manifestations of the phenomenon. She describes the many ways women and girls are forced to edit the expressions of their emotions to accommodate and elevate the emotions of others. But Hackman doesn’t simply diagnose a problem—she empowers us to combat patriarchy and forge pathways for radical evolution, justice and change. This is a must-have for any feminist reader.

Rose Hackman is a British journalist based in Detroit. Her work on gender, race, labor, policing, housing and the environment – published in the Guardian – has brought international attention to overlooked American policy issues, historically entrenched injustices, and complicated social mores.