Archives de l’auteur : WebmasterBenisti

BABY: A SOPPY STORY de Philippa Rice

BABY: A Soppy Story focuses on the small, everyday moments of parenthood. From dreaming about the future baby and making plans, to actually being there with a real baby and bumbling through each precious day.

BABY: A SOPPY STORY
by Philippa Rice
Andrews McMeel, January 2020

From a #1 New York Times best-selling graphic novelist comes a collection of all new comics and illustrations about the small, intimate moments of a couple expecting their first baby. In this sequel to Soppy: A Love Story, the couple experience many heartwarming moments, as well as challenges, while planning to have a baby, going through pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for a newborn.

Philippa Rice is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Soppy. She is an artist who works in a number of different mediums including comics, illustration, animation, model making and crochet. Her other works include the collage-based webcomic My Cardboard Life and her stop-motion animated characters. Philippa grew up in London and now she lives in Nottingham with illustrator Luke Pearson and their adorable daughter.

THE ACTUAL STAR de Monica Byrne

An original and ambitious novel about three characters reincarnated over two thousand years, from the collapse of the ancient Maya to a post-apocalyptic utopia, centered on the disappearance of one teenage tourist in a cave deep in the Belizean jungle in the year 2012.

THE ACTUAL STAR
by Monica Byrne
Harper Voyager, Fall 2021

Credit: Donald E. Byrne

A large, multi-layered speculative work, with three interwoven parts, one set in the world of the ancient Maya a thousand years ago (in which teen-age twins prepare to ascend the throne of their city-state, only to be toppled in a coup), one set in the present day (in which a young woman named Leah becomes fascinated by a cave complex in Belize), and one set a thousand years in the future (in which a new world religion has grown up, worshiping the memory of Leah’s disappearance in the cave). Each of the three stories is powerful in its own way. The world view of the pre-conquest Maya is persuasively evoked in vibrant, sensuous colors, in chapters that are based on extensive research. In the present-day story, Leah is a compelling mystic figure, a surprising yet satisfying first saint for a new world religion. And the future story is a magnificent feat of world-building, with a genuinely original vision of a post-climate-apocalypse, post-capitalist society of wanderers. Braided together, the three stories create profound resonances, with a cast of complex characters who we come to realize are reincarnations of earlier selves; with echoes of Christian theology and history; and with themes of human sacrifice, bloodletting, utopias, and parallel worlds. THE ACTUAL STAR is a rich, complex, challenging and satisfying work.

Monica Byrne graduated from the Clarion Workshop in 2008, where she studied with Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, and Kelly Link. Her debut novel, The Girl in the Road, was published in 2014. It won the Tiptree Award and was listed for the Kitschie, Locus, and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She has performed original monologues twice at TED, hosted a technology series for ViceUK, and spoken across the US on futurism and science fiction. Her short stories and essays have been published in The Baffler, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Wired, Tor.com, Electric Velocipede, Fantasy Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Electric Literature, and Glimmer Train. She has written five plays produced in Durham, NC, one of which, What Every Girl Should Know, has been performed from Berkeley to Dublin.

THE UNMAKING de Stephanie Foo

In this science-based, remarkably candid account of what it’s like to heal from Complex PTSD, journalist Stephanie Foo offers a fascinating exploration of a psychological phenomenon we’re only beginning to understand and a relevant and powerful narrative of reckoning and healing.

THE UNMAKING
by Stephanie Foo
Ballantine, pub. date TBD

Stephanie Foo was an accomplished journalist, a producer at This American Life, won an Emmy, and launched a podcasting app, but behind her office door she was having panic attacks. At the age of 30 she was diagnosed with Complex PTSD. Finding few resources to help her heal, Stephanie set out to write her own guide, THE UNMAKING. With the determination and curiosity of an award-winning journalist, Stephanie investigates the science behind Complex PTSD and how it has shaped her own life. She interviews experts and tries a variety of therapies. She also dives into her past of extreme child abuse and neglect and uncovers family secrets.
While someone can develop PTSD from a single traumatic event, Complex PTSD blooms when the trauma happens over and over and over, over the course of years. Risk factors include being hit or verbally abused by a caretaker, having mentally ill, alcoholic or addict parents, or even facing poverty. Those numbers alone add up to around 50 million people. And that’s not including the large populations of those who may have developed Complex PTSD through domestic abuse, continual health issues, or POC and queer people living in threatening and discriminatory environments. They need help. And yet…nobody is talking about it. THE UNMAKING describes how C-PTSD is, essentially, brain damage, and the tragic impact it has on bodies and minds. But unlike the academic books on C-PTSD, Stephanie Foo also shares how it feels to learn that science as a survivor. She writes about her doubts, anguish, terrible setbacks, and ultimately, successes.

Stephanie Foo is a writer and radio producer. She most recently was a producer at the radio show This American Life, which reaches 5 million listeners every week. Before that, she helped create the public radio show Snap Judgment, where she produced nearly 200 stories in 4 years. Foo is an acclaimed advocate for diversity in all forms. She wrote a viral article for Transom about the importance of diverse workplaces, particularly in newsrooms, and speaks frequently on the topic of diversity and inclusion. She’s an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University and has spoken at Columbia, Vassar, Yale, Berkeley and CUNY.

ASK A PHILOSOPHER de Ian Olasov

For several years Ian Olasov has set up “Ask-a-Philosopher” booths around New York City, answering questions from passers-by. Now in this book he offers answers to the real-life questions on people’s minds.

ASK A PHILOSOPHER:
Answers to Your Most Important—and Most Unexpected—Questions
by Ian Olasov
Thomas Dunne Books, September 2020

Ian Olasov answers questions such as:
– Are people innately good or bad?
– Is it okay to have a pet fish?
– Is it okay to have kids?
– Is color subjective?
– If humans colonize Mars, who will own the land?
– Is there life after death?
– Should I give money to homeless people?

ASK A PHILOSOPHER shows that there’s a way of making philosophy work for each of us, and that philosophy can be both perfectly continuous with everyday life, and also utterly transporting. From questions that we all wrestle with in private to questions that you never thought to ask, ASK A PHILOSOPHER will get you thinking.

Ian Olasov is an adjunct professor and doctoral candidate at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. He won the American Philosophical Association’s Public Philosophy Op-Ed Prize in 2016 and 2018. His Ask-a-Philosopher series has received a lot of publicity coverage over the years including in Newsweek, The New York Times, qz.com, and WNYC.

BERLIN RECKONING de Alexander Wolff

From acclaimed journalist and former Sports Illustrated staff writer Alexander Wolff comes the fascinating story—part history, part memoir—of the author’s exiled grandfather and émigré father, who survived the turmoil of both World Wars and led fascinating lives as immigrants in America.

BERLIN RECKONING:
My German American Family’s Story of War, Flight, Exile and Emigration
by Alexander Wolff
Atlantic Monthly, Winter 2021

In 2017 acclaimed journalist Alexander Wolff moved to Berlin to ta explore the lives of his exile grandfather Kurt Wolff and émigré father Niko Wolff—two part-Jewish, German-born men who became American citizens. Kurt Wolff broke into the book business in 1909 as partner of Ernst Rowohlt in Leipzig; four years later, at age 26, he went out on his own, publishing Franz Kafka, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, and other writers whose books would be burned by the Nazis. Just after the Reichstag fire in 1933, he and his wife Helen fled to France and Italy, and eight years later in New York they founded Pantheon Books, which went on to publish Gift from the Sea, Doctor Zhivago, and The Tin Drum. Kurt left behind a son from his first marriage, who served in the Wehrmacht before being captured by the Americans, emigrating to the U.S. only in 1948. This was Alexander’s father Niko. Drawing on family letters, diaries, reminiscences and photographs, many never before seen by anyone outside the family, Alexander weaves intimate detail of his father and grandfather into a tapestry of history. An absorbing journey that is part memoir and part historical narrative, BERLIN RECKONING is the saga of a far-flung family navigating wartime and its aftershocks. The book evokes the perils, triumphs, and setbacks at the heart of the refugee experience. And it paints a vivid portrait of the life and times of a titanic literary figure who went from having his books burned by the Nazis to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Alexander Wolff spent 36 years on staff at Sports Illustrated. He is author or editor of nine books, including the New York Times bestseller Raw Recruits and Big Game, Small World, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. A former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, from which he graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in History, he lives with his family in Vermont.