Archives de catégorie : London 2026 Nonfiction

FAMILY de Meredith F. Small

In the face of the current changes in the structure of the family in our culture, this book explains why family continues to be so central to our lives.

FAMILY: How the Human Need for Belonging Shapes Our Lives
by Meredith F. Small
Pegasus, Fall 2026
(via Harvey Klinger)

Family is the most ubiquitous and persistent human social group. Everyone across the world has a family, even if that family has been lost, broken, or transformed. And now, acclaimed anthropologist Meredith Small, author of Our Babies, Ourselves, examines the very roots of the family and why this particular type of connection is so fundamental to all cultures and all people.

Previous books about family are self-help books designed to start, build, or repair broken families. Family: How the Human Need for Connection Shapes Our Lives is something different. Small seeks to understand why this particular form of social organization is the bedrock of human interaction. Why do we form families? Why do people place such importance on their family relationships? And what is the reality of family life—does it live up to our expectations? What do families provide for each of us?

Small takes the reader on a journey from the evolutionary roots of family three million years ago to its present-day varied expression. We read that there is fossil evidence of human groups that could be called families, and extensive archaeological finds that when humans settled down and started to grow their own food and build villages and cities, they did so as families.

But within this common framework of a family, there are also complex iterations of the way families are formed and operate. Across the globe, various forms of marriage, parenting, and types of family differ from the Western template of a family of Mom+Dad+kids. People have developed families of all stripes, adapting the notion of family to their own worldview, religious beliefs, and economic necessities.

Meredith F. Small is a classically trained anthropologist, and Professor Emerita at Cornell University, where Small was an award-winning teacher for over thirty years. Small was hailed “the Margaret Mead of our generation” by the President of the American Anthropological Association, and has published numerous books for the popular audience, Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization, Here Begins the Dark Sea: How a 15th Century Venetian Monk Drew the Most Accurate Map of the World and Foresaw the Future, Our Babies, Ourselves, Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children, and What’s Love Got to Do With It.

PEOPLE SKILLS de Lily Scherlis

A razor-sharp nonfiction book that dissects the failures of the bloated self-help industrial complex to improve our lives, while also unearthing what real change could look like.

PEOPLE SKILLS:
The Impossible Task of Personal Growth–and Why Change is the Answer
by Lily Scherlis
Liveright / Norton (US) / Hutchinson Heinemann (UK), publication date TBC
(via The Gernert Company)

Psychology is rife with metaphors, and today’s self-help movement is no different: you can “optimize” your routine, as if you are designing an app; you can set better boundaries, as if you are a lawn; you can say when you’re “at capacity,” as if you are a battery; or you can “invest” in self-care, as if you are a stockbroker on the trading floor of the soul. From a pragmatist’s perspective, borrowing the language of the times to instill psychological insights makes perfect sense, and when self-help advice sounds so intuitive, it’s easy to buy in. But problems arise when we mistake metaphors forged in the crucible of our hyper-individualized neoliberal culture for a true metaphysics of the mind. You may indeed have a 401k, but you are neither a lawn nor a battery. 

In PEOPLE SKILLS, Lily Scherlis places the concepts so many of us cling to for sanity as we navigate an increasingly uncertain world–think attachment styles, emotional intelligence, and even the idea of people skills itself–in sociopolitical context, from cold war ideological panic to anxieties unleashed by globalization. Many of these ideas have their origins in legitimate psychological insights and research, and some of them can be helpful, some of the time. But when they are warped, watered down, and overapplied, they give rise to a curious paradox: As inadequate institutions crumble and we are forced deeper into financial and emotional dependence upon one another, our primary yardstick for measuring our own well-being is the ability to perform independence. In a society that values economic growth at all costs, the only way to avoid being left behind is to keep growing yourself; in a world getting worse, the only solution is to be better. 

But this is an impossible task: In the never-ending quest for self-improvement, the goal is always just out of reach–which is exactly how the $1.5 billion self-help industry wants it. Lily gives us permission to step off the hamster wheel of personal growth and think about other ways of addressing our problems—and to question whether they’re really problems at all. We are intrinsically interdependent beings, she reminds us, whose obligations to ourselves are never really divorced from our obligations to one another, and when we retreat to our own private spheres in order to self-actualize, we merely atomize our troubles, disappoint ourselves, and reinforce the status quo. In encouraging us to flex new psychic muscles instead of reaching for the same canned jargon, PEOPLE SKILLS ends up being its own kind of self-help, ironically. For Lily, the goal is not growth but change–for ourselves, and for our world. Neither can happen without the other.

Lily Scherlis is a writer and artist, and a PhD candidate in English and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Harper’s, The Guardian, Parapraxis, The Baffler, The Drift, and Cabinet, among other venues. She lives in Brooklyn.