Archives de catégorie : Narrative Nonfiction

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE de Jennifer Ashley Wright

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE is a little bit You Never Forget Your First, a little bit The Knick, a dash of The Age of Innocence, and a sprinkle of The Shawshank Redemption.

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE
by Jennifer Ashley Wright
Hachette Books, Spring 2023

This sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history stars Madame Restell, a glamorous women’s healthcare provider in Manhattan, who was a celebrity in her era and a Moira Rose-esque figure with a flair for high fashion and petty public beefs. The story of Restell’s struggle to care for New York’s unmarried women—providing abortions, birth control, and other assistance—in defiance of increasing persecution from powerful men, it ends not in outright tragedy, but with a glorious, life-affirming, bittersweet twist. That this book doubles as a history of women’s health—and the propaganda on which the “pro-life” movement was founded—makes it not just entertaining, but profoundly comforting for feminist readers. Few and far between are the books expanding our sense of hope, humor, and what’s possible for women’s rights in this politicized arena, one which augurs some real downer developments in the coming years. BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE does just that, and it does so in a sumptuous, character-driven, frequently funny package.

Jennifer Ashley Wright has written beloved pop history collections from It Ended Badly and Get Well Soon (Holt) to the forthcoming She Kills Me, an illustrated field guide to righteous women who have committed murder (Abrams Image). BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE is Wright’s first work of single narrative history.

THE CRANE WIFE And Other Love Stories From Life, de C.J. Hauser

Over a million readers flocked to read CJ Hauser’s essay The Crane Wife when it ran in the Paris Review last year. In her first book-length work of non-fiction, Hauser uses that now-beloved title essay as a thematic anchor around which to explore, through an excavation of both her own personal and larger familial hope chest of ‘love stories,’ what it looks like when a person realizes the traditional narrative she thought was to be the story of her life turns out to be a story which must be rewritten.

THE CRANE WIFE And Other Love Stories From Life
by C.J. Hauser
Doubleday, July 2022
(via DeFiore and Co.)

Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realized she’d almost signed up to live someone else’s life.
In this intimate, frank, and funny memoir-in-essays, Hauser releases herself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way. She kisses internet strangers and officiates a wedding. She re-reads Rebecca in the house her boyfriend once shared with his ex-wife and re-winds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to learn how not to lose yourself in a relationship. She thinks about Florence Nightingale at a robot convention and grief at John Belushi’s rock and roll gravesite, and the difference between those stories we’re asked to hold versus those we choose to carry. She writes about friends and lovers, blood family and chosen family, and asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer us all.
Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most big-hearted friend, THE CRANE WIFE is a book for everyone whose life doesn’t look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.

Feature film rights to “The Crane Wife” essay have been sold to an award-winning producer, and streamer, with an Oscarwinning actress attached to star and produce.

C.J. Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. She is the author of the novels The From-Aways and Family of Origin, and her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, and The Kenyon Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Creative Writing from The Florida State University. She lives in Hamilton, New York.

HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD de Robert Kolker sélectionné par Oprah Winfrey pour son Book Club !

La nouvelle vient d’être annoncée dans l’émission  “CBS This Morning” : la célèbre Oprah Winfrey a sélectionné comme prochain titre pour son Book Club le livre de Robert Kolker sur la schizophrénie, HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD :

HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD paraît aujourd’hui chez Doubleday aux Etats-Unis et figure déjà dans les sélections du mois d’avril de Goodreads (« April’s Most Anticipated New Books« ) et d’Apple (« Apple Best Book of April »).

“HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD vividly conveys not only the inner experience of schizophrenia but its effects on the families whose members are afflicted . . . With the skill of a great novelist, Mr. Kolker brings every member of the family to life.” —Richard J. McNally, Wall Street Journal 

Les droits de langue française sont toujours disponibles.

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.

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.