Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

WELL, THIS IS ME d’Asher Perlman

The perfect gift for every single person on the planet.

WELL, THIS IS ME
by Asher Perlman
Andrews McMeel, June 2024

WELL, THIS IS ME is the debut cartoon collection from Asher Perlman (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert), who NPR’s Scott Simon calls “one of today’s great New Yorker cartoonists.” A blend of Asher’s classics and never-before-seen material, this collection gives the people what they want: universal health care. Okay, not that, but something almost as important: a delightful book, chock-full of over 150 cartoons about everything from a dog’s encounter with a genie to the Tin Man’s trip to Jiffy Lube.

Conveniently broken up into thematic chapters, WELL, THIS IS ME: A Cartoon Collection from The New Yorker’s Asher Perlman explores traditional comedy playgrounds, like travel and work, as well as more lighthearted subjects, like death and dying. Point is: this book has a little something for everyone. Even you, Kristen.

Asher Perlman is an Emmy award-nominated, WGA award-winning, Peabody award-winning cartoonist, comedian, writer, and actor. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and a writer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He lives in Brooklyn, but his heart will always be in the Midwest with his family.

THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS de Ben Kafka

With an accessible, witty, and honest voice, a Stanford-trained historian, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist explores the maddening situations and relationships we all find ourselves in, and explains that while there are no quick or easy answers, recognizing and understanding these scenarios as they happen can help us muddle through in a better way.

THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS:
How People, Work and The World Drive Us Crazy
by Ben Kafka
John Murray Press, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

Despite what much pop psychology will tell you, sometimes it’s not a matter of doing more work on yourself. And while psychopharmacology has made some incredible and life-saving advances, our responses to crazy-making situations are often not purely biochemical. Sometimes the call isn’t coming from inside the house. Sometimes crazy really is other people.

In THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS, Kafka draws from decades of fascinating psychotherapeutic research as well as his own work with patients to help us understand the mechanics of things that make us rant and rave—passive-aggressive partners, borderline workplaces (a term Kafka coined), bureaucracy that feels like crucifixion—to help us better understand our own responses to these maddening stimuli, and in time, not be so reactive to them.

Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in Greenwich Village. Originally trained as a historian, he was on the faculty of NYU for many years; he is now affiliated with the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He has been a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 2007, and a member of its board since 2012. He also serves on the board of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012).

A KITCHEN IN ITALY de Mimi Thorisson

With recipes for antipasti, primi, secondi, and dulci, A KITCHEN IN ITALY brings Mimi’s Italian secrets to your dinner table.

A KITCHEN IN ITALY:
A Year of Family Meals and Celebrations from Our Home
by Mimi Thorisson
Clarkson Potter, October 2025

Mimi Thorisson first captivated readers with her family’s idyllic lifestyle in the French countryside before turning to the rich culinary treasures of Italian regional cuisine in Old World Italian. Now that she has found a true home in Italy, Mimi is back with a new Italian cookbook sharing how she cooks and eats in her Italian home.

Allow Mimi’s cooking to transport you to Italy, with 100 simple yet elegant dishes that celebrate the seasons. The recipes collected here are Mimi’s favorites, the staple dishes that she enjoys at home with her family and friends. In the spring, she loves Risi e Bisi, a brothy, risotto-like Venetian dish served in every home and restaurant when peas are in season. At the end of a long week, she turns to Involtini de Pollo, a comforting stuffed chicken served with a parmesan cream sauce. And there’s no better way to use up abundant summer zucchini than in Spaghetti alla Nerano, a dish that encapsulates the beautiful simplicity of Italian cooking.

Mimi Thorisson is a French cook and writer living with her family between Médoc, France and Turin, Italy. She is the author of A Kitchen in France, French Country Cooking, and Old World Italian, and she runs the award-winning food blog Manger, which documents her cooking adventures in Médoc and around Italy.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM de Julian Sancton

Julian Sancton’s follow-up to his thrilling, acclaimed debut, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, is the riveting story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Columbia in 1708 with over a billion dollars in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find and excavate it.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM
by Julian Sancton
Crown, January 2026

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose—he was looking for the galleon Mercedes. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of plundered riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain. But that ship, the San Jose, never reached Spanish shores. Somewhere miles off Cartegena, the Spanish armada was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean, its precise location unknown and its decaying hull shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of divers.

Dooley was at once an unlikely candidate to find it, but also a singular figure. Half Cuban by birth, his life stretched from the ballfields of Brooklyn to the shores of Castro’s Havana at the dawn of revolution, where he would help birth a fledgling nation’s diving program and make films with the likes of Jacques Cousteau before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. With academic training cobbled together across various disciplines, Dooley was no one’s idea of a credentialed academic, and yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to the science of ocean archeology—and to finding the San Jose—led him to breakthroughs thought impossible, as he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors and ultimately homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three hundred year old shipwreck—or nothing at all.

Like The Orchid Thief, NEPTUNE’S RANSOM plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. In this tale of temerity and treasure, Julian Sancton blends the adventure of Indiana Jones with the international intrigue of XXX into a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.

Julian Sancton is a senior features editor at Departures magazine, where he writes about culture and travel. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among others. He has reported from every continent including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching this book.

MOTHER MEDIA de Hannah Zeavin

An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.

MOTHER MEDIA:
Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century
by Hannah Zeavin
MIT Press, April 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, MOTHER MEDIA tells the story of how our contemporary understanding of what a mother is came to be and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media.

Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at UC Berkeley. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Bookforum, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and beyond. Zeavin was a recipient of a 2022 Works in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for an essay about the children of psychoanalysis, “Composite Case.” She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021).