Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY de Susan Swan

Where do we belong if we don’t fit in? A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother and an artist, for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than Me.

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY:
A Memoir About Taking Up Space
by Susan Swan
foreword by Margaret Atwood
HarperCollins Canada, April 2025

Susan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.

In this revealing and revelatory memoir, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her forties, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies.

Swan examines the expectations of women of her generation and beyond using the lens of her then-unusual height as a metaphor for the way women are expected not to take up space in the world. Inspiring and thought-provoking, BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY invites us to re-examine what we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and ask how it could be different.

“[Swan’s writing offers] not only an enjoyable read, but also the chance to think and reflect on the vast complex living entity that is the world. » —Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk

Susan Swan is a novelist and non-fiction writer and a professor emerita at York University. Her books include The Wives of Bath, The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, What Casanova Told Me, The Western Light and Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With. She is also co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the largest literary prize for women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.

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.