Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND de Kelly Sundberg

Sundberg focuses on the longer-lasting effects of trauma and PTSD on survivors, challenging a culture in which violence against women is normalized and illuminating the nonlinear, complex nature of recovery. For readers of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, this is a beautiful, devastating, and nuanced examination into embracing a new reality after trauma and finding power and beauty in it.

THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND
by Kelly Sundberg
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, August 2025

The trauma of surviving an abusive marriage didn’t make Kelly Sundberg stronger. In fact, it nearly broke her. But leaving the abuse behind was not the end of the story, it was the beginning of a new one. In that journey, Sundberg learned in ways both good and bad, that one doesn’t necessarily get to leave abuse behind. Sometimes, everywhere you go, the memories of the abuse go with you.

THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND begins with the invocation “May this book be an exorcism.” Learning to coexist with her rage and then to turn that rage into strength, Sundberg’s journey to alchemizing her suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder into post-traumatic stress growth was neither easy nor simple. Far from bleak, her story provides vital insight into the little-known recovery process, and how healing is possible.

A narrative following a process of discovery as Sundberg’s personal story is juxtaposed against established research, The Answer is in the Wound offers a redemptive arc for trauma survivors, arguing for healing through an acceptance of their new state of being. Sundberg uses metaphors like the act of erasure—shown in erasure poetry created from her abusive ex-husband’s apologetic emails—and includes theories from psychiatrists and researchers like Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and Peter A. Levine to construct a balanced meditation on trauma and the imprint it leaves.

Kelly Sundberg is the author of Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Sur­vival, published by Harper in 2018. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published or selected as notables in Best American Essays four times. She has a PhD in creative nonfiction. She lives, writes, and edits in Columbus, Ohio.

MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS d’Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS: Essays & Writings
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Harper, June 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.
Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club Pick, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, and five poetry collections, including the NAACP Image Award-winning The Age of Phillis, also nominated for the National Book Award. She teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English.

I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME de Hala Alyan

The rich and deeply personal memoir by the award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement.

I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME: A Memoir
by Hala Alyan
Avid Reader, June 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan decides to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman—the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn—to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling—a husband who wants to leave; the cost of past traumas and addictions threatening to resurface; the city of her youth, Beirut, on the brink of crisis. She turns to family stories and communal myths: of grandmothers mapping their lives through Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men that left and women that stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood, and adolescence in various Arab cities. Hala gathers the stories that are her legacy, which makes for emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are higher: how to honor ancestors and future generations alike in the midst of displacement? How to impart love for those who are no longer here, for places one can no longer touch?

A stunningly lyrical and brutally honest quest for motherhood, selfhood, and peoplehood, I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME is a powerful story of unraveling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.

“A beautiful and intimate memoir of a life in the embrace of stories, Alyan weaves the fine threads of torn and fragmented lives into an irresistible, intergenerational tapestry. I was spellbound from the first page.”
—Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

Hala Alyan is the Palestinian-American author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back, both published by Ecco. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

ERFÜLLTER LEBEN MIT MINIMALISMUS d’Adina Markowz

From a full life to a fulfilled life – rethinking minimalism – self-awareness instead of renunciation.

ERFÜLLTER LEBEN MIT MINIMALISMUS
(Living the Fulfilled Life through Minimalism)
by Adina Markowz
Irisiana/PRH Germany, April 2025

Adina Markowz does not do with giving things up, but the only things she has are those that suit her life. To find out what really works for you and your life, the ‘Minimalism Muse’, as she calls herself, has created a 40-step program that can be implemented in everyday life.

The author does not advocate any kind of extremism: you don’t have to throw away, give away, or sell 90 percent of your possessions the very next day. Adina’s playful minimalism will lend you more energy, lightness, and clarity rather than the stresses of optimization, abstention, or a guilty conscience. She is more focused on the happy medium of less, with a deep self-knowledge and personal fulfillment – and the questions: What makes you happy? What do you need? And what is simply unnecessary ballast hindering you in your life?

Adina Markowz is known and loved on Instagram as the « Minimalism Muse ». As a coach, she helps people free themselves from material and mental baggage, thereby helping them find more joy, lightness, and energy.

JUNGS VON HEUTE, MÄNNER VON MORGEN d’Anne Dittmann

Protect your daughter? Educate your son!

JUNGS VON HEUTE, MÄNNER VON MORGEN
(Boys of Today, Men of Tomorrow)
by Anne Dittmann
Kösel/PRH Germany, May 2025

People who have sons today face special challenges. We desire happy boys who grow up without toxic concepts of masculinity. But there still seems to be a lack of role models and structures for their upbringing. In her new book, Spiegel bestselling author Anne Dittmann, herself the mother of a son, examines the major questions of our time in terms of actual family life: What is inherent in boys’ nature? Which role models have a positive influence on them? What role models are we able to set for them? How do we raise them to be empathetic, respectful, and caring? And where do we sometimes become entangled in our own stereotypes? This book not only organizes the relevant evidence, but also provides us with many practical instructions for everyday life. A must for all those who want to courageously accompany their men of tomorrow.

Featuring interviews with renowned experts on such topics as friendship and feelings, violence and aggression, health and crises, computer games and media, roles and role models, porn and sexuality, and leisure and commitment.

• Empowering approach in the field of counseling boys
• Contributing to the ongoing debate around sexism, #MeToo, and toxic masculinity

Anne Dittmann is an author, podcaster, and journalist who writes about family policy issues, including for ZEIT Online, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Brigitte. With her Spiegel bestseller Solo, Selbst & Ständig and as the host of her podcast ‘Solo Moms’, she has become a prominent voice for single parents.