Archives par étiquette : Ecco

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER by Damon Young

From the cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com, and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today, a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be Black (and male) in America.

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER:
A Memoir in Essays
by Damon Young
Ecco/HarperCollins, March 2019

For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as “How should I react here, as a professional black person?” and “Will this white person’s potato salad kill me?” are forever relevant. WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER chronicles Young’s efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him. It’s a condition that’s sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the “being straight” thing, as if his sexual orientation was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble move or knitting; creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly Black to “Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies.” And, at its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white. From one of our most respected cultural observers, WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity.

• A Finalist for the NAACP Image Award
• Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
• An NPR Best Book of the Year
• A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite of the Year

Damon Young is a co-founder and editor in chief of VerySmartBrothas—coined « the blackest thing that ever happened to the internet » by The Washington Post and recently acquired by Univision and Gizmodo Media Group to be a vertical of The Root—and a columnist for GQ. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, LitHub, Time Magazine, Slate, LongReads, Salon, The Guardian, New York Magazine, EBONY, Jezebel, and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Based in Pittsburgh, he’s also a member of ACLU Pennsylvania’s State Board.

L’écriture selon Bukowski : des lettres inédites à paraître en 2015 !

La nouvelle ravira les milliers de fans de l’auteur : l’éditeur ECCO publiera en juillet 2015 le premier de trois volumes inédits de Charles Bukowski. ON WRITING précédera CATS (octobre 2015) et LOVE (Février 2016).

ON WRITING est un recueil autour d’un sujet qui a toujours obsédé le plus irrévérencieux des écrivains américains : l’écriture.

Piercing, unsentimental, and often hilarious, ON WRITING is made up of never-before-published letters about the subject that obsessed Bukowski the most: writing

ON WRITING
by Charles Bukowski
Ecco, July 2015

Charles Bukowski was one of our most iconoclastic, raw, and riveting writers, one whose stories, poems, and novels have left an enduring mark on our culture. ON WRITING collects Bukowski’s reflections and ruminations on the craft that he dedicated his life to. Piercing, unsentimental, and often hilarious, ON WRITING is filled not only with memorable lines but also with the author’s trademark toughness, leavened with moments of grace, pathos, and intimacy. In the correspondence collected here–letters to publishers, editors, friends, and fellow writers–Bukowski is brutally frank about the drudgery of work and canny and uncompromising when it comes to the absurdities of life-and of art. Still, he is always “effortlessly, magnetically readable” (Booklist), a true American legend and counterculture icon whose hard-edged, complex humanity is fully on display here. The “laureate of American lowlife,” a writer associated with the downtrodden and depraved, Bukowski was still always–and indelibly–in tune with the life of the mind.

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN de Parnaz Foroutan

If your child is your legacy, who are you without one? What story will you leave behind?
A wrenching and heartfelt debut novel

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN
by Parnaz Foroutan
Ecco, Fall 2015

Set in the Iranian town of Kermanshah at the turn of the twentieth century, THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN is the intimate, poetic, and brutal story of a young woman beholden to the schemes and strictures of a male world. In a cloistered household of wealthy Jewish merchants, at a time when a woman’s worth is measured only by the number of male heirs she can produce, Rakhel, a barren young bride, must do the impossible: produce a son and satisfy her husband Asher’s wild desire for preeminence. Their struggle slowly rends their family asunder, dividing Asher from his family and breaking the delicate bonds between the women of the house, which have grown like flowers in a garden as they battle impossible odds to save Rakhel and her place in the household.

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN’s lyrical prose and heartbreaking evocation of female struggle in a forgotten time and place is reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, but it is not just a novel about women. It is a story of Iran, of a lost cultural moment and identity that flourished before the wars and the reign of the shahs. And it is a story about family—about the things that draw us closer and perhaps inevitably push us apart.

Parnaz Foroutan was born in Iran and spent her early childhood there. This novel, for which she received PEN USA’s Emerging Voices fellowship, was inspired by her family history. She has been named to the Hedgebrook Fellowship and residency, and has received funding from the Elizabeth George Foundation, among other institutions. Writers like Holly Morris, Gloria Steinem, and Carolyn Forche have reviewed her work with praise and hold the project in high esteem.