Archives par étiquette : HarperCollins

BEFORE YOU GO de Tommy Butler

A big, rich, life-affirming debut that explores the most perplexing questions of existence: purpose, the pain of loneliness, the desire for happiness, and the price we pay as we search for fulfillment.

BEFORE YOU GO
by Tommy Butler
Harper, August 2020

In the Before, humankind is created with a hole in its heart, the designers not realizing their mistake—if it was a mistake—until too late. Elliot Chance is just a boy, and knows nothing of this. All he knows is that he doesn’t feel at home in this world, and his desire for escape becomes more urgent as he grows into adulthood, where the turbulence of life seems to offer no cure for the emptiness. Desperate and lost, he stumbles upon a support group on the edge of Manhattan. There he meets two other drifting souls—Sasha, a young woman who leaves coded messages in the copy she writes for advertising campaigns, and Bannor, whose detailed depictions of the future make Elliot think he may have actually been there. With these two unlikely allies, Elliot launches into the business of life, determined to be happy in spite of himself. Yet the hole in the heart is not so easily filled. Profound yet playful, BEFORE YOU GO is a beautiful, imaginative journey into the ache and wonder of being human, and the quest for a meaningful life.

“Butler brilliantly imagines the creation of human life, and the toll its imperfection takes on Elliot, a Gen-X man from Connecticut, in this dazzling debut…beautiful, heart-wrenching prose…Butler’s treatise on the value of life with all its moments of darkness and light leaves the reader with aching gratitude for their existence.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Alluring. Magical. And painfully real. Will make your heart ache in all the right ways. A triumph for all of us who’ve suspected there’s something missing deep within.” —Matthew Quick, bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook and The Reason You’re Alive
“Hats off to that brave soul daring to write what might be called speculative literary fiction, and willing to venture answers to questions beyond even those of life & death. Tommy Butler’s debut novel Before You Go has a big beating heart and a mind all its own.” —Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party and Then We Came to the End

Tommy Butler has been a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He’s a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School; his fiction has appeared in Oxford Magazine and he won the Short Fiction Award from Reflections Literary Journal. He runs a small law practice when he’s not writing.

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.

TINSELTOWN bientôt adapté à la télévision

TINSELTOWN: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood de William J. Mann, lauréat d’un Edgar Award en 2015, sera bientôt adapté pour le petit écran par la société Spectrum Originals. Située dans les années 1920 à l’ère du cinéma muet, la série historique mettra en scène la vie de quatre pionnières du cinéma dont la vie et la carrière à Hollywood furent menacées suite à un meurtre scandaleux resté non résolu : celui de William Desmond Taylor, président de la Motion Picture Directors Association. Cette histoire véridique et addictive d’ambition, de scandale, d’intrigue et de crime retrace la naissance de l’industrie cinématographique moderne dans un monde encore brutal et sexiste. Pour plus de détails sur le projet de série TV, voir cet article de Deadline.

TINSELTOWN est paru en 2014 chez HarperCollins aux Etats-Unis. Les droits de langue française sont toujours disponibles.

HOW TO STAY HUMAN IN A F*CKED UP WORLD de Tim Desmond

How can we be more mindful when the world is this f*cked up? HOW TO STAY HUMAN IN A F*CKED UP WORLD is the fresh, engaging answer to this important question.

HOW TO STAY HUMAN IN A F*CKED UP WORLD:
Mindful Practices for Real Life
by Tim Desmond

HarperOne, June 2019

If you’ve tried mindfulness before and failed, we get it. Likely you were told to sit on a pillow in a dark room, meditate, or count your breaths. But mindfulness isn’t about separating ourselves from the problems in the world. Instead, it is about re-learning how to get out there, connect with the suffering of every living being and in so doing, embrace your own personal suffering to heal, transform, grow, and finally find peace. Tim Desmond—an esteemed Buddhist philosopher who has lectured on psychology at both Harvard and Yale and studied under Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh—has spent his life cultivating new ways to bridge the gap between the ancient tradition of mindfulness and modern life. With How to Stay Human in a F*cked Up World Desmond gets right to the heart of our collective pain with a life-changing mindfulness practice for surviving the sometimes-miserable world we live in, featuring strategies and guidance you can start using to feel more connected, joyful, and present today.

Timothy Ambrose Desmond is a Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Antioch University teaching professional psychology rooted in self-compassion. He has lectured at Yale School of Medicine, and taught mindfulness in all 50 states. After having grown up poor in Boston with a single alcoholic mother and having been homeless as a teenager, Desmond was exposed to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, and eventually studied closely with Thich Nhat Hanh and his senior monastics at Plum Village. In 2011, Desmond co-founded Morning Sun Mindfulness Center, an intentional community and retreat center in Alstead, NH. When he isn’t teaching, advising, or on retreat, Desmond is organizing progressive political demonstrations, and was one of the core organizers of Occupy Wall Street.

THE FUTURE EARTH de Eric Holthaus

The first hopeful book about climate change, THE FUTURE EARTH shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades.

THE FUTURE EARTH:
A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming
by Eric Holthaus
HarperOne, June 2020

Credit: Karen Edquist

The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In THE FUTURE EARTH, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face. What could happen if we reduced carbon emissions by 50 percent in the next decade? What could living in a city look like in 2030? How could the world operate in 2040, if the proposed Green New Deal created a 100 percent net carbon-free economy in the United States?

This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, THE FUTURE EARTH invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.

Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. His work, which is regularly cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Buzzfeed, has appeared in Rolling Stone, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers climate science, policy, and solutions. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.