Archives par étiquette : Neon Literary

GIVE ME SPACE BUT DON’T GO FAR de Haley Weaver

A graphic memoir of one woman’s utterly relatable and life-affirming anxiety journey.

GIVE ME SPACE BUT DON’T GO FAR
by Haley Weaver
‎Avery, Spring/Summer 2023
(via Neon Literary)

Through eleven illustrated essays, GIVE ME SPACE BUT DON’T GO FAR encourages readers to understand anxiety as a part of them, a neutral thing as unavoidable and intrinsic as any other part of their body. Anxiety isn’t an obstacle, it’s a roommate. Or in Haley Weaver’s case, her anxiety is represented by a wide-eyed tangle of string, Weaver reveals over the course of the book that it isn’t an enemy to defeat or an obstacle to overcome. Anxiety just is, and it’s never going away, but if we care for it with tender curiosity and attention, it has many gifts to offer. With care, practice, and the friendship of some really great coping mechanisms, you can learn how to live with your anxiety roommate in a mutually respectful, affectionate, even meaningful way.
GIVE ME SPACE BUT DON’T GO FAR is more than just a memoir; it’s a valentine to selfacceptance and forgiveness.

Haley Weaver illustrates and shares webcomics about anxiety + mental health, relationships, and selfhood on her Instagram account @HaleyDrewThis. Her illustrations have been featured on other notable accounts and websites, including Bustle, Betches, New York Magazine, and Bored Panda. She has a knack for transforming universal (and sometimes overwhelming) feelings into digestible, relatable illustrations. Since sharing her first doodle to Instagram in 2017, Haley has accrued a fan base of almost 300,000 followers on Instagram.

RIPE de Sarah Rose Etter

From an award-winning writer whose work Roxane Gay calls “utterly unique and remarkable” comes a surreal novel about a woman in Silicon Valley who must decide how much she’s willing to give up for success—for fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Her Body and Other Parties.

RIPE
by Sarah Rose Etter
Scribner, July 2023
(via Neon Literary)

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains, and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.
Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, growing or shrinking in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels.
When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it. Sharp but vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, RIPE portrays one millennial woman’s journey through our late-capitalist hellscape and offers a brilliantly incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.

« Sarah Rose Etter is a wonder, and this novel is a knife to the heart. » —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

« RIPE is exactly the kind of book I want to read: astoundingly bold, terrifically haunting, and deeply human. Etter refuses to pull any punches here, asking us to look directly at the nightmares we sometimes agree to live with in exchange for comfort and security. Reading this book felt like pressing repeatedly on a bruise; the most pleasurable kind of pain. Ripe is a dazzlingly gorgeous novel and Sarah Rose Etter is truly one hell of a writer. » —Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of the chapbook Tongue Party and The Book of X, winner of a Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her work has appeared in Time, Guernica, BOMB, the Bennington Review, The Cut, VICE, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan in Iceland. She earned her BA in English from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA in fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Los Angeles. 

AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE de Paul Dalla Rosa

Oscillating between elation and despair, AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE is the debut short story collection from Sunday Times Short Story Award finalist Paul Dalla Rosa.

AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE
by Paul Dalla Rosa
Allen & Unwin, May 2022
(via Neon Literary)

Whether working in food service or in high-end retail, lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director, sharing a dangerous apartment in the city, a rooming house in China or a vacation rental in Mallorca, the protagonists of the ten stories comprising Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion, ambition and aimlessness, the curated profile and the unreliable body.
By turns unsparing and tender, Dalla Rosa explores our lives in late-stage Capitalism, where globalisation and its false promises of connectivity and equity leave us all further alienated and disenfranchised. His stories are small masterpieces of regret, futility and tenderness, dripping with acuity, irony and wit.
Like his acclaimed contemporary Ottessa Moshfegh and the legendary Lucia Berlin, Dalla Rosa is a masterful observer and unflinching eviscerator of our ugly, beautiful attempts at finding meaning in an ugly, beautiful world.

« The contemporary urgency of his stories is intoxicating…. This is such an exciting collection – writing this good is thrilling, exhilarating. » – Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap

Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. His stories have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Meanjin and New York Tyrant. In 2019, his story ‘Comme’ was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. He is currently undertaking his PhD at RMIT University, studying the real within contemporary fiction. An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is his debut collection.

NO ONE DIES YET de Kobby Ben Ben

An unsettling tale of murder in a country whose dead slaves are shackled with stories that must be heard.

NO ONE DIES YET
by Kobby Ben Ben
‎ Europa Editions UK, Fall 2022
(via Neon Literary)

The Year of Return, linked to the 400th anniversary of slaves landing in the US, memorialised the many who died during the slave trade in Ghana, particularly at Elmina Castle, while encouraging members of the African diaspora to visit. As Black diasporans around the world make the pilgrimage to West Africa, three African-American friends join in the festivities to explore Ghana’s colonial past and its underground queer scene. They are thrust into the hands of two guides, Kobby and Nana, whose intentions aren’t clear, yet they are the narrators we have to trust. Kobby, a modern deviant according to Nana’s traditional and religious principles, offers a more upscale and privileged tour of Ghana and also becomes the friends’ link to Accra’s secret gay culture. Nana’s adherence to his pastor’s teachings against sin makes him hate Kobby enough to want to kill.
NO ONE DIES YET is a shocking and unsettling tale of murder that is at times funny, at times erotic, yet always outspoken and iconoclastic. Kobby Ben Ben proves in this his first novel that he is set to become one of the most prominent new voices to emerge in this decade.

Kobby Ben Ben, born in Ghana, spends his time reviewing books as well as curating books for his African Book Club, Ghana Must Read. His eccentric Instagram book blog, @bookworm_man, has caught the attention of Booker Winner Bernardine Evaristo and other celebrated writers such as Maaza Mengiste and Petina Gappah. When he isn’t writing poetry masked as prose or anticipating Michaela Coel’s next project, he’s most passionate about discovering debut writers of colour whose stories shed light on underrepresented languages and cultures. NO ONE DIES YET is his first novel.

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE de Jennifer Ashley Wright

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE is a little bit You Never Forget Your First, a little bit The Knick, a dash of The Age of Innocence, and a sprinkle of The Shawshank Redemption.

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE
by Jennifer Ashley Wright
Hachette Books, Spring 2023

This sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history stars Madame Restell, a glamorous women’s healthcare provider in Manhattan, who was a celebrity in her era and a Moira Rose-esque figure with a flair for high fashion and petty public beefs. The story of Restell’s struggle to care for New York’s unmarried women—providing abortions, birth control, and other assistance—in defiance of increasing persecution from powerful men, it ends not in outright tragedy, but with a glorious, life-affirming, bittersweet twist. That this book doubles as a history of women’s health—and the propaganda on which the “pro-life” movement was founded—makes it not just entertaining, but profoundly comforting for feminist readers. Few and far between are the books expanding our sense of hope, humor, and what’s possible for women’s rights in this politicized arena, one which augurs some real downer developments in the coming years. BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE does just that, and it does so in a sumptuous, character-driven, frequently funny package.

Jennifer Ashley Wright has written beloved pop history collections from It Ended Badly and Get Well Soon (Holt) to the forthcoming She Kills Me, an illustrated field guide to righteous women who have committed murder (Abrams Image). BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE is Wright’s first work of single narrative history.