Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

THE TROUBLE UP NORTH de Travis Mulhauser

An atmospheric, haunting novel about a family of bootleggers, their troubled history, and the land that binds them.

THE TROUBLE UP NORTH
by Travis Mulhauser
Grand Central, March 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

The Sawbrooks have lived on prime real estate on the lakes of Michigan since before there was prime real estate. A family of smugglers and bootleggers, every man, woman, and child in each generation has been taught to navigate the nooks and crannies of the rivers and highways that flow in and out of Canada. The hidden routes are the family’s legacy.

But today, the Sawbrooks are deeply fractured, and the money that’s sustained the family is running out. Edward, the Sawbrook patriarch, is dying from cancer, and his wife, Rhoda, is bitterly disappointed in her three adult children. The eldest daughter, Lucy, is now a park ranger, working to federally protect the land against her mother’s will; the middle son, Buckner, hasn’t been the same since he came back from the army suffering from alcoholism; and the youngest daughter, Jewell, is wasting her potential as a card player and bartender.

When Jewell is asked to commit a crime for a major insurance payout, she agrees, eager for the cash, but too late, she realizes that that the boat she torched wasn’t empty…

Together, the Sawbrooks will have to contend with the old, familial ways and the new, shifting world, and face each other—and their pain-filled past—to smuggle one more thing through and out of their land to safety.

Travis Mulhauser was born and raised in Northern Michigan. His novel, Sweetgirl (Ecco/Harper Collins), was listed for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, an Indie Next Pick, and named one of Ploughshares Best Books of the New Year. He is also the author of Greetings from Cutler County: A Novella and Stories. Travis received his MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro and is also a proud graduate of North Central Michigan College and Central Michigan University. He lives currently in Durham, North Carolina with his wife and two children.

Elena Kostioutchenko remporte le Pushkin House Book Prize 2024

Photo credit: Rocio Chacon

Elena Kostioutchenko s’est vu décerner le Pushkin House Book Prize 2024, qui lui a été remis à Londres le 14 juin dernier en présence de l’une de ses traductrices et de son éditeur britannique.

La Pushkin House est un espace artistique, culturel et social situé à Londres qui explore, remet en question et débat de la culture et de l’identité russes aujourd’hui. Le Pushkin House Book Prize a été créé en 2013 afin de récompenser et d’attirer l’attention sur les ouvrages de non-fiction provenant de Russie ou portant sur ce pays, écrits ou traduits en anglais. Les sujets des livres sélectionnés ne concernent pas seulement la vie et la culture à l’intérieur des frontières de l’actuelle Fédération de Russie, mais aussi l’expérience de ceux dont les terres natales ont été affectées par l’Empire russe et l’Union soviétique.

Les éditions Noir sur blanc ont publié l’édition française, intitulée RUSSIE, MON PAYS BIEN-AIME, en février 2024 dans une traduction d’Emma Lavigne et Anne-Marie Tatsis-Botton.

« Être journaliste, c’est dire la vérité. Avec Mon pays bien-aimé, Elena Kostioutchenko documente son pays, tel qu’il est vécu par celles et ceux qu’il efface systématiquement, par exemple les filles de la campagne recrutées comme travailleuses du sexe, les personnes queer des provinces éloignées, les patientes et les médecins d’une maternité ukrainienne – et les journalistes, dont elle fait partie.
Cet ouvrage est le portrait singulier d’une nation, et celui d’une jeune femme qui refuse de garder le silence. En mars 2022, alors qu’elle est reporter pour Novaïa Gazeta, l’un des derniers journaux russes indépendants, Kostioutchenko se rend en Ukraine pour couvrir la guerre. Elle se donne pour mission d’informer les Russes sur les horreurs que Poutine commet en leur nom. Elle sait dès le début que si elle retourne dans son pays, elle risque d’être condamnée à quinze ans de prison, sinon pire. Portée par la conviction que la plus grande forme d’amour et de patriotisme est la critique, elle continue à écrire, nullement découragée, les yeux grand ouverts. »

COUPLES d’Orna Guralnik

A groundbreaking, definitive, once-in-a generation book about why couples fall in love, how they find themselves in inevitable crisis, and why it’s important—not just for them—how these crises are resolved.

COUPLES:
The Crisis of Intimacy and the Influence of Big History
by Dr. Orna Guralnik
Penguin Press, 2027
(via The Gernert Company)

You may know Orna Guralnik from Showtime’s docuseries Couples Therapy, or from her excellent New York Times Magazine piece « I’m a Couples Therapist. Something New is Happening in Relationships ». Before Guralnik was a television star, however, she was a revered, influential academic—in fact, this was why the producers of the show approached her. Guralnik is part of a groundbreaking psychoanalytic movement which sees the self as nested in one’s community—collectives, as she terms it—as opposed to in conflict with civilization (as Freud thought), and understands that the unconscious cannot be set aside from the influence of history and politics (so goes much present-day thinking). As she has written in the New York Times, « psychoanalytic exploration is just as much about our deep ethical dilemmas regarding how to live with one another, and our environment, as it is about our early family dramas; my patients’ repressed experiences with the ghosts of their country’s history are as interesting as with their mothers. »

Following several couples along their dramatic developmental arcs, we learn that the person who is most important to us, who we depend on the most, is also the exact person who is destined to fail and misunderstand us. Crisis is set into motion when differences become unbearable; couples find themselves caught up in maddening, repetitive cycles. They must then move from black-and-white thinking and blame to an understanding of the unconscious forces that guide them. The knowledge that these unconscious forces can be generational—a mother’s immigration trauma, say, or a father’s childhood poverty—enables us all to better understand personal conflicts in the context of shared history. Analysis that leads to the understanding of difference and the acceptance of multiple perspectives can heal the relationship with one’s partner—and also those in the world at large. The roots of Big History touch us all.

Dr. Orna Guralnik is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is on faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City, where she lectures and publishes on the topics of couples treatment and culture, dissociation and depersonalization, as well as culture and psychoanalysis. She is co-founder of the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Mount Sinai Medical School. Dr. Guralnik is a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. She has completed the filming of several seasons of Showtime’s documentary series Couples Therapy.

HOPE FOR CYNICS de Jamil Zaki

Cynicism is making us sick; Stanford Psychologist Dr. Jamil Zaki has the cure—a “ray of light for dark days” (Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author).

HOPE FOR CYNICS
The Surprising Science of Human Goodness
by Jamil Zaki
Grand Central Publishing, September 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

For thousands of years, people have argued about whether humanity is selfish or generous, cruel or kind. But recently, our answers have changed.  In 1972, half of Americans agreed that most people can be trusted; by 2018, that figure had fallen to 30%. Different generations, genders, religions, and political parties can’t seem to agree on anything, except that they all think human virtue is evaporating.

Cynicism is a perfectly understandable response to a world full of injustice and inequality. But in many cases, cynicism is misplaced.  Dozens of studies find that people fail to realize how kind, generous, and open-minded others really are.  And cynical thinking worsens social problems, because our beliefs don’t just interpret the world—they change it. When we expect people to be awful, we coax awfulness out of them.

Cynicism is a disease, with a history, symptoms—and a cure. Through science and storytelling, Jamil Zaki imparts the secret for beating back cynicism: hopeful skepticism. This approach doesn’t mean putting our faith in every politician or influencer. It means thinking critically about people and our problems, while simultaneously acknowledging and encouraging our strengths. Far from being naïve, hopeful skepticism is a more precise way of understanding others, and paying closer attention re-balances how you think about human nature.  As more of us do this, we can take steps towards building the world we truly want.

Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. He is interested in human connection and how we can learn to connect better.

SITO de Laurence Ralph

This heart-wrenching story of violence, grief and the American justice system, explores the systemic issues that perpetuate gang participation in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, as told through the story of one teenager.

SITO
An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him
by Laurence Ralph
Grand Central, February 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito’s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a deeply personal way. Written from Ralph’s perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito’s family and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace.

Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is the Director for the Center on Transnational Policing. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014) and The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence (2020), both published by University of Chicago Press. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter.