Archives par étiquette : Writers House

LOVING ME AFTER WE de Ginger Dean

A breakup can feel like the end of the world—but what if it could also serve as the start of a better you?

LOVING ME AFTER WE
The Essential Guide to Healing, Growing, and Thriving After a Toxic Relationship
by Ginger Dean
Flatiron, July 2024
(via Writers House)

This radical question is at the heart of celebrated psychotherapist Ginger Dean’s teachings. Dean, who specializes in helping women overcome heartbreak, knows all too well that often in our search for love and acceptance, we can find ourselves repeating dysfunctional patterns with new partners. In her essential debut, LOVING ME AFTER WE, Dean argues that not only is it possible to break this cycle, but that doing so will set you on a crucial path to healing and self discovery.

Through personal anecdotes, practical guidance, and a little bit of tough love, Ginger brings her wisdom and empathy to any reader who is ready to join the revolution of women healing their hearts so they can start the best love affair they’ve ever known—with themselves. And, of course, loving ourselves first is the key to finding healthy, fulfilling, and passionate love in our future partnerships.

For anyone looking to heal their heart, rediscover themselves, and find renewed peace and passion in their life, LOVING ME AFTER WE is here to help.

Ginger Dean is a psychotherapist and founder of Loving Me After We. Her specialty is helping women overcome heartbreak, increase self-love and confidence after a toxic relationship so they can become the best version of themselves.

SEARCHES de Vauhini Vara

From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize,a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection.

SEARCHES
by Vauhini Vara
Pantheon, April 2025
(via Writers House)

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of herself and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. SEARCHES illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.

“Vara’s essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms . . . pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach. An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity.” —Kirkus, starred

“SEARCHES picks up where Vauhini Vara’s impressive first novel, The Immortal King Rao, left off; this new book deepens, complicates, and amplifies her ongoing investigation into the nature of artificial intelligence, especially in relationship to the human body, mortality, sorrow, and grief. Blessedly free of cant or posture and extremely knowledgeable about (and acutely conscious of its complicity in) the networks it’s mapping, Searches is Vara’s best and most compelling book yet.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

“I cannot imagine a better guide through the infuriating, labyrinthine underworld of technology than Vauhini Vara. SEARCHES is so many things—heart-stoppingly sad, a formal high-wire act, a wise and funny and thoughtful encyclopedia of our modern age—but most of all it is a book about human relationships: how imperfectly we made this thing that connects us, and how we might use this thing to re-meet ourselves and each other.” —Carmen Maria Machado

Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged, named a notable book of 2023 by Publisher’s Weekly, The New Yorker and others, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is also a journalist, writing for Wired and others, and an editor, most recently at The New York Times Magazine.

THE TINY THINGS ARE HEAVIER d’Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo

A stunning debut exploring the hardships of migration, the subtleties of Nigeria’s class system, and how far we’ll go to protect those we love.

THE TINY THINGS ARE HEAVIER
by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
Bloomsbury, June 2025
(via Writers House)

THE TINY THINGS ARE HEAVIER follows Sommy, a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States for graduate school two weeks after her brother, Mezie, attempts suicide. Plagued by the guilt of leaving Mezie behind, Sommy struggles to fit into her new life as a student and an immigrant. She soon enters a complicated relationship with her boisterous Nigerian roommate, Bayo, a relationship that plummets into a web of lies and deceit when Sommy meets Bryan, a biracial American, whose estranged Nigerian father left the States immediately after his birth. Bonded by their feelings of unbelonging and a vague sense of kinship, Sommy and Bryan transcend the challenges of their new relationship.

After a year together, Sommy and Bryan visit Lagos, Nigeria for the summer break, where Sommy reunites with Mezie and Bryan gets a lead on his father. But when Mezie accidentally commits manslaughter in a drunken fit of fear, Sommy and Bryan react to the crime in vastly different ways, exposing the cracks in their relationship and forcing Sommy to confront her notions of self and familial love.

A deeply moving and gorgeously written novel about family, grief, privilege, and coming-of-age within cultural rupture, THE TINY THINGS ARE HEAVIER will appeal to readers of Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, and Jessica George’s Maame.

Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a second-year PhD student in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her fiction has appeared in Isele Magazine, Guernica, and Catapult. She’s a recipient of the 2021 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant.

WHAT YOU MAKE OF ME de S.M. Dess

Intense, darkly humorous, and emotionally acute, WHAT YOU MAKE OF ME poses questions about love and obsession, about meaning and the purpose of art. What does it mean to use someone else’s life for your art? Where is the line? Does it matter?

WHAT YOU MAKE OF ME
by S.M. Dess
Penguin Press, March 2025
(via Writers House)

Demetri and his sister, Ava. Ava and her brother, Demetri. As fiercely competitive as they are co-dependent, the two have long been locked in an emotionally charged relationship. Ava, defiant and impassioned, grew up in the shadow of soft, charming, and intellectual Demetri. But in the aftershocks of familial trauma, it is Demetri who finds himself emotionally ruined, whereas Ava has no time nor patience for grief. As they grow up, following one another from city to city, the siblings are set on their own parallel paths as artists, thinkers, and lovers. Ava throws herself into her obsession with her art, which gradually leads to fame and financial stability – as well as extreme existential insecurity. But Demetri flounders, unable to escape the wake of tragedy.

When Nati, an Italian gallery owner, arrives in New York, Demetri and Ava orbit her, possessed by their own priorities. But when they both fall for her, Nati refuses to play their game. Once again, and perhaps for the last time, the brother and sister must face what they most want from each other, and what they’re unwilling to give.

S.M. Dess is a writer with fiction in The Paris Review, The Drift, Forever Magazine and more. She received her MFA from Columbia University in Spring 2023.

MONA ACTS OUT de Mischa Berlinski

Both beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, MONA ACTS OUT is a novel about acting and telling the truth; about how we play roles to get through our days; and how the great roles teach us how to live.

MONA ACTS OUT
by Mischa Berlinski
Norton Liveright, Winter 2025
(via Writers House)

Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of a household of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband, who has not forgotten what happened last night; and in just a few weeks she is supposed to step into the rehearsal room as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. It’s the hardest role in theatre—and the first role Mona has ever attempted without her sister, who died just over a year ago, by her side. When her father-in-law starts fighting with her niece about Donald Trump, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!”) to find the only person she doesn’t have to act for: her estranged longtime mentor, Milton Katz, who may or may not be dying and who was recently forced out of the legendary theatre company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s trek turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face to face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has loved and still loves.

A brilliant, highly-anticipated return of a writer of almost magical descriptive and imaginative powers.

Mischa Berlinski is the author of Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Peacekeeping. He has written for the New York Review of Books about Haitian politics, has tried to buy a zombie for Men’s Journal, and investigated a woman who married a snake for Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in the Best American Essays and the Best American Travel Writing. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award.