Archives de l’auteur : WebmasterBenisti

OUT OF YOUR MIND de Jorge Cham & Dwayne Godwin

From the creator of We Have No Idea, an introductory journey into your own mind—if your inner voice had a Ph.D. in brain science, cracked jokes, and drew cartoons.

OUT OF YOUR MIND:
The Biggest Mysteries of the Human Brain
by Jorge Cham & Dwayne Godwin
Pantheon, January 2024
(via The Gernert Company)


Why do you love? Why do you lie? What makes you happy? Every single thought you have comes from one place: your brain. But what makes it tick? How much of it have we decoded, and how much of it remains an impenetrable mystery? Join best-selling author and online cartoonist Jorge Cham and neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin on a deep dive into the fascinating world of the human brain, in which they will explore questions such as: What is consciousness? Where is you in the brain? And do we have free will? All while illuminating everything we know (and DON’T know) about one of the most complex objects in the known universe. Think of it as conversation-ammunition for your next cocktail party, or a quick fascinating read while you’re in the bathroom (don’t worry, the chapters aren’t that long). Centered around questions we all ask ourselves at some point but don’t usually have answers to, OUT OF YOUR MIND is an illustrated book about the brain that isn’t too brainy. Playful, accessible, and deeply insightful, it’s the one brain book that’s truly accessible and suitable for all brains.

Jorge Cham is the Daytime Emmy-nominated and best-selling cartoonist creator of the popular online comic strip “Piled Higher and Deeper” (known as PHD Comics – phdcomics.com). He is the co-creator, Executive Producer and Creative Director of “Elinor Wonders Why,” one of the highest-rated animated shows on PBS Kids, and the co-author of two popular science books: the best-selling and award-winning We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe and Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe, as well as the children’s book Oliver’s Great Big Universe. Jorge is also the co-host and co-creator of “Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe” a popular podcast and radio show. He obtained his Ph.D. in robotics from Stanford University and was an Instructor and Research Associate at Caltech from 2003-2005. He is originally from Panama.

Dwayne Godwin is a neuroscientist, an educator, and an academic leader who is a professor in the Department of Translational Neuroscience and served as graduate dean at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His research centers on the cellular basis of abnormal brain rhythms, including active projects on calcium channel function, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. His goal is to use emerging insights about the brain to develop treatments and potential cures for neurological diseases. His science outreach includes Mind in Pictures, cocreated with Jorge Cham for Scientific American Mind, as well as blogs for the Society for Neuroscience and the Museum of the Moving Image.

LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET de Toya Wolfe

For fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Brit Bennett, a striking coming-of-age debut about friendship, community, and resilience, set in the housing projects of Chicago during one life-changing summer.

LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET
by Toya Wolfe
‎ William Morrow, June 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

Even when we lose it all, we find the strength to rebuild. Felicia “Fe Fe” Stevens is living with her vigilantly loving mother and older teenaged brother, whom she adores, in building 4950 of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. It’s the summer of 1999, and her high-rise is next in line to be torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority. She, with the devout Precious Brown and Stacia Buchanan, daughter of a Gangster Disciple Queen-Pin, form a tentative trio and, for a brief moment, carve out for themselves a simple life of Double Dutch and innocence. But when Fe Fe welcomes a mysterious new friend, Tonya, into their fold, the dynamics shift, upending the lives of all four girls.
As their beloved neighborhood falls down around them, so too do their friendships and the structures of the four girls’ families. Fe Fe must make the painful decision of whom she can trust and whom she must let go. Decades later, as she remembers that fateful summer—just before her home was demolished, her life uprooted, and community forever changed—Fe Fe tries to make sense of the grief and fraught bonds that still haunt her and attempts to reclaim the love that never left.
Profound, reverent, and uplifting, LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET explores the risk of connection against the backdrop of racist institutions, the restorative power of knowing and claiming one’s own past, and those defining relationships which form the heartbeat of our lives. Interweaving moments of reckoning and sustaining grace, debut author Toya Wolfe has crafted an era-defining story of finding a home — both in one’s history and in one’s self.

Toya Wolfe grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Chicago Journal, Chicago Reader, Hair Trigger 27, and WarpLand. She is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston-Bessie Head Fiction Award, the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation Short Story Competition, and the Betty Shifflet/John Schultz Short Story Award. She currently resides in Chicago. LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET is her debut novel. 

THE GOD OF GOOD LOOKS de Breanne Mc Ivor

In the vein of Jane Austen and Candice Carty-Williams, a debut novel about a Trinidadian woman who finds herself assisting a legendary makeup artist.

THE GOD OF GOOD LOOKS
by Breanne Mc Ivor
‎ William Morrow, Spring/Summer 2023
(via The Gernert Company)

Bianca Bridge is at her wit’s end. Fired from her editorial job after scandalizing Trinidad’s tight, conservative society with an affair with a married government minister, she’s resorting to modeling for even the sleaziest of photographers to make ends meet. Her mother, were she still alive, would be stunned by whom her daughter has become. Her father — and his ample checkbook — is off somewhere with his second family. And the government minister? It was her precious Eric Hugo’s wife who got her fired. With nothing left to lose, Bianca agrees to assist the brilliant but aloof makeup artist Obadiah Cortland. A legend in the Trinidadian beauty community, Obadiah’s makeup-school-cum-beauty-salon, OC Beauty, complete even with its own magazine, is snobbishly exclusive. At least Bianca will get to write. Yet Obadiah is not the elite tyrant he seems. Born in the poorest part of Trinidad, he’s clawed part-way up society’s ladder and built OC Beauty around his meticulously crafted persona. He’s not about to let anyone see past his façade, especially not the headstrong ‘Miss Bridge.’ Still, Bianca and Obadiah work diligently, along with co-workers Radhika and Dante, while Trinidadian high society throws obstacles in their path. When Bianca discovers Obadiah’s unexpected connection to her former lover, however, and the power Eric Hugo is continuing to attempt to wield over her and the OC Beauty community she’s come to love, she’s finally ready to fight back like her mother taught her — and to reconsider, at last, the nature of what might deserve to be called beautiful.
Inspired by the spirit of writers ranging from Jane Austen to Candice Carty-Williams, yet a talent unto herself, Commonwealth Short Story Prize finalist and Trinidadian writer Breanne Mc Ivor’s debut novel THE GOD OF GOOD LOOKS alternates between Bianca’s irreverent, yet poignant diary entries and Obadiah’s clear-eyed first person narrative as it captures, with warmth, bite, and vulnerability, the fraught impact of the commodification of beauty in a patriarchal society, the Caribbean’s rigid class barriers, and the sweet ache of two young people seeking to find their voice. Though focused on the everyday realities of modern Trinidad and Tobago, THE GOD OF GOOD LOOKS, in addition to being transportive, is full of meaty questions that are universally relatable.

Breanne Mc Ivor’s writing has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean, and the Derek Walcott Writing Prize. In 2015, she was awarded The Caribbean Writer’s David Hough Literary Prize. In 2020 and 2021, she was one of twenty-five Caribbean authors and bookstagrammers involved in the #ReadCaribbean initiative, which encouraged more people to read Caribbean literature. Her short story collection, Where There Are Monsters, was published in 2019 by a small British house, Peepal Tree Press, “home to the best in Caribbean and Black British fiction.” Mc Ivor holds degrees in English from the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh and has a certificate in Advanced Professional Makeup Artistry from the Ephraim Hunte International Makeup Academy. She lives in West Trinidad.

FRUITING BODIES: STORIES de Kathryn Harlan

This genre-bending debut collection of stories constructs eight eerie worlds full of desire, wisdom, and magic blooming amidst decay. For readers of Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell.

FRUITING BODIES: STORIES
by Kathryn Harlan
W.W. Norton, June 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

In stories that beckon and haunt, FRUITING BODIES ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters—mostly queer, mostly women—on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.
In “The Changeling,” two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In “Endangered Animals,” Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In “Take Only What Belongs to You,” a queer woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in “Fiddler, Fool, Pair,” an anthropologist is drawn into a magical—and dangerous—gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes’s body—until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.
Audacious, striking, and wholly original, FRUITING BODIES offers stories about knowledge in a world on the verge of collapse, knowledge that alternately empowers or devastates. Pulling beautifully, brazenly, from a variety of literary traditions, Kathryn Harlan firmly establishes herself as a thrilling new voice in fiction.

« A debut of astonishing range and beauty, nimble and magical and profound. In stunning prose, Kathryn Harlan’s wildly imaginative and daring stories reveal the anguish of growing up in a dying world. Her characters’ quest for knowledge―about themselves, their families, their bodies, and their yearnings―will thrill and haunt you. » ― Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers

Kathryn Harlan received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she now teaches writing. She was the recipient of the 2019 August Derleth Graduate Creative Writing Prize. Her work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere.

STAY AWAKE de Megan Goldin

In the vein of S.J. Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, an electrifying novel of memory and murder.

STAY AWAKE
by Megan Goldin
‎ St. Martin’s Press, August 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a taxi with no idea where she is or how she got there. When she’s dropped off at the door of her brownstone, a stranger answers—a stranger who now lives in her apartment and forces her out in the cold. She reaches for her phone to call for help, only to discover it’s missing, and in its place is a bloodstained knife. That’s when she sees that her hands are covered in black pen, scribbled messages like graffiti on her skin: STAY AWAKE.
Two years ago, Liv was living with her best friend, dating a new man, and thriving as a successful writer for a trendy magazine. Now, she’s lost and disoriented in a New York City that looks nothing like what she remembers. Catching a glimpse of the local news, she’s horrified to see reports of a crime scene where the victim’s blood has been used to scrawl a message across a window, the same message that’s inked on her hands. What did she do last night? And why does she remember nothing from the past two years? Liv finds herself on the run for a crime she doesn’t remember committing as she tries to piece together the fragments of her life. But there’s someone who does know exactly what she did, and they’ll do anything to make her forget—permanently.
A complex thriller that unfolds at a breakneck speed, STAY AWAKE will keep you up all night.

Megan Goldin, author of The Escape Room and The Night Swim, worked as a correspondent for Reuters and other media outlets where she covered war, peace, international terrorism and financial meltdowns in the Middle East and Asia. She is now based in Melbourne, Australia where she raises three sons and is a foster mum to Labrador puppies learning to be guide dogs.