Archives de catégorie : Memoir

DINNER FOR ONE: How Cooking in Paris Saved Me de Sutanya Dacres

The genuine memoirs from a popular Black American podcaster with an international following. Will feature select recipes, illustrative of the author’s Parisian life.

DINNER FOR ONE:
How Cooking in Paris Saved Me
by Sutanya Dacres
Park Row, May 2022
(chez MacKenzie Wolf – voir catalogue)

When Sutanya Dacres married her French boyfriend and moved to Paris in 2013, she felt like she was living out her very own fairy tale. Jamaican-born and New York-raised, she had never entertained fantasies of living abroad, until her grad school days when she discovered the blogs of expat women living in Paris and began to dream of a different life in a different land. Then she met a French man in a bar, fell in love, and voilà, almost as if she willed it, she was living her Parisian fantasy, embarking on her own “happily ever after” … until her marriage fell apart. Sutanya looked back to her beloved bloggers for guidance, but realized their rosé-tinted reality didn’t match up to her own. For one thing, they weren’t writing about divorce. For another, they weren’t Black. While her marriage had ended and the façade of picture-perfect Paris had cracked, Sutanya wasn’t giving up on the City of Light. Instead, she decided to figure out for herself what happens after the Paris fairy tale ends, and to find a way to mend her broken heart and create a home for herself, beginning in her kitchen. Determined to share her genuine, candid perspective and offer a counter-narrative to the typical idealized expat story, Sutanya launched her podcast, Dinner for One, in February 2018. In each episode, she invites listeners into her Paris kitchen as she shares her experiences as a 30-something hopeless romantic embracing her post-divorce life and celebrating the joy of learning to love cooking for herself. This book grew out of the podcast.
In DINNER FOR ONE: HOW COOKING IN PARIS SAVED ME, Sutanya takes the reader on an adventure through love, loss, and finding home, even when home doesn’t look quite how you expected. Along the way, she builds Parisienne friendships, learns how to date in French, and examines what it means to be a Black American woman in Paris—all while adopting the French principle of pleasure, especially when it comes to good food.

Sutanya Dacres is the creator and host of the podcast Dinner for One, which has been featured in The New York Times and BBC Radio Hour, among others outlets. She grew up in New York City and graduated from the University of Hartford where she double majored in international relations and modern languages and cultures (French) and earned a master’s in communications. She has held a number of copywriting positions at branding and advertising agencies, including Interbrand and BBDO Paris, and with Air France. Sutanya is passionate about contributing a new, underrepresented voice to the Paris expat narrative. She currently resides, and cooks dinners for one, in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris.

I, WITNESS, collection dirigée par Dave Eggers & Zainab Nasrati

A landmark new nonfiction upper middle-grade series curated by literary legend Dave Eggers and International Youth Congress member Zainab Nasrati. Inspiring, engaging, and utterly absorbing, I, WITNESS gathers together the world’s foremost teen activists, writers and changemakers to tell their stories. Filled with accounts of extraordinary challenge from voices across the globe, it’s a one-of-a-kind series by the leaders of tomorrow—a rallying call to action, a praise song to youth resilience, and a testament to the incredible power of shared stories.

I, WITNESS Series
curated by Dave Eggers & Zainab Nasrati
Norton, Summer 2021
(chez Writers House – voir catalogue)

Book #1, ACCUSED, tells the story of Muslim-American activist Adama Bah, who, at the age of 16, was wrongly seized by the FBI on suspicion of being a suicide bomber. Her experience provides a riveting window into the damaging effects of racial profiling and post-9/11 discrimination. Book #2, HURRICAINE, is the astonishing account of Salvador Gómez-Colón, who raised over $160,000 for families devastated by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (read more about Salvador here).
Books #3-4 tentatively to follow over the next 12 months.

The International Congress of Youth Voices was founded by Dave Eggers and Amanda Uhle and is an assembly of the world’s most exceptional teenage writers and activists. You can read more about the organization here.

 Dave Eggers is the acclaimed author of several books for adults and children, and is the winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His establishment of the International Congress of Youth Voices is a natural extension of his well-known activism including the founding of 826 National and his ongoing involvement with ScholarMatch. Dave and co-founder Amanda Uhle are working alongside Danish activist (and congress delegate) Zainab Nasrati to shape the series. Bestselling illustrator AG Ford will provide cover art for each book in the series in order to give it a unified look.

THE CRANE WIFE And Other Love Stories From Life, de C.J. Hauser

Over a million readers flocked to read CJ Hauser’s essay The Crane Wife when it ran in the Paris Review last year. In her first book-length work of non-fiction, Hauser uses that now-beloved title essay as a thematic anchor around which to explore, through an excavation of both her own personal and larger familial hope chest of ‘love stories,’ what it looks like when a person realizes the traditional narrative she thought was to be the story of her life turns out to be a story which must be rewritten.

THE CRANE WIFE And Other Love Stories From Life
by C.J. Hauser
Doubleday, July 2022
(via DeFiore and Co.)

Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realized she’d almost signed up to live someone else’s life.
In this intimate, frank, and funny memoir-in-essays, Hauser releases herself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way. She kisses internet strangers and officiates a wedding. She re-reads Rebecca in the house her boyfriend once shared with his ex-wife and re-winds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to learn how not to lose yourself in a relationship. She thinks about Florence Nightingale at a robot convention and grief at John Belushi’s rock and roll gravesite, and the difference between those stories we’re asked to hold versus those we choose to carry. She writes about friends and lovers, blood family and chosen family, and asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer us all.
Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most big-hearted friend, THE CRANE WIFE is a book for everyone whose life doesn’t look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.

Feature film rights to “The Crane Wife” essay have been sold to an award-winning producer, and streamer, with an Oscarwinning actress attached to star and produce.

C.J. Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. She is the author of the novels The From-Aways and Family of Origin, and her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, and The Kenyon Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Creative Writing from The Florida State University. She lives in Hamilton, New York.

CHEEKY: A Head-to-Toe Memoir, d’Ariella Elovic

The funny, exuberant, inspiring antidote to body shame—a full-color graphic memoir celebrating the imperfections of the author’s female body in all its glory.

CHEEKY:
A Head-to-Toe Memoir
by Ariella Elovic
Bloomsbury, November 2020
(chez DeFiore and Co. – voir catalogue)

Too tall. Too short. Too fat. Too thin. The message is everywhere—we need to pluck, wax, shrink, and hide ourselves, to not take up space, emotionally or literally; women are never “just right.” Well, Ariella Elovic, feminist and illustrator extraordinaire, has had enough. In her full-color graphic memoir CHEEKY, she takes an inspiring and exuberant head-to-toe look at her own body self-consciousness, and body part by body part, finds her way back to herself. How does Ariella learn not to see herself as a never-finished DIY project, but to accept and even love the physical attributes society taught her to hide? How does a mirror go from a “black hole of critique” to a “who’s that girl” moment? Essential to her journey is her posse of girlfriends, her “yentas.” Together, they discover that sharing “imperfections” and some of the gross and “unsightly” things our bodies produce can be a source of endless laughs and deep bonding. It helps to have a team with some outside perspectives to keep our inner bullies in check. Charming and hilarious, full of empathy and candor, and gorgeously illustrated, CHEEKY aims to inspire women everywhere to embrace their bodies, flaws and all, and also their respective bodies’ needs, desires, and inherent power.

“An entertaining, jubilantly body-positive memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews

Ariella Elovic holds a BFA in Communication Design from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been featured by The New Yorker, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Buzzfeed, KAAST, and Womanly Magazine. Ariella has collaborated with various female-interest brands, including Lunette Cup, What’s In Your Box?, Lunapads, and Cora for Women. She lives in New York.

UNDAUNTED de John Brennan

A powerful and revelatory memoir from former CIA director John Brennan, spanning his more than thirty years in government.

UNDAUNTED:
My Fight Against America’s Enemies, At Home and Abroad
by John Brennan
Celadon/Macmillan, October 2020

Friday, January 6, 2017: On that day, as always, John Brennan’s alarm clock was set to go off at 4:15 a.m. But nothing else about that day would be routine. That day marked his first and only security briefing with President-elect Donald Trump. And it was also the day John Brennan said his final farewell to Owen Brennan, his father, the man who had taught him the lessons of goodness, integrity, and honor that had shaped the course of an unparalleled career serving his country from within the intelligence community.
In this brutally honest memoir, Brennan describes the life that took him from being a young CIA recruit enamored with the mystique of spy work and invigorated by his travels in the Middle East to being the most powerful individual in American intelligence. He details his experiences with very different presidents and what it’s been like to bear responsibility for some of the nation’s most crucial and polarizing national security decisions. He pulls back the curtain on the inner workings of the Agency, describing the selfless, patriotic, and invisible work of the women and men involved in national security. He also examines the insularity, arrogance, and myopia that have, at times, undermined its reputation in the eyes of the American people and of members of other branches of government. Through topics ranging from George W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq to his thoughts on the CIA’s controversial use of enhanced interrogation techniques to his eye-opening account of the planning of the raid that resulted in Bin Ladin’s death to his realization that Russia had interfered with the 2016 election, Brennan brings the reader behind the scenes of some of the most crucial moments in recent U.S. history. He also candidly discusses the times he has failed to live up to his own high standards and the very public fallouts that have resulted.
UNDAUNTED offers a rare and insightful look at the often-obscured world of national security, the intelligence profession, and Washington’s chaotic political environment. But more than that, it is a portrait of a man striving for integrity; for himself, for the CIA, and for his country.

John O. Brennan was one of President Obama’s most trusted national security advisors during all eight years of the Obama Administration, first as assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism and then as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Brennan had previously worked in the CIA from 1980 to 2005, where he specialized in Middle Eastern affairs and counterterrorism and served as President Clinton’s daily intelligence briefer. Mr. Brennan received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Fordham University in 1977 and a master’s degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.