Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

HIGH HAWK d’Amy Frykholm

With the rich interiority of Marilynne Robinson, the thoughtful contemplation of Cara Wall’s The Dearly Beloved, and the lyricism and wisdom of Louise Erdrich, High Hawk explores the fragility of the past, and the power of second chances. Using language that is at once immersive and transporting, Frykholm evokes the plains of the west, conveying a sense of place and the land.

HIGH HAWK
by Amy Frykholm
University of Iowa Press, Fall 2024
(via Harvey Klinger)

It is the early 1980s and for twenty years Father Joe Kreitzer has been dutifully serving the Lakota community on the Windy Creek Reservation in South Dakota. And in all this time he has carried memories of Veronica; their parting propelled him into the church. Now she has reached out, wanting to rekindle what they had turned their back on so many years ago. While grappling with this resurgence from his past, Joe’s dear friend Alice Nighthawk comes to him with news of her son Little Bear’s arrest for attempted murder. In his efforts to help exonerate Bear, Joe uncovers long buried evidence of a church cover up of abuse at a Catholic school on the reservation, forcing him to confront the choices he’s made and the secrets he keeps. What unfolds is an intimately layered story of love, and a search for answers.

Amy Frykholm grew up in South Dakota, where she worked at a community center in Sioux Falls for over ten years and first studied Lakota. She is an award-winning writer, scholar, and journalist. As senior editor for The Christian Century magazine, she hosts the podcast, In Search Of. Amy has her PhD from Duke University and is the author of five books of nonfiction including the most recent, Wild Woman: A Footnote, The Desert, and My Quest for An Elusive Saint (Broadleaf Books, 2021).

BREAKING BIAS d’Anu Gupta

If bias is something learned, not a trait we’re born with, then how do we unlearn it?

BREAKING BIAS
Where Stereotypes & Prejudices Come From—and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them
by Anu Gupta
Hay House, September 2024
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

Growing up in India and the United States, and being a brown-skinned, cis-gendered, gay man with an Indian name, Anu has experienced different levels of bias, privilege, and prejudice in his life—ranging from the subtly stinging to the all-out violent—and he knows intimately the importance of breaking not only interpersonal bias, but our own internalized biases. Today, he is the founder of BE MORE with Anu, an organization that funds independent research on breaking bias and has provided anti-bias trainings to hundreds of companies around the world.

In his first book, Anu will provide readers with a solid foundation in understanding the different types of bias (internalized, interpersonal, and institutional) and their root causes: social contact, education, media, cultural stories, and institutional policies. Then, he’ll teach them how to break it.

At the heart of Anu’s work is the PRISM Toolkit, a mindfulness-based training program that Anu developed in partnership with a cross-disciplinary board of scientists at BE MORE. PRISM stands for Perspective-Taking, pRosocial Behavior, Individuation, Stereotype Replacement, and Mindfulness. These tools have been shown to measurably break bias through regular practice—with the added benefits of strengthening relationships, increasing resilience, reducing stress and anxiety, and even enhancing memory and cognition.

At a time when so many people are desperate for real solutions to structural inequality BREAKING BIAS will expand the important conversation and provide readers with the specific tools needed to address bias in all its forms—racism, sexism, classism, and more.

Anu Gupta is a scientist, educator, lawyer, and the founder & CEO of BE MORE with Anu, an e-learning company that trains organizations in breaking bias. He has spent five years developing and testing a unique science-backed, data-driven methodology that trains people in measurably breaking bias, with funding from National Science Foundation, New York State Health Foundation, American Heart Association, and On Being, among others. He has led hundreds of DEI programs that train professionals in this methodology. Anu has appeared on The Oprah Conversation with Oprah Winfrey, and his writing has been featured in Newsweek, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review and more.

ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SELF-PERSUASION de Jay Heinrichs

Show yourself who’s in charge using the original art of persuasion, backed by contemporary pop culture examples that make transforming your habits and achieving goals easy, even fun—from the New York Times bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing

ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SELF-PERSUASION:
How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life
by Jay Heinrichs
Crown, April 2025
(via DeFiore and Company)

Rhetoric once sat at the center of elite education. Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, and Martin Luther King, Jr., used it to build empires, write deathless literature, and inspire democracies. Now it will help you to take leadership over yourself; not through pop psychology or empty inspiration, but with persuasive tools that have been tested for more than three thousand years. In Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, Heinrichs helps readers persuade their most difficult audiences—themselves—by using techniques invented by the likes of Aristotle and Cicero and deployed by our culture’s most persuasive characters. With their help, rhetoric can convert the most negative situations into positive ones.

Heinrichs brings in examples from history and pop culture—Winston Churchill, Iron Man, Dolly Parton, and the woman who serendipitously invented the chocolate chip cookie—to illustrate the concepts. But the core of the book tests the tools of self-persuasion and asks: Can the same techniques that seduce lovers, sell diet books, and overturn governments help us achieve our most desired goals?

Filled with entertaining and scientific studies that showcase the power of what language can do for you, Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion will teach you how to be the most successful person you can be, just by talking to yourself.

Jay Heinrichs is the New York Times bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing. He spent twenty-six years as a writer, editor, and magazine publishing executive before becoming a full-time advocate for the lost art of rhetoric. He now lectures widely on the subject, to audiences ranging from Ivy League students and NASA scientists to Southwest Airlines executives, and runs the language blog figarospeech. He lives with his wife in New Hampshire.

POETS SQUARE de Courtney Gustafson

Beautifully written literary nonfiction about animals with a profound core like H Is for Hawk and Fox and I. Structured in smart, snappy personal essays that probe at the problems of personhood in the internet age, it will appeal to fans of Melissa Broder or Jia Tolentino, and its introspective, generous thinking on self and society evokes Wintering.

POETS SQUARE:
Essays on Cats & Community
by Courtney Gustafson
Crown, 2024
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

When Courtney Gustafson moved into a new rental in the Poets Square neighborhood in Tuscon, Arizona, she would never have guessed that a colony of feral cats living in her driveway would change her life forever. Settling into a secure romantic relationship while it felt like the world around her was burning down, she couldn’t know how reluctantly, then profoundly, she would come to care about the health and safety of those thirty-some-odd neglected cats: Beebs, Lola, Sadboy, Goldie, Dr. Big Butt, Reverse Monkey, Rihanna, and so many more.
She had no idea about the grief and hardship of animal rescue, the staggering size of the problem. And she couldn’t have imagined how that struggle—towards an ethics of care, of individuals trying their best amidst spectacularly failing systems—would help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with much of her life. She also didn’t expect that the TikTok and Instagram accounts she created about the cats would end up with a just shy of a combined million followers.
POETS SQUARE is a memoir-in-essays about becoming an accidental cat rescuer, going viral, creating community, and surviving capitalism. These essays tell the brutal and tender stories of cats Courtney has saved (or failed to save) as a lens to explore everything from poverty and mental health to morality and misogyny. We see how cat rescue—despite its often-enormous sadness—paradoxically helped in a struggle with depression, showing the way towards an interrelated community of cats and care. The book explores caretaking and kindness in the face of a broken system: what it means for an individual to refuse to throw their hands up, to insist on showing up regardless of insurmountable problems, to search for ways to be a good person in the face of crushing overwhelm.

Courtney Gustafson is the creator of @PoetsSquareCats on TikTok (918k) and Instagram (61k). Her cats and rescue work have been featured on The Dodo, Newsweek, Best Friends Animal Society Magazine, and elsewhere. Before she had thirty cats, she completed a masters degree and PhD coursework in rhetoric and composition at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her interests included community literacies and literacy within incarcerated populations. She taught first-year writing at UMass before leaving academia to work in nonprofit communications. Most recently she’s worked for a large regional food bank, managing social media strategy, storytelling, fundraising, and crisis communications. She has continued to teach creative writing and adult basic literacy as a volunteer in prisons and in refugee communities in Tucson, Arizona, and volunteers as a mentor to incarcerated writers with PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Lady Science, Word Riot, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere.

42 REASONS TO HATE THE UNIVERSE de Chris Ferrie

From bestselling author Chris Ferrie comes an out of this world pop science space book on how the universe is, indeed, trying to kill us all.

42 REASONS TO HATE THE UNIVERSE
(And One Reason Not To)
by Chris Ferrie
Sourcebooks, February 2024

Yes, the Universe is beautiful. And, despite all our scientific progress, it’s still pretty mysterious. But you know what? The Universe is also kind of an asshole.

Consider that you are just a group of atoms structured in a specific way that you can try to understand this thing we call existence. Those same atoms could have just as easily been used to make the dog shit you are cleaning off your shoes. The fact is, when you zoom out and look at the Universe and how it functions, you’ll see that it’s usually not in our favor. Many of the laws of physics are just kind of… dick-ish.

Chris Ferrie is an award-winning physicist and Senior Lecturer for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a Masters in applied mathematics, BMath in mathematical physics and a PhD in applied mathematics. He lives in Australia with his wife and children.