Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

TALK WITH HER de Kimberly Wolf

TALK WITH HER:
A Dad’s Essential Guide to Raising Empowered Girls
by Kimberly Wolf
Penguin Life, May 2022

As an entrepreneur launching a girls’ health and wellness company, Kimberly Wolf found herself talking to many high-powered male investors, creatives, and advisors. But what they wanted to talk about took her by surprise. They all wanted to ask questions about their teenage daughters—what they should say to them, what they should do for them, or whether they should step aside and leave it to mom (or just wait it out).
Wolf realized dads needed real guidance, and that she could help. Daughters who have healthy communication with their dads are known to have more a more positive sense of self, better nutritional habits, and more successful careers. In TALK WITH HER, she gives dads a toolbox filled with insights into girlhood, proven communication methods, and anecdotes and advice based on interviews with more than 100 dads and daughters. More importantly, she offers straight talk about what teenage girls are going through and dozens of actionable strategies and scripts to help dads get through to their girls even if their girls won’t give them the time of day. It all adds up to a framework that will give dads the confidence they need to communicate with their daughters and raise empowered women.

Kimberly Wolf is a wellness educator and the founder of Girlmentum Labs, a web-based educational media consulting company supporting girls’ health and wellness. She is a graduate of Brown (BA, 2006, women’s studies) and Harvard (M.Ed., 2009, human development and psychology) where she worked closely with Richard Weissbourd, director of Human Development & Psychology Program.

PREPARE HER de Genevieve Plunkett

A collection of stories set in a not-so bucolic Vermont, a land of antique stores, small towns, fading farms, and young women trying to figure out marriage, motherhood, sex and their own power.

PREPARE HER
by Genevieve Plunkett
Catapult, July 2021

PREPARE HER tells the stories of young women at the brink of discovering their own power. The crossroads in their lives are not always the obvious kind—divorce, motherhood, coming of age—but sometimes much more private and dramatic. Kitty discovers that her ex-boyfriend has committed a murder; Renee navigates a friendship with Arla, a Jehovah’s Witness; Emi realizes that her boyfriend is fetishizing her mental illness; Petra acts recklessly when faced with a client with a gun; and Rachel must grapple with the reality of raising a daughter in a world that she, herself, is still terrified of.
Tempered by its rural and often haunting Vermont setting, this book explores the complexities of gender and power imbalances in a way that transforms normal life into something mysterious, uncharted, and sometimes bewildering. Through this lens, we can see the many subtle, yet staggering injustices endured by the women at the center of these stories, as well as identify what, or who might be responsible.

Genevieve Plunkett is the recipient of an O. Henry Award. Her work has also appeared in The Best Small Fictions, and journals such as New England Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, The Colorado Review, and Willow Springs. She lives in Vermont with her two children. She is at work on her debut novel, which is also forthcoming from Catapult.

SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems de Melissa Broder

Featuring a new introduction from the author, SUPERDOOM brings together the best of Broder’s three cult out-of-print poetry collections―When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone―as well as the best of her fourth collection, Last Sext.

SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems
by Melissa Broder
Tin House Books, August 2021

Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, with humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder’s language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness and raw intimacy. At turns essayistic and surreal, bouncing between the grotesque and the transcendent, SUPERDOOM is a must-have for longtime fans and the perfect introduction to one of our most brilliant and original poets.

Melissa Broder is the author of the novel The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, and she is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She has written for The New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles.

THE GRIEVING BRAIN de Mary-Frances O’Connor

THE GRIEVING BRAIN:
How Our Neurons Map Love and Loss
by Mary-Frances O’Connor
Harper One, March 2022

There is the initial pain of loss, and then there is the grieving. We have long assigned grief to the realm of nebulous emotions, but we now know that the brain creates those emotions in response to many outside factors. Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor has been studying the effects of grief on the brain and body for more than twenty years, and the clues she has found as to how we cope with loss turn out to be rooted in how we fall in love. In THE GRIEVING BRAIN, she explores this new territory and explains what happens inside the brain when we become attached to another and then lose that loved one—and why it can be so difficult to imagine a future without them. (Hint: Sometimes the brain leads us to believe the death is just not true.)
For readers of popular science such as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, as well as Joan Didion’s memoir of loss, The Year of Magical Thinking, THE GRIEVING BRAIN offers remarkable insight into the inner workings of our minds and the evolution of grief. O’Connor’s explanation of the brain’s reaction to loss is an inspiring look at love. And her discovery, that we should think of grief as a form of learning, is a bold new perspective on a timeless struggle.

Mary-Frances O’Connor is the award-winning director of the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. She earned her degrees in psychology from Northwestern and in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona, and she completed her clinical training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital and her post-doctoral fellowship at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. In 2017, she received the American Psychosomatic Society’s 75th Anniversary Award, given in recognition of her important career contributions in the field of mind-body medicine. She has previously appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and Good Morning Tucson, and has been featured in the New York Times and Psychology Today, among many others.

CIRCA de Devi S. Laskar

Told through a series of precise, charged vignettes, CIRCA tells the story of Heera Sanyal, the daughter of Bengali immigrants, as she negotiates the complicated, strange proximity of love and grief and struggles with the divide between her parents’ and society’s expectations, and her own vision for the future.

CIRCA
by Devi S. Laskar
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Spring 2022

On the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, Heera and her best friends, siblings Marie and Marco, are rebelliously teasing what fun can be had out of life in Raleigh, North Carolina. But no matter how much Heera defies her strict upbringing, from pickpocketing to vandalism, she’s always avoided any real danger—until Marie is killed in an accident in front of her and Marco. Then everything changes. Marco begins calling himself Crash and over the years to come, spends his days womanizing and burning through a string of jobs. Heera’s dream of college in New York is upended by a family illness. She soon finds herself trapped in a loveless arranged marriage to a wealthy man and in-laws who become fearful of the devastating force of community gossip.
Over the years, Heera and Crash’s paths cross and re-cross, on a journey of dreams, desires, jealousies, betrayals—all in the name of love. Heart-wrenching and wry, CIRCA is a story of a young woman torn between familial duty and her own survival. Laskar penetratingly explores within these pages what it means to have an identity fractured by different cultures; issues of emotional inheritance, belonging, grief, and romance; and the many ways that people can disappear, both from themselves and others. Heera’s journey, from North Carolina to New York, and from girlhood to womanhood, reveals the beauty and darkness and revelation inherent in the paths of all those who not only want to survive, but to grow. The novel is also compulsively readable; a true one-sitting read.

Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, which was named a Washington Post “Best Book of the Year” and “A Book All Georgians Should Read” by The Georgia Center for the Book. The novel was the winner of the 2019–2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Adult Fiction and the 2020 Crook’s Corner Book Prize. It was also short-listed for the Northern California Book Awards and long-listed for the 2019 Northern California Golden Poppy Book Award in Fiction and for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Laskar holds an MFA from Columbia University and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been hailed by Marie Claire as “devastatingly potent,” by Booklist as “sharply relevant and tragically timeless,” by Jean Kwok as “searing, powerful, and beautifully written,” and by Kiese Laymon as “narratively beautiful as it is brutal…Laskar has changed how we will all write about state-sanctioned terror in this nation,” to name just a few highlights of praise. She is an alumna of The OpEd Project and VONA.