DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG d’Eve J. Chung

Told in assured, evocative prose, with impeccably drawn characters, DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG is a hopeful, powerful story about the resilience of women in war, the enduring love between mothers, daughters and sisters, and the sacrifices made to lift up future generations.

DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG
by Eve J. Chung
Berkley, Spring 2024
(via Writers House)

Daughters are the Ang’s family curse.
In 1948, the civil war ravages the countryside, but in rural Shandong the wealthy landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her baby sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother, abused by the family for failing to birth a boy, finds her own small acts of rebellion in the kitchen. As the communist army closes in on their town, the prosperous household flees, leaving behind the girls and their mother because they are useless mouths to feed.
Without an Ang male to punish, the land-seizing cadres choose Hai, as the eldest child, to stand trial for her family’s crimes. She barely survives their brutality. Realizing that worse is yet to come, the women plan their escape. Starving and penniless, but resourceful, they forge their travel permits and embark on a thousand-mile journey to confront the family that abandoned them.
From the countryside to Qingdao, and onward to British Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan, they witness the changing hands of a nation and the plight of multitudes caught in the wake of revolution. But with the loss of their home and the life they’d known also comes a new freedom to take hold of their own fate, to shake free of the bonds of their gender, and to claim their own story.

Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality and women’s rights. She lives in New York with her husband, two children, and two dogs.

SUSPICIOUS MINDS d’Ace Atkins

Ace Atkins, the New York Times bestselling author of the Quinn Colson series, delivers an unputdownable new standalone thriller.

SUSPICIOUS MINDS
by Ace Atkins
William Morrow, Winter 2024
(via Writers House)

Photo: © Joe Worthem

Addison McKellar has it all — the big house, two kids at the right schools, the club memberships, friends, and a handsome, successful husband. Until the day her husband, Dean, leaves for a short business trip and just doesn’t come back. No messages. Her calls and texts unanswered. Fearing the worst, she hires private investigator Porter Hayes, an old friend of her father’s and a legend in Memphis. Hayes starts pulling at loose threads, and Addison’s entire life unravels.
Her husband’s prosperous construction firm? It doesn’t exist. Instead, her easy, affluent lifestyle is funded by blood money from Dean’s shadowy international mercenary firm. Her upstanding husband is a hired killer who runs a small army of hired killers and weapons dealers — and she doesn’t even know his real name.
Porter Hayes, once one of Memphis’s first black police detectives, has confronted evil in many forms over the years. He wants to help Addison get free of this dangerous man and keep her children safe — even if no one else in her privileged world believes her story.
As the real reason behind Dean’s disappearance becomes clear, Addison and Hayes cross paths with Russian mobsters, federal agents, international thieves, arms dealers, and an aging It Girl in this darkly comic thriller with echoes of classic Hitchcock.

Ace Atkins is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of almost thirty novels. Atkins, a former SEC football player, started his career as a crime beat reporter in Florida before becoming a full time novelist. Since then he’s written eleven books in the Quinn Colson series and several true crime novels based on infamous crooks and killers. He was also chosen by Robert B. Parker’s family to continue the Spenser series in 2010, adding ten novels to that iconic franchise.

READ. WRITE. OWN. de Chris Dixon

A passionate call for a new internet – one that wrests control from big tech and puts it back in the hands of the people, through the use of blockchain technology.

READ. WRITE. OWN. :
Building the Next Era of the Internet
by Chris Dixon
Random House, January 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Though few outside a passionate subset of the tech world seem to realize it, the internet has arrived at an inflection point, in two respects. The first regards the history of the internet itself; the second, the technology that will power its future.
Evidence of the first inflection point is all around us. The top 1% of internet services, mostly run by an oligopoly of tech giants, account for 95% of web traffic. Content creators and small businesses depend upon algorithms over which they have no control, and that are subject to change at any time. A tiny handful of people make unilateral decisions with profound consequences for public discourse and who can participate in it, and increasingly for democracy itself. An even tinier handful has become unprecedentedly wealthy off our data, which–unless we want to opt out entirely–we have no choice but to turn over for free.
Chris Dixon remembers the halcyon days of the early internet–Web 1.0, as it’s known–when it was an open, egalitarian, and decentralized place, before it was intermediated by Big Tech. The next era, Web 2.0, brought transformative technologies like social media that connected billions of people–but it also centralized power in the hands of the companies that run them, with increasingly negative consequences for society as a whole.
For over five years, Chris has been advocating for a new kind of internet, which would combine the ethos of the early web while maintaining and innovating upon the benefits of corporate networks. Web3 (a term Chris has done more than anyone else to popularize) would be powered by blockchains, a new kind of computing that does everything corporate networks can do, and much more. They would return power and ownership to users, and foster innovation, precisely because their architecture makes it impossible for one person or company to seize control.
That brings us to the second inflection point. For many people, the past year has turned crypto into a dirty word–even a risible one. But that’s because cryptocurrency, which is but one use case of blockchains, has become in the public mind the province of speculators and grifters. The average person fails to understand that the true power and potential of crypto lies in blockchains themselves, not in the market for their tokens. It’s easy to forget that when the tech bubble burst in 2000, and the speculative frenzy that fueled the spectacular failure of companies like Pets.com and Webvan had subsided, many people thought it was the internet itself that had been overhyped. And yet that same era, and its immediate aftermath, gave us Amazon, Google, and Facebook–three of the most valuable companies in the world, which have fundamentally changed the way we live and work, but whose success has brought us to this crossroads.
There is a battle underway over the soul of crypto: “the computer v. the casino,” as Chris puts it. Sam Bankman-Fried was the figurehead for the latter camp. Chris is the unquestioned thought leader of the former. While the casino gets all the mainstream attention, the future of the internet is quietly being built. READ. WRITE. OWN. is its ZERO TO ONE–and having represented both, that’s not a comparison I make lightly.

Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he has been since 2012. He founded and leads a16z crypto, which invests in web3 technologies through four dedicated funds with more than $7 billion under management. In 2022, he was ranked #1 on Forbes’ Midas List of the top venture capitalists. Previously, he founded and was CEO of two internet companies, SiteAdvisor and Hunch, which were acquired by McAfee and eBay, respectively. A programmer by training, he has a BA and MA in Philosophy from Columbia, and an MBA from Harvard. He tweets at @cdixon and blogs at Mirror.

THE BOYS de Sameer Pandya

A compulsively readable and incisive look at a violent incident among a group of teenage boys that brings three very different sets of parents together: it’s about class, race, education and privilege, and the conflict when all of those slam together.

THE BOYS
by Sameer Pandya
Ballantine, Winter 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Reveling in the triumph of a high school football win, a group of newly-friended boys find themselves at a party and—as sometimes happens—might or might not have beaten the crap out the kid that has annoyed them all their lives. These all-stars are suspended for the season, but instead of dwelling tight on the boys, Sameer wraps the narrative around their troubled parents and how they react and interact and judge and confront this family crisis. THE BOYS is about class, and race, and education and the privilege of passing and the lack of privilege if you don’t, and the conflict we find when all of those slam together. It’s about the kids inside each parent, and the games the world makes each of us play.

Sameer Pandya is the author of Members Only and the story collection The Blind Writer, which was long listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. He is also the recipient of the PEN/Civitella Fellowship. His fiction, commentary, and cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and Narrative Magazine. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

THE PARA METHOD de Tiago Forte

Productivity expert and bestselling author of Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte shows you how to re-organise, streamline and simplify your inbox, filing system, notes app and more – so that you have more time to do the things that really matter.

THE PARA METHOD
by Tiago Forte
Atria/Simon & Schuster, November 2023
(via Writers House)

Imagine the perfect organizational system.
A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your life – every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research – and exactly where to find it when you needed it. Such a system would need to be incredibly easy to set up, and even easier to maintain. After all, only the simplest, most effortless habits endure long term.
It would need to be both flexible, adapting to your needs in different seasons of your life, but also comprehensive, so you can use it in every one of the many places where you store information, such as your computer’s file system, a cloud storage platform (e.g., Dropbox or Google Drive), or a digital notetaking app. But most of all, the ideal organizational system would be one that leads directly to tangible benefits in your career and life. It would dramatically accelerate you toward completing the projects and achieving the goals that are most important to you.
In other words, the ultimate system for organizing your life is one that is actionable. Instead of putting more obstacles in your way, postponing the actions that will make a difference, it would pull those actions closer and make them easier to start and finish.
Developed by Tiago Forte after more than a decade of personal experimentation, teaching thousands of students, and coaching world-class professionals, THE PARA METHOD is a simple, comprehensive, yet extremely flexible system for organizing any type of digital information across any platform.

Tiago Forte is one of the world’s foremost experts on productivity and has taught thousands of people around the world how timeless principles and the latest technology can revolutionize their productivity, creativity, and personal effectiveness. He has worked with organizations such as Genentech, Toyota Motor Corporation, and the Inter-American Development Bank and appeared in a variety of publications, such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review.