Narrative Non-fiction

Dear Memory

Dear Memory

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A Kirkus Best Book of October 2021

From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.

For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.

Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted collages and missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Victoria Chang grasps on to a sense of self that grief threatens to dissipate.

In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.

Other Honors for Dear Memory:

An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021

A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021

A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021An NPR Most Anticipated Book of October 2021

Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion

Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion

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"Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity."--Chris KrausA rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes--finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land--she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords' vast estates. In the farmers' socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents' collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present. Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place--one in which everything is intertwined and all at once.


Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

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Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library

Anne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love

Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers. Beginning with the poet Sappho's invention of the word "bittersweet" to describe Eros, Carson's original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both "miserable" and "one of the greatest pleasures we have."

Everybody: A Book about Freedom

Everybody: A Book about Freedom

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The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century--among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.

Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

Five Billion Years of Solitude : The Search for Life Among the Stars

Five Billion Years of Solitude : The Search for Life Among the Stars

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An intimate history of Earth and the quest for life beyond the solar system
For 4.6 billion years our living planet has been alone in a vast and silent universe. But soon, Earth's isolation could come to an end. Over the past two decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars. Some of these exoplanets may be mirror images of our own world. And more are being found all the time.
Yet as the pace of discovery quickens, an answer to the universe's greatest riddle still remains just out of reach: Is the great silence and emptiness of the cosmos a sign that we and our world are somehow singular, special, and profoundly alone, or does it just mean that we re looking for life in all the wrong places? As star-gazing scientists come closer to learning the truth, their insights are proving ever more crucial to understanding life s intricate mysteries and possibilities right here on Earth.
Science journalist Lee Billings explores the past and future of the "exoplanet boom" through in-depth reporting and interviews with the astronomers and
planetary scientists at its forefront. He recounts the stories behind their world-changing discoveries and captures the pivotal moments that drove them forward in their historic search for the first habitable planets beyond our solar system. Billings brings readers close to a wide range of fascinating characters, such as:
FRANK DRAKE, a pioneer who has used the world s greatest radio telescopes to conduct the first searches for extraterrestrial intelligence and to transmit a message to the stars so powerful that it briefly outshone our Sun.
JIM KASTING, a mild-mannered former NASA scientist whose research into the Earth s atmosphere and climate reveals the deepest foundations of life on our planet, foretells the end of life on Earth in the distant future, and guides the planet hunters in their search for alien life.
SARA SEAGER, a visionary and iron-willed MIT professor who dreams of escaping the solar system and building the giant space telescopes required to discover and study life-bearing planets around hundreds of the Sun s neighboring stars.
Through these and other captivating tales, Billings traces the triumphs, tragedies, and betrayals of the extraordinary men and women seeking life among the stars. In spite of insufficient funding, clashing opinions, and the failings of some of our world s most prominent and powerful scientific organizations, these planet hunters will not rest until they find the meaning of life in the infinite depths of space. Billings emphasizes that the heroic quest for other Earth-like planets is not only a scientific pursuit, but also a reflection of our own culture s timeless hopes and fears.

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Ghosts of an Old Forest: Essays on Midwestern Rural Heritage

Ghosts of an Old Forest: Essays on Midwestern Rural Heritage

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In the Ohio counties of the Alleghany Plateau, 19th-century barns hewn from old-growth wood rest near remnant forests, reminders of the state's deep agricultural roots and rich ecological past. Through fourteen linked, meditative essays, Deborah Fleming, author of the award-winning Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio's Natural Landscape, persuasively and passionately argues for protecting these vestiges of the region's natural and rural history.

Fleming describes domesticated and wild nature on her farm; delves into Ohio's rich history of agriculture; tackles the issues of litter and pollution; decries the practice of hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking"); and reflects on changes in communities bordering rivers, which are often the most exploited by extraction industries.

The result is an evocative collection, which traces Ohio's natural and cultural history--and serves as an urgent call to preserve its splendor.
Gulp

Gulp

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"America's funniest science writer" (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of--or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists--who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts.

Like all of Roach's books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.

H Is for Hawk

H Is for Hawk

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One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)

The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human "discover the pain and beauty of being alive" (People). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from one of our most unique and transcendent voices.

Hark: How Women Listen

Hark: How Women Listen

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We're told women are good at listening, but we rarely examine what they're listening to, what their worlds sound like, or how it feels to be expected to listen in a world of noise made by men.

Like so many of us, Alice Vincent had become overwhelmed by the sensory overload punctuating our every moment. And then, a baby's heartbeat arrived. A rapid, pulsing whoosh of white noise. An undeniable rhythm. Once again, Alice's life became cacophonous - both with a new child, but also with the societal pressures that motherhood holds.

What followed was a personal quest to rediscover sound as something alive and vital and restorative. Beyond music, Alice's journey takes her into new corners of listening: from the phantom crying heard by mothers across the world to the nightingale's song and the crackle of the Aurora Borealis. As our attention spans shrink and our sense of disconnection grows, Alice wants to find out if sound - seeking it, trying to hold on to it, making space for it in her life - can reconnect her not only to lost parts of herself but to a life more consciously lived. Hark is a book for women who feel unheard and a means of listening more deeply in a world that has grown too loud.

Healing the Space Between Us: connecting across racial and economic divisions

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