Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of
David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its ear,
mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his
unique worldview-a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and
deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her
young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a
stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a
quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of
imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without
doubt one of the freshest in American writing.
From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come.
Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in
history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate
change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global
policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a
sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary
tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:
• Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of
what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and
different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and
national governments than in the past.
• The worldwide digital
communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the
emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of
billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots,
ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
• The balance of global
political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than
at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system
to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to
private actors, and from political systems to markets.
• A deeply
flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in
consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic
resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
• Genomic,
biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically
transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular
science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
• There
has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings
and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary
transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and
construction worldwide.
From his earliest days in public life,
Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent
truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as
it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right.
Sam Lewis is going to get his butt kicked in exactly thirty-three
minutes. He knows this because yesterday his former best friend Morgan
Sturtz told him, to his face and with three witnesses nearby, “I am
totally going to kick your butt tomorrow at recess.”
All
that’s standing between Sam and this unfortunate butt-kicking is the
last few minutes of social studies and his lunch period. But how did Sam
and Morgan end up here? How did this happen just a few months after
TAMADE (The Absolutely Most Amazing Day Ever), when they became the
greatest Alien Wars video game team in the history of great Alien Wars teams? And once the clock ticks down, will Morgan actually act on his threat?
Told with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and achingly real emotional truth, 33 Minutes shows how even the best of friendships can change forever.
Behind the Book: "Seventh grade was the worst year of my life. By far. My very best
friend since fourth grade (the best friend I ever had up to that point)
was steadily turning into just another kid at school. Somehow I
couldn’t do a single thing about it. I didn’t like his new friends. In
fact, some of them were my enemies.
That year was long and painful. And not even a teeny bit funny.
When I started writing my first book for young readers, I knew I’d start
with that year, with what it felt like to learn the hard way that your
best friend could decide all by himself that the two of you aren’t even
going to be friends anymore. I wanted to write about the loss of a best
friend, but not just because it happened to me. I wanted to tell this
story because I was certain it was, and is, a story tons of other kids
are going through all the time. Almost every other adult I talk to
about this experience seems to have a similar story, a story they’ll
never forget, even if they’ve tried. And most of them, including me,
have definitely tried.
But just because that sad, painful, unfunny year felt like it lasted
forever, it didn’t mean that the experience of reading my book about it
should be any of those things. So I decided that Sam Lewis, my
protagonist, would go through it (or finally come out, pretty much in
one piece, the other end of it) in only about 33 minutes. And his
telling of it, however sad at the core, would have to be funny, too. Or
even hilarious. And, in a few places, totally absurd.
And maybe that last part is no coincidence, because if there’s one thing
I learned in middle school it’s this: you’ll never survive those years
without an oversized sense of humor."
"George Saunders has done something special with his collection of
stories, The Tenth of December. Saunders has maintained a unique style
and an intensely close eye on the inner-workings of each of his
characters in these widely varied stories - varied not just in subject
matter, but in emotional depth, satire, and all those other things we
look for: unique flaws, interactions with other unique characters,
situations, etc. etc. This was not my first interaction with Saunders.
Another collection Pastoralia introduced me to Saunders' unique
style: his comedy, his depth, his inventive style, and in Tenth of
December Saunders maintains and has sharpened his voice. Many of his
characters seem to possess the rambling, worried inner-monologues that
so many of us non-Saunders-character-people live with. My favorite
pieces include the flash piece "Sticks" and the title story "Tenth of
December" which closes the collection on such a powerful emotional note
(it is a story about an older man with cancer saving the life of a young
boy, after all). I had to re-read the last two pages several times, not
just for the emotional weight but for the overwhelming beauty in
Saunders' prose. A fantastic writer and a fantastic collection!"
In the stunning tradition of Lisa See, Maeve Binchy, and Alice Hoffman, The Tin Horseis
a rich multigenerational story about the intense, often fraught bond
sisters share and the dreams and sorrows that lay at the heart of the
immigrant experience.
It has been more than sixty years since Elaine Greenstein’s twin
sister, Barbara, ran away, cutting off contact with her family forever.
Elaine has made peace with that loss. But while sifting through old
papers as she prepares to move to Rancho Mañana—or the “Ranch of No
Tomorrow” as she refers to the retirement community—she is stunned to
find a possible hint to Barbara’s whereabouts all these years later. And
it pushes her to confront the fierce love and bitter rivalry of their
youth during the 1920s and ’30s, in the Los Angeles Jewish neighborhood
of Boyle Heights.
Though raised together in Boyle Heights,
where kosher delis and storefront signs in Yiddish lined the streets,
Elaine and Barbara staked out very different personal territories.
Elaine was thoughtful and studious, encouraged to dream of going to
college, while Barbara was a bold rule-breaker whose hopes fastened on
nearby Hollywood. In the fall of 1939, when the girls were eighteen,
Barbara’s recklessness took an alarming turn. Leaving only a cryptic
note, she disappeared.
In an unforgettable voice layered
with humor and insight, Elaine delves into the past. She recalls growing
up with her spirited family: her luftmensch of a grandfather, a
former tinsmith with tales from the Old Country; her papa, who preaches
the American Dream even as it eludes him; her mercurial mother, whose
secret grief colors her moods—and of course audacious Barbara and their
younger sisters, Audrey and Harriet. As Elaine looks back on the
momentous events of history and on the personal dramas of the Greenstein
clan, she must finally face the truth of her own childhood, and that of
the twin sister she once knew.
In The Tin Horse,
Janice Steinberg exquisitely unfolds a rich multigenerational story
about the intense, often fraught bonds between sisters, mothers, and
daughters and the profound and surprising ways we are shaped by those we
love. At its core, it is a book not only about the stories we tell but,
more important, those we believe, especially the ones about our very
selves.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Anne Tyler gives us a wise, haunting,
and deeply moving new novel about loss and recovery, pierced throughout
with her humor, wisdom, and always penetrating look at human foibles.
Crippled in his right arm and leg, Aaron grew up fending off a sister
who constantly wanted to manage him. So when he meets Dorothy, an
outspoken, independent young woman, she’s like a breath of fresh air. He
marries her without hesitation, and they have a relatively happy,
unremarkable marriage. Aaron works at his family’s vanity-publishing
business, turning out titles that presume to guide beginners through the
trials of life. But when a tree crashes into their house and Dorothy is
killed, Aaron feels as though he has been erased forever. Only
Dorothy’s unexpected appearances from the dead—in their house, on the
roadway, in the market—help him to live in the moment and to find some
peace. Gradually, Aaron discovers that maybe for this beginner there is
indeed a way to say goodbye.
When Reuben Golding, a young reporter on assignment, arrives at a
secluded mansion on a bluff high above the Pacific, it’s at the behest
of the home’s enigmatic female owner. She quickly seduces him, but their
idyllic night is shattered by violence when the man is inexplicably
attacked—bitten—by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness. It will
set in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation that will propel
Reuben into a mysterious new world and raise profound questions. Why
has he been given the wolf gift? What is its true nature--good or evil?
And are there others out there like him?
Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of
David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its ear,
mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his
unique worldview-a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and
deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her
young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a
stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a
quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of
imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without
doubt one of the freshest in American writing.
