Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionWhen three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community …
The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo: Menstruation
A provocative look at the way our culture deals with menstruation.The Curse examines the culture of concealment that surrounds menstruation and the devastating impact such secrecy has on women’s physical and psychological health. Karen Houppert combines reporting on the potential safety problems of sanitary products–such as dioxin-laced tampons–with an analysis of the way ads, movies, young-adult novels, and …
The second volume of the bestselling landmark work on the history of the modern stateWriting in The Wall Street Journal, David Gress called Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order “magisterial in its learning and admirably immodest in its ambition.” In The New York Times Book Review, Michael Lind described the book as “a major achievement by one of …
A biting satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of …
The stunningly vibrant final novel in the bestselling Ibis TrilogyIt is 1839 and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is …
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,And on a beach aslant its shimmering Upwards of 50,000 menAsleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet. For more than forty years, the English poet, wit, and troublemaker Christopher Logue (1926-2011) was at work on what came to be regarded as his masterpiece: an idiosyncratic contemporary version of Homer’s Iliad. Beginning with …
The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The …
First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era―including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall―through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness …
A revised edition of this major writer’s complete poetical workAnd I who was walkingwith the earth at my waist,saw two snowy eaglesand a naked girl.The one was the otherand the girl was neither. -from “Qasida of the Dark Doves”Federico García Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world’s most …
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of FreedomYoung Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother–her only family–is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a …