From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Gutsy Girl, a funny, inspiring, deeply researched exploration into the science and psychology of the outdoors and our place in it as we age.
Caroline Paul has always filled her life with adventure: From mountain biking in the Bolivian Andes to pitching a tent, mid-blizzard, on Denali, she has never been a stranger to the exhilaration the outdoors can hold. Yet through it all, she has long wondered, Why aren’t women, like men, encouraged to keep adventuring into old age?
Tough Broad is her quest to understand not just how to live a dynamic life in a changing body,
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Growing up in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, Sarah McCammon was strictly taught to fear God, obey him, and not question the faith. Persistently worried that her gay grandfather would go to hell unless she could reach him, or that her Muslim friend would need to be converted, and that she, too, would go to hell if she did not believe fervently enough, McCammon was a rule-follower and–most of the time–a true believer. But through it all, she was increasingly plagued by fears and deep questions as the belief system she’d been carefully taught clashed with her expanding understanding of the outside world.
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A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot’s genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother’s kitchen.
Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and one wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains.
In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone—her house,
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A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine negotiates the enduring anxieties of medicated depression, race riots, divisive elections, terrorist attacks, and ongoing wars–doom scrolling through the daily news feeds that keep us glued to our screens and that have come to define our age.
First published in 2004, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a hauntingly prescient work,
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A hilarious and incisive exploration of the joys of reading from a teacher, bibliophile and Thurber Prize finalist.
We read to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the power to keep us safe, to challenge us, and perhaps most importantly, to make us more fully human.
Shannon Reed, a long-time teacher, lifelong reader and The New Yorker contributor, gets it. With one simple goal in mind,
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In June of 2018, 35-year-old Shoji Morimoto posted on Twitter offering one simple service: he will do nothing, for a fee. Any and all requests are fair game—seeing you off when moving, sharing a soda with you, being present alongside you when submitting divorce papers, joining you at a baseball game—so long as it conforms to his one and only requirement that he “do nothing.” Since then, Morimoto has been hired by over 4,000 patrons across Japan, officially rebranding himself as Rental Person.
Rental Person’s clients are often desperate, their requests funny, poignant, mysterious and baffling—but never short of fascinating.
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