Fatherhood caught David McGlynn by surprise. His sons arrived in quick succession—the first when the author was a dirt-poor student and the second not long after he’d moved his family across the country to start a new job in bucolic Wisconsin. As a result, McGlynn found himself colliding with fatherhood, at once scared to death and utterly thrilled. Just like many new fathers, he hopes he’s doing the right thing—but he’s never quite sure.
One Day You’ll Thank Me translates the small, often hilarious moments common among parents of young children, especially dads, into “life lessons” about fatherhood.
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A “searingly honest self-exploration” (New York Times) of the experience and psyche of the Asian American male, including Tizon’s stunning final article, “My Family’s Slave”
Shame, Alex Tizon tells us, is universal—his own happened to be about race. To counteract the steady diet of American television and movies that taught Tizon to be ashamed of his face, his skin color, his height, he turned outward. (“I had to educate myself on my own worth. It was a sloppy, piecemeal education, but I had to do it because no one else was going to do it for me.”) Tizon illuminates his youthful search for Asian men who had no place in his American history books or classrooms.
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From the author of The Queen of the Night, an essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist—and how we form our identities in life and in art.
As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incomparable” by Junot Díaz, and “incendiary” by the New York Times. With How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his first collection of nonfiction, he’s sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life,
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Twelve-year-old Patryk knows little of the world beyond his tiny Polish village; the Russians have occupied the land for as long as anyone can remember, but otherwise life is unremarkable. Patryk and his friends entertain themselves by coming up with dares—some more harmful than others—until the Germans drop a bomb on the schoolhouse and the Great War comes crashing in.
As control of the village falls from one nation to another, Jurek, the ringleader of these friends, devises the best dare yet: whichever boy steals the finest military button will be king. But as sneaking buttons from uniforms hanging to dry progresses to looting the bodies of dead soldiers—and as Jurek’s obsession with being king escalates—Patryk begins to wonder whether their “button war” is still just a game.
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Owen Cross grew up with two loves: one a game, the other a girl.
One of his loves ruined him. Now he’s counting on the other to save him.
Owen Cross leaves his sleepy, southern town and goes to college with dreams of the major leagues—and an emptiness full of a girl back home named Micky Dullahan. Owen loved Micky from the first time they met on the hill between their two worlds: his middle-class home and her troubled Shantytown.
Years later he leaves her for the dugouts and the autographs, but their days together follow him.
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In the middle of the night in 1997, Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe André was kidnapped by armed men and taken away to an unknown destination in the Caucasus region. For three months, André was kept handcuffed in solitary confinement, with little to survive on and almost no contact with the outside world. Close to twenty years later, award-winning cartoonist Guy Delisle (Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzhen, Burma Chronicles) recounts André’s harrowing experience in Hostage, a book that attests to the power of one man’s determination in the face of a hopeless situation.
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