No Place for Normal: New York


Book Description

From random sightings of the spectral (and spectacular) Rollerena, a fortyish male who would grace onlookers with his fairy godmother benedictions in a cloud of white fabric and rhinestones, to some of the haunts that Charles Dickens frequented during his visits to the city, author Clifford Browder leaves no stone unturned, or for that matter, subject untouched. Topics include (but are not limited to) alcoholics, abortionists, grave robbers, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, peyote visions, sinners that New Yorkers will (or won't) put up with, and an artist who makes art of a blood-filled squirt gun and a blackened human toe. From the grotesque to the engrossing, No Place for Normal: New York celebrates the shocking, weird, unpredictable, yet utterly wonderful tapestry that makes New York unlike any other city in the world, and a place that so many are proud to call home.




Look to Windward


Book Description

Eight hundred years after the most horrific battle of the Idiran war, light from its world-destroying detonations is about to reach the Masaq Orbital, home to the Culture. Major Quilan has supposedly come to take the exiled Composer Ziller back to their war-ravaged home world, Chel. But despite the major's civilized veneer, his true mission may be the death and destruction of an entire civilization.







Normal Gets You Nowhere


Book Description

nor-mal: according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule or principle / conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern / of, relating to, or characterized by average intelligence or development Normal? Who wants to be that? When Kelly Cutrone’s first book, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside, was first published, young people flocked to this new voice—finally, someone was telling it like it is, in language they spoke. It quickly became a New York Times bestseller, and fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone became more than a personality, she became a beloved guru, mentor, and fairy godmother. Now she’s back with another no-holds-barred book to awaken our souls and kick our asses into gear. With Normal Gets You Nowhere, she invites us to get our freak on. History is full of successful, world-changing people who did not fit in. Think Nelson Mandela, Joan of Arc, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, John Lennon, and Rosa Parks. Instead of changing themselves to accommodate the status quo or what others thought they should be, these people hung a light on their differences— and changed humanity in the process. “I know you don’t feel normal, so why are you trying to act it and prove to everyone you are?” Cutrone says. So much of what we say or don’t say, and what we do or don’t do, is dictated by what others have told us, or what people may think of us. This is not how we should be living, by measuring ourselves against the mundane. An invitation to rethink who you are, what you value, and what you want from life, Normal Gets You Nowhere goes beyond how to reinvent yourself and create your own brand, and investigates what it means to live in this world as a tuned-in, caring individual with a passion for making a difference. There’s already an army of super talented uberfreaks changing the world–isn’t it time you joined them?




A Cultural History of Work in the Modern Age


Book Description

Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities Changes in production and consumption fundamentally transformed the culture of work in the industrial world during the century after World War I. In the aftermath of the war, the drive to create new markets and rationalize work management engaged new strategies of advertising and scientific management, deploying new workforces increasingly tied to consumption rather than production. These changes affected both the culture of the workplace and the home, as the gendered family economy of the modern worker struggled with the vagaries of a changing gendered labour market and the inequalities that accompanied them. This volume draws on illustrative cases to highlight the uneven development of the modern culture of work over the course of the long 20th century. A Cultural History of Work in the Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.




The Luminaries


Book Description

The winner of the Man Booker Prize, this "expertly written, perfectly constructed" bestseller (The Guardian) is now a Starz miniseries. It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.




Nowhere Near Normal


Book Description

In the bestselling tradition of Augusten Burroughs, a compassionate, witty, and completely candid memoir that chronicles growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder. When all the neighborhood kids were playing outdoors, seven-year-old Traci Foust was inside making sure the miniature Catholic saint statues on her windowsill always pointed north, scratching out bald patches on her scalp, and snapping her fingers after every utterance of the word God. As Traci grew older, her OCD blossomed to include panic attacks and bizarre behaviors, including a fear of the sun, an obsession with contracting eradicated diseases, and the idea that she could catch herself on fire just by thinking about it. While stints of therapy -- and lots of Nyquil -- sometimes helped, nothing alleviated the fact that her single mother and mid-life crisis father had no idea how to deal with her. Traci Foust shares her wacky and compelling journey with brutal honesty, from becoming a teenage runaway on the poetry slam beat in the hippie beach towns of Northern California to living at a family-owned nursing home, in a room with a seventy-five- year-old WWII Vet who kept mistaking her for a prostitute. In this funny, frenetic, and wonderfully dark-humored account of her struggles with a variety of psychological disorders, Traci ultimately concludes that there is nothing special about being “normal.”







A Little Life


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.




Weird New York


Book Description

This book is a travel guide of sorts to New York's local legends and best kept secrets, filled with crazy characters, cursed roads, abandoned sites, and bizarre roadside attractions that the author feels reflect the shared modern folklore of our time.




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