Open Water


Book Description

WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35 WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION “Open Water is tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought, an exploration of intimacy and vulnerability between two young artists learning to be soft with each other in a world that hardens against Black people.”—Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control. Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty. This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.




Open Book in Ways of Water


Book Description

In Open Book in Ways of Water, poet and artist Adam Wolfond explores the synaesthetic quality of autistic perception, the way in which water in its different materializations shapes and channels language. Building on notions such as "wetness," "streams," and "currents," Wolfond constructs a linguistic universe in which writing and perception merge, move, and "pace to gether" - echoing both the togetherness of the senses and the gathering rhythms of water. Open Book in Ways of Water is as much a book of poetry and a book about poetry, a self-reflection in an endlessly moving and transforming element. As the author himself explains: Language is a way to understand each other but it is also reductive in the ways that it is abstracted and non-sensuous, and open writing as movement tends to be ignored as autistics are forced into neurotypical ways of seeing, and the thinking around artistic practices feels of a pace that intensifies the use of forms forming, and similarities with open processes are languaging the way of water, making language about artful relations with the more than human. Water is a game of ways and patterns that wave and ripple and can pull us under, the talk is about surfacing but languaging is about feeling, moving the ways that it makes are having variances moving the thresholds in thinking feeling of a rally that comes from cutting the grammars out and that is the way of perception that is cut by grammar and people need art to dance this dance of relation. A man of autism answers the ways of the body much of the time and that means my body rallies the artful atmospheres that are dancing me and the real feeling can dance the atmospheres as my body presence and pace shifts other bodies to be free. Having a ticcing body is making the dance about disorder but really it is about a different and diverse way of languaging with many feelings and bathing and immersing and I don't have any other way. Adam Wolfond is an autistic poet and artist who uses a device to speak. He is the youngest poet to be published at poets.org and has exhibited his film and installation work in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-founder of dis assembly in Toronto, an arts collective which practices techniques for neurodiversity. Languaging is a way of movement, a continual disassembly, challenging the way of neurotypical grammars for more diversities to come. His work can be viewed at adamwolfond.com and dis-assembly.ca. His chapbooks of poetry In Way of Music Water Answers Toward Questions Other Than What is Autism and There Is Too Music in My Ears are published by Unrestricted Editions. His book The Wanting Way is published by Milkweed Editions' Multiverse series.




A Long Walk to Water


Book Description

When the Sudanese civil war reaches his village in 1985, 11-year-old Salva becomes separated from his family and must walk with other Dinka tribe members through southern Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya in search of safe haven. Based on the life of Salva Dut, who, after emigrating to America in 1996, began a project to dig water wells in Sudan. By a Newbery Medal-winning author.




The Water Walker


Book Description

The story of a determined Ojibwe Grandmother (Nokomis) Josephine-ba Mandamin and her great love for Nibi (water). Nokomis walks to raise awareness of our need to protect Nibi for future generations, and for all life on the planet. She, along with other women, men, and youth, have walked around all the Great Lakes from the four salt waters, or oceans, to Lake Superior. The walks are full of challenges, and by her example Josephine-ba invites us all to take up our responsibility to protect our water, the giver of life, and to protect our planet for all generations.




Metropolitan Stories


Book Description

“Only someone who deeply loves and understands the Metropolitan Museum could deliver such madcap, funny, magical, tender, intimate fables and stories.” —Maira Kalman, artist and bestselling author of The Principles of Uncertainty From a writer who worked at the Metropolitan Museum for more than twenty-five years, an enchanting novel that shows us the Met that the public doesn't see. Hidden behind the Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and cafeteria that are home to the museum's devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people—along with a few ghosts. A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination.




How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea (Natural Navigation)


Book Description

Hone your senses and learn to read the hidden signs of nature—from master outdoorsman Tristan Gooley, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Read a Tree and The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs “Equal parts alfresco inspiration, interesting factoids, how-to instructions and self-help advice.”—The Wall Street Journal When most of us go for a walk, a single sense—sight—tends to dominate our experience. But when New York Times–bestselling author and expert navigator Tristan Gooley goes for a walk, he uses all five senses to “read” everything nature has to offer. A single lowly weed can serve as his compass, calendar, clock, and even pharmacist. In How to Read Nature, Gooley introduces readers to his world—where the sky, sea, and land teem with marvels. Plus, he shares 15 exercises to sharpen all of your senses. Soon you’ll be making your own discoveries, every time you step outside!




Teaching Myself To See


Book Description

Teaching Myself to See deals with Tito's struggles to participate in a world full of visual details. As a person with autism, Tito is visually selective, processing the myriad of details seeping in through the eye rather than the whole. Tracing Tito's experiences to learn to see in his own, "hyper-visual" way, through art, through magazines, through everyday life, Teaching Myself to See is a work of auto-anthropology, capturing in words, sentences, paragraphs, poems, a way of seeing that might seem so bewildering that doctors and psychologists told his mother he wouldn't be able to think. This book proves otherwise. By teaching us to look through his eyes, Tito shows us the miracle and immense complexity of sight, of neuro-atypicals and neuro-typicals alike.




The Water Knife


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A "fresh, genre-bending thriller” (Los Angeles Times) set in the near future when water is scarce and a spy, a hardened journalist and a young Texas migrant find themselves pawns in a corrupt game. "Think Chinatown meets Mad Max." NPR, All Things Considered In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.




Story


Book Description

As a small boy Story Musgrave found solace, protection and beauty in the world of nature. His deep affinity with nature and the wonders of the universe would one day set him on an inexorable course to the stars. Be warned however: this remarkable book is not your standard, chronological biography.




How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls


Book Description

Discovering the secrets of animal movement and what they can teach us Insects walk on water, snakes slither, and fish swim. Animals move with astounding grace, speed, and versatility: how do they do it, and what can we learn from them? In How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls, David Hu takes readers on an accessible, wondrous journey into the world of animal motion. From basement labs at MIT to the rain forests of Panama, Hu shows how animals have adapted and evolved to traverse their environments, taking advantage of physical laws with results that are startling and ingenious. In turn, the latest discoveries about animal mechanics are inspiring scientists to invent robots and devices that move with similar elegance and efficiency. Hu follows scientists as they investigate a multitude of animal movements, from the undulations of sandfish and the way that dogs shake off water in fractions of a second to the seemingly crash-resistant characteristics of insect flight. Not limiting his exploration to individual organisms, Hu describes the ways animals enact swarm intelligence, such as when army ants cooperate and link their bodies to create bridges that span ravines. He also looks at what scientists learn from nature’s unexpected feats—such as snakes that fly, mosquitoes that survive rainstorms, and dead fish that swim upstream. As researchers better understand such issues as energy, flexibility, and water repellency in animal movement, they are applying this knowledge to the development of cutting-edge technology. Integrating biology, engineering, physics, and robotics, How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls demystifies the remarkable mechanics behind animal locomotion.