Tommy Can't Stop!


Book Description

Tommy bounces, and he leaps. Tommy clomps, and he bulldozes. Nothing tires Tommy out, and his family can't keep up! But then his sister has an idea: could tap class be just right for Tommy? This exuberant picture book, written by Broadway dancer Tim Federle, with illustrations by Mark Fearing, stars one very energetic kid who finally finds his place in the spotlight. Follow along with word-for-word narration.




Feed


Book Description

A Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry A New York Times Notable Book of the Year From the Winner of the Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and finalist for a Lambda, Tommy Pico's Feed is the final book in the Teebs Cycle. Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.




IRL


Book Description

Composed as a long text message, this poem asks what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history.




The Push


Book Description

THE STORY BEHIND THE HARDEST CLIMB IN HISTORY & ACCLAIMED DOCUMENTARY 'DAWN WALL' 'Heart-stopping, absorbing' Daily Mail 'The most daring free climber on the planet' The Times __________ In 2015, climber Tommy Caldwell took on the hardest challenge of his life, spending 19 days freeclimbing Yosemite's vertical, 3000-foot Dawn Wall - regarded as the most difficult climb in history and a route nobody had ever done before. This odds-defying feat was the culmination of seven years planning and a lifetime of determination. Here, he recounts how he got there, the falls and setbacks - being held hostage, losing his index finger, the break-up of his marriage - the summits conquered and the fears overcome. Fans of Free Solo and Dawn Wall, and climbers and non-climbers alike, will be gripped by this story of drive, focus and achieving the impossible. __________ 'The Push is not simply a book about rock climbing' Guardian 'Probably the greatest living athlete most people have never heard of' Telegraph 'Arguably the best all-round rock climber on the planet' National Geographic 'A real page-turner . . . captivating and deeply moving' Climb magazine 'Captivating and unfailingly honest' Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air




We All Looked Up


Book Description

The lives of four high school seniors intersect weeks before a meteor is set to pass through Earth's orbit, with a 66.6% chance of striking and destroying all life on the planet.




The Elephant in the Room


Book Description

ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 A “warm and funny and honest…genuinely unputdownable” (Curtis Sittenfeld) memoir chronicling what it’s like to live in today’s world as a fat man, from acclaimed journalist Tommy Tomlinson, who, as he neared the age of fifty, weighed 460 pounds and decided he had to change his life. When he was almost fifty years old, Tommy Tomlinson weighed an astonishing—and dangerous—460 pounds, at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, unable to climb a flight of stairs without having to catch his breath, or travel on an airplane without buying two seats. Raised in a family that loved food, he had been aware of the problem for years, seeing doctors and trying diets from the time he was a preteen. But nothing worked, and every time he tried to make a change, it didn’t go the way he planned—in fact, he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to change. In The Elephant in the Room, Tomlinson chronicles his lifelong battle with weight in a voice that combines the urgency of Roxane Gay’s Hunger with the intimacy of Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. He also hits the road to meet other members of the plus-sized tribe in an attempt to understand how, as a nation, we got to this point. From buying a Fitbit and setting exercise goals to contemplating the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, America’s “capital of food porn,” and modifying his own diet, Tomlinson brings us along on a candid and sometimes brutal look at the everyday experience of being constantly aware of your size. Over the course of the book, he confronts these issues head-on and chronicles the practical steps he has to take to lose weight by the end. “What could have been a wallow in memoir self-pity is raised to art by Tomlinson’s wit and prose” (Rolling Stone). Affecting and searingly honest, The Elephant in the Room is an “inspirational” (The New York Times) memoir that will resonate with anyone who has grappled with addiction, shame, or self-consciousness. “Add this to your reading list ASAP” (Charlotte Magazine).




Touching Presence


Book Description

Enter into the teaching space of master Alexander Technique teacher Tommy Thompson. With compassion and integrity, Tommy's teaching explores the ways in which each of us can belong to the moment and stop defining ourselves by our habits. With its insightful, moving reflections, Touching Presence will inspire Alexander Technique teachers, trainees, and students -- indeed anyone -- to find their own path to being more fully present for themselves and the person in front of them.




Nature Poem


Book Description

A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.




Junk


Book Description

An NPR Best Book of the Year From 2018 Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico, Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure, both personal and cultural. The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space “Junk,” in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of “being” for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?




Five, Six, Seven, Nate!


Book Description

“The Nate series by Tim Federle is a wonderful evocation of what it’s like to be a theater kid. Highly recommended.” —Lin-Manuel Miranda, star and creator of the musical, Hamilton Winner of the Lambda Literary Award Encore! Nate Foster’s Broadway dreams are finally coming true in this sequel to Better Nate Than Ever that Publishers Weekly calls a “funny, tender coming-of-age story.” Armed with a one-way ticket to New York City, small-town theater geek Nate is off to start rehearsals for E.T.: The Broadway Musical. It’s everything he ever practiced his autograph for! But as thrilling as Broadway is, rehearsals are nothing like Nate expects: full of intimidating child stars, cut-throat understudies, and a director who can’t even remember Nate’s name. Now, as the countdown to opening night is starting to feel more like a time bomb, Nate is going to need more than his lucky rabbit’s foot if he ever wants to see his name in lights. He may even need a showbiz miracle. The companion novel to Better Nate Than Ever, which The New York Times called “inspired and inspiring,” Five, Six, Seven, Nate! is full of secret admirers, surprise reunions, and twice the drama of middle school...with a lot more glitter.