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Biography
Ben says: One of America's best comediennes delivers a hilarious memoir about her struggles with mental illness and her desire to belong.
A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024
A Financial Times Best Book of 2024
A Kirkus Best Book of 2024
A Daily Telegraph Best Book of 2024
A "beautifully composed and revealing" (Financial Times) biography of the dazzling and painful life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose--"a stunning achievement" (Kai Bird, American Prometheus). When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a "world behind the world" of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world's most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries. However, as Patchen Barss documents in The Impossible Man, success came at a price: He was attuned to the secrets of the universe, but struggled to connect with loved ones, especially the women who care for or worked with him. Both erudite and poetic, The Impossible Man draws on years of research and interviews, as well as previously unopened archives to present a moving portrait of Penrose the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Roger the human being. It reveals not just the extraordinary life of Roger Penrose, but asks who gets to be a genius, and who makes the sacrifices that allow one man to be one.
From the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.
'The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.'
How does one survive the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, of falling in love, of growing old, of losing your mind?
Shakespeare's world is never too far different from our own 'permeated with the same tragedies, the same existential questions and domestic worries. In this extraordinary book, Jonathan Bate brings then and now together. He investigates moments of his own life - losses and challenges - and asks whether, if you persevere with Shakespeare, he can offer a word of wisdom or a human insight for any time or any crisis. Along the way we meet actors such as Judi Dench and Simon Callow, and writers such as Dr Johnson, John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who turned to Shakespeare in their own dark times.
This is a personal story about loss, the black dog of depression, unexpected journeys and the very human things that echo through time, resonating with us all at one point or another.
The Best Graphic Book of 2021 by Publishers Weekly A New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2021 A New York Times Notable Book An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of the Year A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year A St. Louis Post Dispatch Best Book of the Year NPR, 12 Books NPR Staffers Loved Shelf Awareness Best Books of 2021
From the author of Fun Home, a profoundly affecting graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times
Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author's own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.
A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.
"A muscular, canny memoir about labor and power and gender...I couldn't put it down. What a fucking gorgeous book." --Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House A queer teen rebel escapes small-town Appalachia and becomes Los Angeles's Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix in this searing and darkly funny memoir that upends our ideas about desire, class, and power. The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them. So writes Chris Belcher, who appeared destined for a life of conventional femininity after she took first place in an infant beauty contest--a minor glory that followed her around a working-class town of 1,600 people in rural West Virginia. But when she came out as queer, the conservative community that had once celebrated its prettiest baby turned on her. A decade later, living in Los Angeles and trying to stay afloat in the early years of a PhD program, Belcher plunges into the work of a pro domme. Branding herself as Los Angeles's Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix, she specializes in male clients who want a domme to make them feel worthless, shameful, and weak--all the abuse regularly heaped upon women for free. A queer woman whom men can trust with the unorthodox sides of their sexualities, Belcher is paid to be the keeper of the fantasies that they can't enact in their everyday relationships. But moonlighting as a sex worker also carries risks, like the not-so-submissive who tries to turn the tables and the jealous client out for revenge. As Belcher moves between the embodied world of the pro domme and the abstract realm of academia, she discovers how lessons from the classroom apply to the dungeon, and vice versa. Still, fear that her doctoral program won't approve burdens her with a double life. Pretty Baby is her second coming out. In this sharp and discerning memoir, we see through Belcher's eyes how power and desire can be renegotiated--or reinforced.
*A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2022*
The definitive biography of Charles Barkley, exploring his early childhood, his storied NBA career, and his enduring legacy as a provocative voice in American pop culture
He's one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large.
Yet few people know the real Charles. Raised by his mother and grandmother in Leeds, Alabama, he struggled in his early years to fit in until he found a sense of community and purpose in basketball. In the NBA he went toe-to-toe with the biggest legends in the game, from Magic to Michael to Hakeem to Shaq. But in the years since, he has become a bold agitator for social change, unafraid to grapple, often brashly, with even the thorniest of cultural issues facing our nation today.
Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella's Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked-about icons in the world of sports.
*A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2022*
The definitive biography of Charles Barkley, exploring his early childhood, his storied NBA career, and his enduring legacy as a provocative voice in American pop culture
He's one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large.
Yet few people know the real Charles. Raised by his mother and grandmother in Leeds, Alabama, he struggled in his early years to fit in until he found a sense of community and purpose in basketball. In the NBA he went toe-to-toe with the biggest legends in the game, from Magic to Michael to Hakeem to Shaq. But in the years since, he has become a bold agitator for social change, unafraid to grapple, often brashly, with even the thorniest of cultural issues facing our nation today.
Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella's Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked-about icons in the world of sports.
Picture David Sedaris writing Kitchen Confidential about the Ritz in New York in the 1920s, which had the style and charm of The Grand Budapest Hotel... In this charming and uproariously funny hotel memoir, Ludwig Bemelmans uncovers the fabulous world of the Hotel Splendide--the thinly disguised stand-in for the Ritz--a luxury New York hotel where he worked as a waiter in the 1920s. With equal parts affection and barbed wit, he uncovers the everyday chaos that reigns behind the smooth facades of the gilded dining room and banquet halls. In hilarious detail, Bemelmans sketches the hierarchy of hotel life and its strange and fascinating inhabitants: from the ruthlessly authoritarian maître d'hôtel Monsieur Victor to the kindly waiter Mespoulets to Frizl the homesick busboy. Illustrated with his own charming line drawings, Bemelmans' tales of a bygone era of extravagance are as charming as they are riotously entertaining. "[Bemelmans] was the original bad boy of the NY hotel/restaurant subculture, a waiter, busboy, and restaurateur who "told all" in a series of funny and true (or very near true) autobiographical accounts of backstairs folly, excess, borderline criminality, and madness in the grande Hotel Splendide... If you like stories about old New York as I do, this classic will have you laughing out loud." -Anthony Bourdain
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann.
Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. A child prodigy, he mastered calculus by the age of eight, and in high school made lasting contributions to mathematics. In Germany, where he helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, and later at Princeton, von Neumann's colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet--bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and the design of the atom bomb; he helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory; he created the first ever programmable digital computer; he prophesized the potential of nanotechnology; and, from his deathbed, he expounded on the limits of brains and computers--and how they might be overcome.
Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through a stunningly diverse array of fields, sparking revolutions wherever he went. The Man from the Future is an insightful and thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century.