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Nonfiction
When John D'Agata helps his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, he begins to follow a story about the federal government's plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain; the result is a startling portrait that compels a reexamination of the future of human life.
Yet as the contradictions inherent in Yucca's story are revealed, D'Agata's investigation turns inevitably personal. He finds himself investigating the death of a teenager who jumps off the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel, a boy whom D'Agata believes he spoke with before his suicide.
Here is the work of a penetrating thinker whose startling portrait of a mountain in the desert compels a reexamination of the future of human life.
In About Face, twenty-five writers tackle this question, each using the same simple framework of an opening paragraph that objectively considers what they see when they look in the mirror. Each writer then details an experience that transpired, in one way or another, because of the face they live with: a feature that belies a woman's heritage, a scar that serves as a daily reminder of a childhood tragedy, an unwanted change due to sun exposure or smoking or drinking.
Since we live our entire lives behind our faces, About Face presents a challenge: to consider exploring our experiences from a vantage point we simply don't have access to. This collection uncovers surprising outcomes and truly unique observations about internal experiences as witnessed from the writers' external points of view.
Boldly claiming a space in which people with disabilities can be seen and heard as they are--not as others perceive them--About Us captures the voices of a community that has for too long been stereotyped and misrepresented. Speaking not only to those with disabilities, but also to their families, coworkers and support networks, the authors in About Us offer intimate stories of how they navigate a world not built for them.
Since its 2016 debut, the popular New York Times' "Disability" column has transformed the national dialogue around disability. Now, echoing the refrain of the disability rights movement, "Nothing about us without us," this landmark collection gathers the most powerful essays from the series that speak to the fullness of human experience--stories about first romance, childhood shame and isolation, segregation, professional ambition, child-bearing and parenting, aging and beyond.
Reflecting on the fraught conversations around disability--from the friend who says "I don't think of you as disabled," to the father who scolds his child with attention differences, "Stop it stop it stop it what is wrong with you?"--the stories here reveal the range of responses, and the variety of consequences, to being labeled as "disabled" by the broader public.
Here, a writer recounts her path through medical school as a wheelchair user--forging a unique bridge between patients with disabilities and their physicians. An acclaimed artist with spina bifida discusses her art practice as one that invites us to "stretch ourselves toward a world where all bodies are exquisite." With these notes of triumph, these stories also offer honest portrayals of frustration over access to medical care, the burden of social stigma and the nearly constant need to self-advocate in the public realm.
In its final sections, About Us turns to the questions of love, family and joy to show how it is possible to revel in life as a person with disabilities. Subverting the pervasive belief that disability results in relentless suffering and isolation, a quadriplegic writer reveals how she rediscovered intimacy without touch, and a mother with a chronic illness shares what her condition has taught her young children.
With a foreword by Andrew Solomon and introductory comments by co-editors Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, About Us is a landmark publication of the disability movement for readers of all backgrounds, forms and abilities.
Featuring Essays from: John Altmann - Todd Balf - Jennifer Bartlett - Emily Rapp Black - Sheila Black - Sasha Blair-Goldensohn - Cheri A. Blauwet - Molly McCully Brown - Joseph P. Carter - Peter Catapano - Randi Davenport - Luticha Doucette - Anne Finger - Joseph J. Fins - Shane Fistell - Paula M. Fitzgibbons - Kenny Fries - Rosemarie Garland-Thomson - Jenny Giering - Ona Gritz - Elizabeth Guffey - Jane Eaton Hamilton - Ariel Henle - Edward Hoagland - Alex Hubbard - Liz Jackson - Elizabeth Jameson - Cyndi Jones - Anne Kaier - Georgina Kleege - Rachel Kolb - Elliott Kukla - Catherine Kudlick - Emily Ladau - Laurie Clements Lambeth - Alaina Leary - Riva Lehrer - Gila Lyons - Ben Mattlin - Zack McDermott - Catherine Monahon - Jonathan Mooney - Susannah Nevison - Joanna Novak - Valerie Piro - Oliver Sacks - Katie Savin - Melissa Shang - Alice Sheppard - Daniel Simpson - Brad Snyder - Andrew Solomon - Rivers Solomon - Carol R. Steinberg - Jillian Weise - Abby L. Wilkerson - Alice Wong
"Kilian Jornet is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation."--NEW YORK TIMES
"Inspiring and humbling"-- ALEX HONNOLD
The most accomplished mountain runner of all time contemplates his record-breaking climbs of Mount Everest in this profound memoir--an intellectual and spiritual journey that moves from the earth's highest peak to the soul's deepest reaches.
Kilian Jornet has broken nearly every mountaineering record in the world and twice been named National Geographic Adventurer of the Year. In 2018 he summitted Mount Everest twice in one week--without the help of bottled oxygen or ropes.
As he recounts a life spent studying and ascending the greatest peaks on earth, Jornet ruminates on what he has found in nature--simplicity, freedom, and spiritual joy--and offers a poetic yet clearheaded assessment of his relationship to the mountain . . . at times his opponent, at others, his greatest inspiration.
The collection is divided into five sections: "Back," about her family and her past; "Underfoot," about being a mom; "In the Mirror," about growing older; "Above us Only Sky," about a key turning point in her life, and "Ahead," about facing the future."
Armed only with college Arabic and restless curiosity, Adam Valen Levinson sets out to "learn about the world 9/11 made us fear." From a base in globalized and sterilized Abu Dhabi, he sets out to lunch in Taliban territory in Afghanistan, travels under the watchful eye of Syria's secret police, risks shipwreck en route to Somalia, investigates Yazidi beliefs in a sacred cave, cliff dives in Oman, celebrates New Year's Eve in Tahrir Square, and, at every turn, discovers a place that matches not at all with its reputation.
Valen Levinson crosses borders with wisecracking humor, erudition, and humanity, seeking common ground with "bros" everywhere, and finding that people who pray differently often laugh the same. And as a young man bar mitzvahed eight years late, he slowly learns how childish it is to live by decisions and distinctions born of fear.
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author
In recognition of her long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself
“Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event."--Marilynne Robinson, Washington Post Book World
“Annie Dillard is, was, and will always be the very best at describing the landscapes in which we find ourselves."--Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Annie Dillard is a writer of unusual range, generosity, and ambition. . . . Her prose is bracingly intelligent, lovely, and human. "--Margot Livesey, Boston Globe
“A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader," warns Geoff Dyer in his introduction to this stellar collection. Carefully culled from her past work, The Abundance is quintessential Annie Dillard, delivered in her fierce and undeniably singular voice, filled with fascinating detail and metaphysical fact. The pieces within will exhilarate both admiring fans and a new generation of readers, having been "re-framed and re-hung," with fresh editing and reordering by the author, to situate these now seminal works within her larger canon.
The Abundance reminds us that Dillard's brand of "novelized nonfiction" pioneered the form long before it came to be widely appreciated. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life--a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through neighborhood streets, a teenager memorizes Rimbaud's poetry--with beauty and irony, inviting readers onto sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, with a sense of humor: on one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.
Reminding us of the indelible contributions of this formative figure in contemporary nonfiction, The Abundance exquisitely showcases Annie Dillard's enigmatic, enduring genius, as Dillard herself wishes it to be marked.
Gwyeth Smith, known as Smitty, has made a national reputation by flouting the conventions of the college application ritual. He often steers kids from the SAT to the ACT, which he considers a more straightforward test that produces higher scores. He urges parents to home in on hidden bargains, scour the country for scholarships, and challenge financial aid offices rather than take out large loans. He will sometimes talk a seeming shoo-in candidate out of setting her sights on the prestigious Ivy League while goading another long-shot student into aiming for that same Ivy League school. His unorthodox approach is grounded on the principle that getting into college shouldn't just be about getting in; it should be a kid's first great moment of self-discovery.
David L. Marcus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former education writer for "U.S. News & World Report," follows Smitty and "his" kids around Oyster Bay High, a diverse public school in Long Island, New York, as he works his unique magic on their applications and their lives. Smitty's kids run the gamut from the sweet but pathologically disorganized boy next door to the valedictorian who applies to twenty-eight schools. As the year unfolds, Smitty deals in his own ingenious way with almost every complication that can bedevil the applications process. What about the kid who doesn't test well? The kid who plunges into depression after being rejected by Columbia? The overachieving Korean American boy worried about reverse discrimination? Smitty has answers for all of them.
While Smitty excels at easing the pressure of the college hunt, his success comes from imposing a different-and deeper-challenge. He makes kids articulate (orally and in writing) their profoundest fears, their drawbacks, their secret hopes. In short, he makes them figure out who they are. Along the way, he uses his savant's knowledge of America's thirty-six hundred colleges and universities to pair each student with the right one. He sidesteps the applications industrial complex, with its slick Web sites, private essay coaches, and obsessive focus on metrics. He brings to the college search counterintuitive insight and even wisdom-attributes that thousands of students and their parents, frustrated with the excesses of the process, will find useful and inspiring.
