New Items
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The Blueprint
"The Blueprint is an astounding work, an unflinching portrait of misogyny and racism in a speculative world terrifyingly close to our own. Rae Giana Rashad chronicles the generational ghosts of womanhood, and how we understand ourselves through the stories of those we come from, in a way I've never read before. A remarkable new talent, and a timeless literary voice."--Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push
In the vein of Octavia E. Butler and Margaret Atwood, a harrowing novel set in an alternate United States--a world of injustice and bondage in which a young Black woman becomes the concubine of a powerful white government official and must face the dangerous consequences.
Solenne Bonet lives in Texas where choice no longer exists. An algorithm determines a Black woman's occupation, spouse, and residence. Solenne finds solace in penning the biography of Henriette, an ancestor who'd been an enslaved concubine to a wealthy planter in 1800s Louisiana. But history repeats itself when Solenne, lonely and naïve, finds herself entangled with Bastien Martin, a high-ranking government official. Solenne finds the psychological bond unbearable, so she considers alternatives. With Henriette as her guide, she must decide whether and how to leave behind all she knows.
Inspired by the lives of enslaved concubines to U.S. politicians and planters, The Blueprint unfolds over dual timelines to explore bodily autonomy, hypocrisy, and power imbalances through the lens of the nation's most unprotected: a Black girl.
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So Fetch
From the New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia comes the totally fetch story of one of the most iconic teen comedies of all time, Mean Girls, revealing how it happened, how it defined a generation, "like, invented" meme culture, and why it just won't go away, filled with exclusive interviews from the director, cast, and crew.
Get in, loser. We're going back to 2004.
It's been 20 years since Mean Girls hit theaters, winning over critics and audiences alike with its razor-sharp wit, star-making turns for its then unknown cast, and obsessively quotable screenplay by Tina Fey. Fast forward two decades and Mean Girls remains as relevant as ever. Arguably, no other movie from the 2000s has had as big of an impact on pop culture.
In So Fetch, New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, offers the first ever authoritative book about this beloved classic that shaped an entire generation. Based off revealing interviews with the director, cast, and crew, So Fetch tells the full story of the making of Mean Girls, from Tina Fey's brilliant adaptation of a self-help guide for parents of teen girls, to the challenges of casting Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, and the iconic supporting players. So Fetch also explores the film's lasting cultural influence, from its role in the rise of Y2K tabloid culture, impact on girls of all ages and lgbtq+ culture, to how we use it to define female relationships to this day.
Timed for the 20th anniversary and the release of the new movie musical adaptation, So Fetch is the perfect companion for fans and anyone who understands that when it comes to Mean Girls' enduring legacy, the limit does not exist!
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The Takeover
Sometimes, when you ask the universe for your soulmate, you wind up with your hate mate instead.
On Nami's 30th birthday, she’s reminded at every turn that her life isn’t what she planned. She’s always excelled at everything – until now. Her fiancé blew up their engagement. Her pride and joy, the tech company she helped to found, is about to lose funding. And her sister, Sora, is getting married to the man of her dreams, Jack, and instead of being happy for her, as she knows she ought to be, she’s fighting off jealousy.
Frustrated with her life, she makes a wish on a birthday candle to find her soulmate. Instead, the universe delivers her hate mate, Nami’s old high school nemesis, Jae Lee, the most popular kid from high school, who also narrowly beat her out for valedictorian. More than a decade later, Jae is still as effortlessly cool, charming, and stylish as ever, and, to make matters worse, is planning a hostile take-over of her start-up. Cue: sharp elbows and even sharper banter as the two go head-to-head to see who’ll win this time. But when their rivalry ignites a different kind of passion, Nami starts to realize that it's not just her company that's in danger of being taken over, but her heart as well.
"Readers will cheer on this pair of sparring hearts." - Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) -
Legacy
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“This book is more than a memoir—it also serves as a call to action to create a more equitable healthcare system for patients of color, particularly Black women.” —Essence
One of NPR’s 11 Books to Look Forward to in 2024
One of Good Morning America’s 15 New Books to Read for the New Year
“Legacy is both a compelling memoir and an edifying analysis of the inequities in the way we deliver healthcare in America. Uché Blackstock is a force of nature.” —Abraham Verghese, MD, New York Times bestselling author of The Covenant of Water
“[An] extraordinary family story.” —Dr. Damon Tweedy, The New York Times Book Review
“This book should be required reading for all medical students.” —Gayle King, CBS Mornings
The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.
What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child—or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother’s footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school—were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face.
Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. -
West Heart Kill
LOOKING FOR AN ANYTHING-BUT-ORDINARY WHODUNIT? • Welcome to the West Heart Club. Where the drinks are neat but behind closed doors . . . things can get messy. Where upright citizens are deemed downright boring. Where the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader.
A unique and irresistible murder mystery set at a remote hunting lodge where everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective on the scene—a remarkable debut that gleefully upends the rules of the genre.
"A thoroughly original suspense novel that hops across elements of the genre—a diabolical locked-room mystery interspersed with a fascinating primer on the form—while always being tremendous fun to read."—Chris Pavone, best-selling author of Two Nights in Lisbon
An isolated hunt club. A raging storm. Three corpses, discovered within four days. A cast of monied, scheming, unfaithful characters.
When private detective Adam McAnnis joins an old college friend for the Bicentennial weekend at the exclusive West Heart club in upstate New York, he finds himself among a set of not-entirely-friendly strangers. Then the body of one of the members is found at the lake’s edge; hours later, a major storm hits. By the time power is restored on Sunday, two more people will be dead . . . -
The Universe in a Box
Scientists are using simulations to recreate the universe, revealing the hidden nature of reality.
Cosmology is a tricky science—no one can make their own stars, planets, or galaxies to test its theories. But over the last few decades a new kind of physics has emerged to fill the gap between theory and experimentation. Harnessing the power of modern supercomputers, cosmologists have built simulations that offer profound insights into the deep history of our universe, allowing centuries-old ideas to be tested for the first time. Today, physicists are translating their ideas and equations into code, finding that there is just as much to be learned from computers as experiments in laboratories.
In The Universe in a Box, cosmologist Andrew Pontzen explains how physicists model the universe’s most exotic phenomena, from black holes and colliding galaxies to dark matter and quantum entanglement, enabling them to study the evolution of virtual worlds and to shed new light on our reality.
But simulations don’t just allow experimentation with the cosmos; they are also essential to myriad disciplines like weather forecasting, epidemiology, neuroscience, financial planning, airplane design, and special effects for summer blockbusters. Crafting these simulations involves tough compromises and expert knowledge. Simulation is itself a whole new branch of science, one that we are only just beginning to appreciate and understand. The story of simulations is the thrilling history of how we arrived at our current knowledge of the world around us, and it provides a sneak peek at what we may discover next. -
Invisible Woman
Other people kill their husbands. Not her.
"Absolutely a novel of its time-and a novel of women's stories across time."--Kirkus (starred review)
In Invisible Woman, a dangerous secret held for too long between estranged best friends rises to the surface, and a long marriage comes apart with devastating consequences.
Joni Ackerman's decision to raise children, 25 years ago, came with a steep cost. She was then a pioneering filmmaker, one of the few women to break into the all-male Hollywood club of feature film directors. But she and her husband Paul had always wanted a family, and his ascending career at a premier television network provided a safety net. Now they've recently transplanted to Brooklyn, so that Paul can launch a major East Coast production studio, when a scandal rocks the film industry and forces Joni to revisit a secret from long ago involving her friend Val.
Joni is adamant that the time has come to tell the story, but Val and Paul are reluctant, for different reasons. As the marriage frays and the friends spar about whether to speak up, Joni's struggles with isolation in a new city, and old resentments about the sacrifices she made on her family's behalf start to boil over. She takes solace, of sorts, in the novels of Patricia Highsmith--particularly the masterpiece Strangers on a Train, with its duplicitous characters and their murderous impulses--until the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred.
Invisible Woman is at once a literary thriller about the lies we tell each other (and ourselves), and a powerful psychological examination of the complexities of friendship, marriage, and motherhood.
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Unshrinking
The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it—from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled
“An elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, and our culture.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger
For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She’s been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.
Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential.
In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size. -
The Holdovers
It follows a curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them a damaged, brainy troublemaker, and with the school's head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
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Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Daniel Radcliffe is "Weird" Al Yankovic in the unexaggerated true story about the greatest musician of our time. From a conventional upbringing where playing the accordion was a sin, Al rebelled and made his dream of changing the words to world-renowned songs come true. An instant success and sex symbol, Al lives an excessive lifestyle and pursues an infamous romance that nearly destroys him.
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