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The Student: A Short History
Michael S. Roth · 2023
<b>From the president of Wesleyan University, an illuminating history of the student, spanning from antiquity to Zoom<br> <br> <br> <br> "[Roth] has a clear vision for what it ought to mean to be a student: Learn what you love to do, get better at it, and then share it with others."--David Perry, <i>Washington Post</i></b><br> <br> <br> <br> In this sweeping book, Michael S. Roth narrates a vivid and dynamic history of students, exploring some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very different contexts, from the sixth century BCE to the present.<br> <br> <br> <br> Beginning with the followers of Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus and moving to medieval apprentices, students at Enlightenment centers of learning, and learners enrolled in twenty-first-century universities, he explores how students have been followers, interlocutors, disciples, rebels, and children becoming adults. There are many ways to be a student, Roth argues, but at their core is developing the capacity to think for oneself by learning from others, and thereby finding freedom.<br> <br> <br> <br> In an age of machine learning, this book celebrates the student who develops more than mastery, cultivating curiosity, judgment, creativity, and an ability to keep learning beyond formal schooling. Roth shows how the student throughout history has been someone who interacts dynamically with the world, absorbing its lessons and creatively responding to them.
The Woman Destroyed
Simone De Beauvoir · 1987
The Witches of Bellinas: A Novel
J. Nicole Jones · 2024
A dreamy California Gothic about a woman who moves to the mysterious town of Bellinas to save her marriage, only to be swept up in a hedonistic cult that isn’t what it seems<br/><br/>Tansy and her husband Guy are the newest arrivals in Bellinas, a lush oasis tucked into the coast of northern California where a reclusive, creative community is beginning to take shape. Helmed by Guy’s cousin Mia, a famous model -turned -wellness -luminary, and her tech mogul husband, the group renounces the outside world in pursuit of purity, fashioning their own rules about what to eat and how to live.<br/><br/>Everything seems perfect in Bellinas: food is abundant, flowers are always in bloom, and nearby wildfires leave the town remarkably unscathed. While Guy is happy in their new lives, Tansy becomes more and more suspicious of the community and increasingly desperate to save her already-fragile marriage. And as lonely women have throughout the ages, she wants to believe in what may only be a beautiful lie.<br/><br/>The Witches of Bellinas unfolds as a confession from Tansy, filled with anguish over the life, and sense of self, she’s surrendered in her desperation to belong. In J. Nicole Jones’s clever reimagining of cult power and groupthink, the question isn’t why join, but rather, what happens when you understand the danger, but can’t conceive of a way out?
The Mother of All Things
Alexis Landau · 2024
A daring novel from the acclaimed author of Those Who Are Saved: female rage, grief, and creativity collide in the present and animate the past, when a woman reconnects with her essential self during a summer journey, and discovers an ancient female world that offers parallels to her own Kept busy by her obligations as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. Now tagging along on her film-producer husband’s shoot in Bulgaria for the summer, where she’s mostly solo parenting her sweet son and rebellious budding tween daughter, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything. Ava is swept up into a circle of women who reenact ancient Greco-Roman mystery rites of initiation, bringing her research to life and illuminating the story of a 5th-century-BC mother-daughter pair whose sense of female loyalty to each other and connection to the divine feminine guides Ava in her exploration of the eternal stages of womanhood. Reaching across time and deep into the female psyche, The Mother of All Things delivers a revelatory tale of a woman coming to terms with her evolving sense of responsibility to herself and her family, as she achieves a new appreciation of the gifts of female wisdom and self-belief.
Slave Play
Jeremy O. Harris · 2020
“The single most daring thing I’ve seen in a theater in a long time.” — Wesley Morris, New York Times<br/>The Old South lives on at the MacGregor Plantation—in the breeze, in the cotton fields…and in the crack of the whip. Nothing is as it seems, and yet everything is as it seems. Slave Play rips apart history to shed new light on the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in twenty-first-century America.
Sirens & Muses: A Novel
Antonia Angress · 2022
Four artists are drawn into a web of rivalry and desire at an elite art school and on the streets of New York in this “gripping, provocative, and supremely entertaining” (BuzzFeed) debut National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree • “Captures the ache-inducing quality of art and desire . . . a deeply relatable and profoundly enjoyable read, one drenched in prismatic color and light.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth FINALIST FOR THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Glamour, PopSugar, Debutiful It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarefied bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty. Complicating matters is Louisa’s unexpected attraction to her charismatic roommate, Karina Piontek, the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art collectors. Gradually, Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic relationship, one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears. But Karina also can’t shake her fascination with Preston Utley, a senior and anti-capitalist Internet provocateur, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance. When Preston concocts an explosive hoax, the fates of all four artists are upended as each is unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now all must struggle to find new identities in art, in society, and among each other. In the process, they must find either their most authentic terms of life—of success, failure, and joy—or risk losing themselves altogether. With a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.
Colored Television
Danzy Senna · 2024
"A riveting and exhilarating novel about making art and selling out…Senna is one of this country’s most thrilling writers.” –Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind<br/><br/>A brilliant dark comedy about love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial- identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia<br/><br/>Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.<br/><br/>But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.<br/><br/>Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
Sunburn
Chloe Michellq Howarth · 2023
<p><b>** Shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2024 **</b><br><b>** Shortlisted for the 2024 Book of the Year: Discover Award by the British Book Awards **<br>** Shortlisted for the 2023 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction **<br>** Longlisted for the Diverse Book Awards 2024 **<br>** An <i>Evening Standard</i> 'One to Watch in 2023 **<br>** An <i>Independent</i> ‘Best Romantic Summer Reads' **<br>** A Book of the Month pick for <i>Diva</i>, <i>Irish Examiner</i>, <i>Novellic </i>& <i>Sainsbury’s Magazine</i> **<br>** A Most Anticipated pick for <i>PinkNews</i> & <i>Queer on the Street</i> **</b></p><br> <p>It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.</p><br> <p>Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.</p><br> <p>Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.</p><br> <p>But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. Neither will be easy, but only one will offer her happiness.</p><br> <p><b><i>Sunburn</i> is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp. An atmospheric sapphic love story and coming-of-age novel with the intensity of Megan Nolan's <i>Acts of Desperation</i>, the long hot summer of André Aciman's <i>Call Me By Your Name</i> and the female friendships of Anna Hope's <i>Expectation</i>.</b></p><br> <p>‘A tender and heartfelt coming-of-age tale’ – <b><i>Heat</i></b></p><br> <p>‘A compassionate take on the push and pull between what's expected and what is felt’ – <b><i>Herald</i></b></p><br> <p>‘A deeply moving, heartfelt love story’ – <b><i>Daily Mail</i></b></p><br> <p>‘Lucy tells her story in a true, compelling voice, with an eye for minutiae, quaint apercus, and confidences that make her account moving and convincing’ – <b><i>SAGA Magazine</i></b></p><br> <p>‘Tender and poignant... Ideal reading for the last month of summer’ – <b><i>Diva</i></b></p><br> <p>'Intense and all-consuming - like the first love it describes - <i>Sunburn</i> transported me to the heart of summer and the heady days of late adolescence. I won't soon forget Chloe Michelle Howarth's addictive, lushly written debut' - <b>Laura Sims</b></p><br> <p>'Capturing all the intensity of first love, blended with the claustrophobia of small-town life, this debut, inspired by real experience, is tender and raw' - <b><i>The Bookseller</i></b></p><br> <p>'A beautiful coming of age love novel written with an insightful poetical prose, rich with religious allegory and texture which underscores the transformative, spiritual power of first love explored' - <b><i>Scene Magazine</i></b></p>
Natural Beauty: A Novel
Ling Ling Huang · 2023
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction<br/><br/>Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel<br/><br/>Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.<br/><br/>Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.<br/><br/>Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.<br/><br/>A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.
To Read
Everything Is Tuberculosis
John Green · 2025
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
M. E. O'Brien, Eman Abdelhadi · 2022
By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.<br/>Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.
