"Generous and entertaining." -Publishers Weekly (starred review) Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay * Nominated for "Best Memoir & Autobiography" by Goodreads Choice Awards 2016 * Named a "Best Book of the Year" by New York Post "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll want to read it again." -TheSkimm "I'm mad Jennifer's Weiner's first book of essays is as wonderful as her fiction. You will love this book and wish she was your friend." -Mindy Kaling, author of Why Not Me? "Fiercely funny, powerfully smart, and remarkably brave." -Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild Jennifer Weiner is many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and an "unlikely feminist enforcer" (The New Yorker). She's also a mom, a daughter, and a sister, a clumsy yogini, and a reality-TV devotee. In this "unflinching look at her own experiences" (Entertainment Weekly), Jennifer fashions tales of modern-day womanhood as uproariously funny and moving as the best of Nora Ephron and Tina Fey. No subject is off-limits in these intimate and honest essays: sex, weight, envy, money, her mother's coming out of the closet, her estranged father's death. From lonely adolescence to hearing her six-year-old daughter say the F word-fat-for the first time, Jen dives into the heart of female experience, with the wit and candor that have endeared her to readers all over the world.

Judy Blume is one of the most popular authors of children's and young adult fiction in American history. For over 30 years, her books and career have withstood the test of time and she continues to resonate with new generations of young readers. While she is arguably one of the most important authors of the twentieth century, she is also one of the most banned. What is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Blume's career is that despite today's proliferation of cable channels and easy Internet access, books of hers written decades ago about every day life events that all teenagers experience still manage to find themselves at the center of censorship debates. Rather than change her style, the efforts to censor her books turned Blume into an activist and champion for the First Amendment. Inside this biography Kathleen Tracy explores the life and career of Judy Blume, one of the most successful-and most controversial-authors of twentieth century.

In addition to tracing the events of BlooM's life, this engaging biography discusses historic and current censorship issues in classrooms and libraries across the country. Her association with the National Coalition Against Censorship, a group that Blume says changed her life, as did her friendship with the organization's longtime director, Leanne Katz, is examined in detail as well as how libraries, teachers, publishers and grass-roots activists have responded to the ever-growing attempts to censor children's reading material. In-depth chapters are supplemented with a bibliography of print and electronic sources that provide suggested readings for students and general readers alike. Also included is a timeline, photos, and an appendix of free speech resources.

Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2019 Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 'If you have even the slightest interest in Orwell or in the development of our culture, you should not miss this engrossing, enlightening book.' John Carey, Sunday Times George Orwell's last novel has become one of the iconic narratives of the modern world. Its ideas have become part of the language - from 'Big Brother' to the 'Thought Police', 'Doublethink', and 'Newspeak' - and seem ever more relevant in the era of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts'. The cultural influence of 1984 can be observed in some of the most notable creations of the past seventy years, from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaids Tale to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, from Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta to David Bowie's Diamond Dogs - and from the launch of Apple Mac to the reality TV landmark, Big Brother. In this remarkable and original book. Dorian Lynskey investigates the influences that came together in the writing of 1984 from Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War and war-time London to his book's roots in utopian and dystopian fiction. He explores the phenomenon that the novel became on publication and the changing ways in which it has been read over the decades since. 2019 marks the seventieth anniversary of the publication of what is arguably Orwell's masterpiece, while the year 1984 itself is now as distant from us as it was from Orwell on publication day. The Ministry of Truth is a fascinating examination of one of the most significant works of modern English literature. It describes how history can inform fiction and how fiction can influence history.

The extraordinary untold story of Ernest Hemingway's dangerous secret life in espionage A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A finalist for the William E. Colby Military Writers' Award "IMPORTANT" (Wall Street Journal) - "FASCINATING" (New York Review of Books) - "CAPTIVATING" (Missourian) A riveting international cloak-and-dagger epic ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the liberation of Western Europe, wartime China, the Red Scare of Cold War America, and the Cuban Revolution, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy reveals for the first time Ernest Hemingway's secret adventures in espionage and intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s (including his role as a Soviet agent code-named "Argo"), a hidden chapter that fueled both his art and his undoing. While he was the historian at the esteemed CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime American intelligence officer, former U.S. Marine colonel, and Oxford-trained historian, began to uncover clues suggesting Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was deeply involved in mid-twentieth-century spycraft -- a mysterious and shocking relationship that was far more complex, sustained, and fraught with risks than has ever been previously supposed. Now Reynolds's meticulously researched and captivating narrative "looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before" (London Review of Books), revealing for the first time the whole story of this hidden side of Hemingway's life: his troubling recruitment by Soviet spies to work with the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, followed in short order by a complex set of secret relationships with American agencies. Starting with Hemingway's sympathy to antifascist forces during the 1930s, Reynolds illuminates Hemingway's immersion in the life-and-death world of the revolutionary left, from his passionate commitment to the Spanish Republic; his successful pursuit by Soviet NKVD agents, who valued Hemingway's influence, access, and mobility; his wartime meeting in East Asia with communist leader Chou En-Lai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China; and finally to his undercover involvement with Cuban rebels in the late 1950s and his sympathy for Fidel Castro. Reynolds equally explores Hemingway's participation in various roles as an agent for the United States government, including hunting Nazi submarines with ONI-supplied munitions in the Caribbean on his boat, Pilar; his command of an informant ring in Cuba called the "Crook Factory" that reported to the American embassy in Havana; and his on-the-ground role in Europe, where he helped OSS gain key tactical intelligence for the liberation of Paris and fought alongside the U.S. infantry in the bloody endgame of World War II. As he examines the links between Hemingway's work as an operative and as an author, Reynolds reveals how Hemingway's secret adventures influenced his literary output and contributed to the writer's block and mental decline (including paranoia) that plagued him during the postwar years -- a period marked by the Red Scare and McCarthy hearings. Reynolds also illuminates how those same experiences played a role in some of Hemingway's greatest works, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, while also adding to the burden that he carried at the end of his life and perhaps contributing to his suicide. A literary biography with the soul of an espionage thriller, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy is an essential contribution to our understanding of the life, work, and fate of one of America's most legendary authors.

Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years. This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner's concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.

Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice were college buddies who became life-long friends, literary innovators, and spiritual iconoclasts. Their friendship and collaboration began at Columbia College in the 1930s and reached its climax in the widely acclaimed magazine, which ran from 1953 to 1967, a year before Merton's death. Rice was founder, publisher, editor, and art director; Merton and Lax two of his steadiest collaborators. Well-known on campus for their high spirits, avant-garde appreciation of jazz and Joyce, and indiscriminate love of movies, they also shared their Catholic faith. Rice, a cradle Catholic, was godfather to both Merton and Lax. Merton, who died some 30 years before the other two, was the first to achieve fame with his best-selling spiritual autobiography, "The Seven-Story Mountain". Lax, whom Jack Kerouac dubbed "one of the great original voices of our times," eventually received recognition as one of "America's greatest experimental poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words" ("New York Times" Book Review). He spent most of the last 35 years of his life living frugally on one of the remotest of the Greek isles. After Jubilee folded, Rice wrote 20 books on world culture, religion, and biography. His 1970 biography of Merton, "The Man in the Sycamore Tree", was judged too intimate, forthright, and candid by those who, in Lax's words, "were trying so hard to get pictures of [Merton's] halo that they missed his face." His biography of the 19th century explorer and "orientalist" Sir Richard Burton became a "New York Times" bestseller. This book is not only the story of a 3-way friendship but a richly detailed depiction of the changes in American Catholic life over the past sixty-some years, a micro history of progressive Catholicism from the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite their loyalty to the church, the three often disagreed with its positions, grumbled about its tolerance for mediocrity in art, architecture, music, and intellectual life and its comfortableness with American materialism and military power. And each in his own way engaged in a spiritual search that extended beyond Christianity to the great religions of the East.

"How we should think about board games, and what do they do to us as we play them?" Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships-from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia. Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly-an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books-specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author's emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

Widely popular throughout the world, Hardy still seems to speak to us, in fiction and in poetry, as our contemporary. In this new edition of his popular study, Peter Widdowson identifies the elements in his work which enable Hardy to be read in this way: the focus on unstable class and sexual relations in a society undergoing rapid change; the highly-charged and contradictory representations of women at the heart of this dangerously 'metamorphic' social process; the self-reflexive artifice of the writing itself as an aspect of Hardy's 'satiric' worldview; his ironic humanism in the 'new Dark Age' of the modern world. Drawing on contemporary approaches to literary study in an accessible way, the author shows where this radical and destabilizing Hardy is to be located in the texts; and similarly seeks to recast our conception of Hardy the Poet by showing how preconceived and selective it is. For this edition, Professor Widdowson has updated the Select Bibliography and has also included a 'Postscript' on film and TV adaptation of Hardy's fiction, since many newcomers to Hardy may these days experience his work for the first time in this medium. This lucid and engaging study offers a comprehensive guide to reading Hardy anew as a writer who continues to challenge our assumptions about art and life.

Writing and composing with honesty and humanism, Lucille Clifton is known for her themes of the body, family, community, politics, womanhood, and the spirit. While much of her work deals with the African American experience, she does not limit herself to that perspective, addressing topics common to all women, to all people. This timely and important biography will give readers a glimpse into the life and work of this important and revered African American poet, writer, and educator, exploring themes that run throughout her writing, as well as the personal obstacles she faced and overcame. Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936. Today, she is one of the most important and revered African American poets, writers, and educators in the nation. In addition to several works of poetry, she has written more than 15 children's books. Her work has been nominated for three Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, one of which she won for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 in 2000. In 1999, she was appointed and remains a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, one of the most prestigious honors in American letters. Among her best known works is the poem miss rosie, anthologized many times over and a standard part of high school curriculums. She has won an Emmy award, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowmant for the the Arts, and many other prestigious awards. Writing and composing with honesty and humanism, Clifton is known for her themes of the body, family, community, politics, womanhood, and the spirit. While much of her work deals with the African American experience, she does not limit herself to that perspective, addressing topics common to all women, to all people. This biography covers Clifton's life and work, addressing themes that run throughout her writing as well as the personal obstacles she faced and overcame, including her own faultering health. This timely and important biography will give readers a glimpse into the life of one of America's most important, influential, and enduring writers.