A Killing in Cannabis

Scott Eden

“A deeply reported literary nonfiction masterpiece.”—Wright Thompson A shocking murder at the nexus of Silicon Valley, California surf culture, and the cannabis gold rush exposes the dark side of the legal weed business in this revelatory work of investigative journalism. Santa Cruz is one of the country’s surf meccas and a favored getaway of the Silicon Valley elite. For decades, marijuana has been cultivated, consumed, and trafficked in these mountains, one of the most important regions in the country for the crop. It’s where Ken Kesey threw his wild parties, where back-to-the-land types came to live off the grid, and where Tushar Atre, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was found brutally murdered. Charismatic, ambitious, arrogant, and rich, Atre was the leader among a clutch of tech execs and venture capitalists with a voracious appetite for risk, work, and money, riding waves at dawn and then putting in fourteen-hour days. When he met Rachael Lynch, a maverick cannabis grower and mover of product, he had a vision of how their lives could come together in business and in love. Atre sought to disrupt the newly legal cannabis trade by funding a start-up with black-market capital. This illegal pursuit would entangle him with an array of colorful and dangerous characters, many of whom had compelling reason to want him dead. Award-winning journalist Scott Eden’s panoramic investigation exposes the symbiotic relationship between the legal weed world and its shadowy, black-market counterpart. It is a story of love, greed, and betrayal, set in a world where visionaries, hippies, masters of the universe, and stone-cold killers are all stakeholders, eager to exploit the power of the plant.

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The Agony of Eros

Byung-Chul Han

An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.” Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources—Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the “pornographication” of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's “burnout society.” To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself. Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society. This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the “reinvention” of love.—from the foreword by Alain Badiou

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Workhorse

Caroline Palmer

A richly drawn, unsettling, and wickedly funny story of envy and ambition set against the glamor and privilege of media and high society in New York City at its height. At the turn of the millennium, editorial assistant Clodagh “Clo” Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world’s most prestigious fashion magazine. There’s just one problem: She doesn’t have the right pedigree. Instead, Clo is a “workhorse” surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected “show horses” who get ahead without effort, including her beguiling cubicle-mate, Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a beloved but fading Broadway actress. Harry Wood, Davis’s boarding school classmate and a reporter with visions of his own media empire, might be Clo’s ally in gaming the system—or he might be the only thing standing between Clo and her rightful place at the top. In a career punctuated by moments of high absurdity, sudden windfalls, and devastating reversals of fortune, Clo wades across boundaries, taking ever greater and more dangerous risks to become the important person she wants to be within the confines of a world where female ambition remains cloaked. But who really is Clo underneath all the borrowed designer clothes and studied manners—and who are we if we share her desires? Hilariously observant and insightful, Workhorse is a brilliant page-turner about what it means to be in thrall to wealth, beauty, and influence, and the outrageous sacrifices women must make for the sake of success.

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So Old, So Young

Grant Ginder

“So Old, So Young is a story of romantic love, professional jealousy, misplaced longing, and—above all—the gift of lifelong friendship. You will laugh on every page, except for when you find yourself moved to tears.” —Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street Six Friends. Five Parties. Twenty Years… How did we get So Old, So Young?From Grant Ginder, the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, comes a novel of impending millennial middle age that is part love story, part tragic comedy. Five parties over the course of two decades bring six college friends together, exploring the ways we can run from and cling to our friends in love, life, and death. For Marco and Mia, Sasha and Theo, Richie and Adam, the one constant in life after college together has been change. New jobs. New cities. New spouses. New children. Through it all, one thing they thought would always stay the same is their friendship. But time has a way of breaking even the strongest bonds and testing what we thought we knew. From East Village apartment parties and disastrous destination weddings to fortieth birthdays and suburban backyard barbecues, Grant Ginder’s resonant, funny, and deeply moving novel is a story about the growing pains of the millennial generation, and a celebration of how love can shift, stumble, and grow into something bigger than we ever could have imagined.

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Far and Away

Amy Poeppel

The “absolutely hilarious” (Real Simple) Amy Poeppel delights once again with a charming new novel about a house swap gone wonderfully awry.Perfect strangers Lucy and Greta have agreed to a house swap—and boy, are they going to regret it. Lucy’s hometown of Dallas has gone from home sweet home to vicious snake pit in the blink of an eye after her son makes a mistake he can’t undo. And Greta’s beloved flat in Berlin is suddenly up for grabs when her husband Otto takes a dream job in Texas without even telling her. In their rush to leave town, Lucy and Greta make a deal, pack their bags, and—thanks to martinis, desperation, and some very rusty German—have absolutely no idea what they’re getting themselves into. Trading Southern charm and barbecue for European sophistication and schnitzel, the two women get a lot more than a change of scenery as they move into each other’s houses, neighborhoods, and lives. Greta and Lucy’s husbands are no help: Otto is winning over his colleagues, swimming laps in the backyard pool, and rooting for the Rangers, while Lucy’s husband is doing a six-month stretch out west, either in a NASA biosphere or in jail, depending on who you ask. Meanwhile, Greta’s daughter Emmi and Lucy’s son Jack get tossed into each other’s orbits, where they both discover secrets they can’t ignore. When Greta’s biggest career achievement—the buzzworthy purchase of a Vermeer at auction—is thrown into question and Lucy’s past with a hot Viking named Bjørn invades her present, the two women need each other in ways they never could have imagined. Through jet lag, culture shock, suspiciously nice neighbors, and scandals that refuse to be left behind, Lucy and Greta will have to decide if they can ever go home again.

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Workhorse

Caroline Palmer

A richly drawn, unsettling, and wickedly funny story of envy and ambition set against the glamor and privilege of media and high society in New York City at its height. At the turn of the millennium, editorial assistant Clodagh “Clo” Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world’s most prestigious fashion magazine. There’s just one problem: She doesn’t have the right pedigree. Instead, Clo is a “workhorse” surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected “show horses” who get ahead without effort, including her beguiling cubicle-mate, Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a beloved but fading Broadway actress. Harry Wood, Davis’s boarding school classmate and a reporter with visions of his own media empire, might be Clo’s ally in gaming the system—or he might be the only thing standing between Clo and her rightful place at the top. In a career punctuated by moments of high absurdity, sudden windfalls, and devastating reversals of fortune, Clo wades across boundaries, taking ever greater and more dangerous risks to become the important person she wants to be within the confines of a world where female ambition remains cloaked. But who really is Clo underneath all the borrowed designer clothes and studied manners—and who are we if we share her desires? Hilariously observant and insightful, Workhorse is a brilliant page-turner about what it means to be in thrall to wealth, beauty, and influence, and the outrageous sacrifices women must make for the sake of success.

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The Home of the Drowned

Elin Anna Labba

A powerful family saga set in the wilds of Sweden, where the summer settlement of the reindeer-herding Sámi people is flooded without warning, and three women must fight for their heritage and future in a changing worldThe sides of the mountain were shining almost red under the night sun, while rivers flowed white as milk down their slopes. People kept wading back and forth. They’d all moved west just like always, and it had taken some time to reach the village. Not many days, but long enough to arrive too late. The dam was finished. They’d known it. But no one realized how quickly the lake would fill up.Spring 1942, the time of the golden midnight sun. When Ingá, her mother Ravdná and aunt Ánne return to the summer settlement, they are hor­rified to discover that their village has been drowned, leaving the shore, their goahtis huts and the beautiful birch forest submerged beneath a strange underwater landscape. Without any notice to the community, the Company has dammed the lake for hydropower. Modern society is creeping closer with its demand for electricity and comfort, and with little consideration for its impact on the natural world or on those who have inhabited it for centuries. The villagers have great respect for the lake; they have learned that you can be on the water, but not in the water; most of them cannot even swim.The Home of the Drowned is the story of a small family of nomadic a rebellious mother who finds herself fighting a lonely battle, a tender sister who mourns the loss of a child, and a pragmatic daughter who wishes to put the past behind her in order to live a life just like everyone else.

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The Prophet and the Idiot

Jonas Jonasson

The brand-new, hilarious, feel-good adventure from the internationally bestselling author of The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Sweden, late summer of 2011. Self-taught astrophysicist Petra has calculated that the atmosphere will collapse on the 21st of September that year, around 21.20 to be more precise, bringing about the end of times. Armed with this terrible knowledge, Petra meets Johan, a domesday prophet, and Agnes, a widow of 75 who has made bank living a double life on social media as a young influencer. Together, the trio race through Europe as they plan to make the most out of the time they have left, in more ways than one. But of course, things rarely go to plan, even the end of the world…

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Technology and Barbarism: or: how billionaires will save us from the end of the world

Michel Nieva

Thought provoking pieces of non-fiction exploring the cross-roads of technology with art and science, as well as how hard science fiction has inspired the craziest ideas of our times, for the good and the bad.The non-fiction pieces included in Technology and Barbarism, as well as the long essay Capitalist Science Fiction, constitute the non-fiction alternative to Nieva’s Dengue Boy and has similar potential to achieve cult-status. Equally fast and furious, grounded in deep research as well as far-reaching literary traditions, Nieva writes about the crossroads between civilization and barbarism through history, literature, and the incidence of genetics in the Arts and Humanities. Could the inspiration for Kafka's stories have come from his visits to human zoos where he saw indigenous people kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego? Can an algorithm understand the verses of Rubén Darío? Can bacteria write literature? And can a monkey reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare? These are some of the questions that run through this collection of essays, which explores the almost always ambiguous threshold that technology and culture have drawn between what is understood as human and what is not, living and non-living, and which is the seed of the biggest questions of this century.  From nineteenth century science fiction to contemporary art exhibitions, via a philosophical take on COVID, this book examines the impact of capitalism, indigenous extermination, medical policies in Latin America and elsewhere, in order to interrogate our very identity.In Capitalist Science Fiction, Nieva studies the influence of historical ‘hard’ science fiction on technology and capitalism today, with a special focus on Silicon Valley, and a particular spin at the end on, of course, Elon Musk. The essay is totally timely and super smart.

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Technology and Barbarism: or: how billionaires will save us from the end of the world

Michel Nieva

Thought provoking pieces of non-fiction exploring the cross-roads of technology with art and science, as well as how hard science fiction has inspired the craziest ideas of our times, for the good and the bad.The non-fiction pieces included in Technology and Barbarism, as well as the long essay Capitalist Science Fiction, constitute the non-fiction alternative to Nieva’s Dengue Boy and has similar potential to achieve cult-status. Equally fast and furious, grounded in deep research as well as far-reaching literary traditions, Nieva writes about the crossroads between civilization and barbarism through history, literature, and the incidence of genetics in the Arts and Humanities. Could the inspiration for Kafka's stories have come from his visits to human zoos where he saw indigenous people kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego? Can an algorithm understand the verses of Rubén Darío? Can bacteria write literature? And can a monkey reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare? These are some of the questions that run through this collection of essays, which explores the almost always ambiguous threshold that technology and culture have drawn between what is understood as human and what is not, living and non-living, and which is the seed of the biggest questions of this century.  From nineteenth century science fiction to contemporary art exhibitions, via a philosophical take on COVID, this book examines the impact of capitalism, indigenous extermination, medical policies in Latin America and elsewhere, in order to interrogate our very identity.In Capitalist Science Fiction, Nieva studies the influence of historical ‘hard’ science fiction on technology and capitalism today, with a special focus on Silicon Valley, and a particular spin at the end on, of course, Elon Musk. The essay is totally timely and super smart.

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Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism: How a Magazine Born in the 1960s Changed America

Charles L. Ponce de Leon

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Gatecrasher: How I Helped the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World

Ben Widdicombe

A smart, gossipy, and very funny examination of celebrity culture from New York’s premiere social columnist. Ben Widdicombe is the only writer to have worked for Page Six, TMZ, and The New York Times—an unusual Triple Crown that allowed him personal access to the full gamut of Hollywood and high society’s rich and famous, from billionaires like Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and the Koch brothers, to pop culture icons Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. Now, in Gatecrasher, New York’s premiere gossip-turned-society writer spills the sensational stories that never made it to print. Widdicombe has appeared at nearly every gossip-worthy venue—from the Oscars and the Hamptons, to the Met Gala and Mar-a-Lago—and has rubbed elbows with a dizzying array of celebrities (and wannabes), and he whisks us past the clipboard and velvet rope to teach us the golden rules of gatecrashing, dishing on dozens of boldface names along the way. Widdicombe shares secrets for how to crash the parties, climb the ladder, avoid the paparazzi, or make small talk with Henry Kissinger and Anna Wintour. Endlessly fun and extremely telling, Gatecrasher makes the unnerving argument that Paris Hilton conquering pop culture two decades ago lead to Donald Trump winning the White House. “As the gossip pages go, so goes the country,” he says.

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We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada's Troubled Hockey Culture

Rick Westhead

A hard-hitting and powerful look at hockey's moment of reckoning in Canada, and the ways in which a game that is so universally loved has been rocked in recent years by court cases involving sexual assault and shocking incidents of hazing and abuse throughout junior hockey. The allegations read like a scene out of a horror movie. Five National Hockey League players, all of them 18-year-old Canada World Juniors at the time, are alleged to have sexually assaulted a young woman in a London, ON hotel room in June 2018 over several hours. When the players learned that the alleged victim had reported the incident to the police, they allegedly threatened her to drop the complaint. Hockey Canada kept the details of the case out of the spotlight and came to a confidential financial settlement with the plaintiff, paid out of a secret slush fund worth millions of dollars that the organization kept on hand to settle such complaints quietly. On May 26, 2022, TSN investigative reporter Rick Westhead broke the story surrounding the Team Canada junior players and Hockey Canada's handling of the case, immediately sending shock waves throughout all levels of the hockey world. Once the story went live on the TSN website, Westhead's inbox on X filled with messages from people who wanted to share their personal stories on how they had been impacted by hockey's toxic culture. In We Breed Lions, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Rick Westhead does a deep-dive into the state of hockey in Canada today. He gives voice to those who have been sexually assaulted by hockey players, revealing the struggles they've had with local police officials in their efforts to seek justice. He also goes inside the dressing room to find out how attitudes of misogyny and homophobia continue to flourish, and speaks to former players who were forced to perform degrading acts of initiation in order to join the team. Looming large in Westhead's extraordinary reporting are the gatekeepers of the game—league officials, team owners and members of the sport's governing bodies—who are reluctant to impose change from the outside and willing to sacrifice the well-being of their players and the community for profit. Westhead offers hope for hockey's future, profiling those individuals and organizations who are committed to educating players around issues of consent, putting an end to hazing and redefining what it means to be a man on and off the ice. Featuring a Foreword by bestselling author Stephen Brunt, We Breed Lions will surely generate an enormous amount of debate and discussion among parents, players and all of those who love the game of hockey and want to see it get to a better place.

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A Killing in Cannabis

Scott Eden

“A deeply reported literary nonfiction masterpiece.”—Wright Thompson A shocking murder at the nexus of Silicon Valley, California surf culture, and the cannabis gold rush exposes the dark side of the legal weed business in this revelatory work of investigative journalism. Santa Cruz is one of the country’s surf meccas and a favored getaway of the Silicon Valley elite. For decades, marijuana has been cultivated, consumed, and trafficked in these mountains, one of the most important regions in the country for the crop. It’s where Ken Kesey threw his wild parties, where back-to-the-land types came to live off the grid, and where Tushar Atre, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was found brutally murdered. Charismatic, ambitious, arrogant, and rich, Atre was the leader among a clutch of tech execs and venture capitalists with a voracious appetite for risk, work, and money, riding waves at dawn and then putting in fourteen-hour days. When he met Rachael Lynch, a maverick cannabis grower and mover of product, he had a vision of how their lives could come together in business and in love. Atre sought to disrupt the newly legal cannabis trade by funding a start-up with black-market capital. This illegal pursuit would entangle him with an array of colorful and dangerous characters, many of whom had compelling reason to want him dead. Award-winning journalist Scott Eden’s panoramic investigation exposes the symbiotic relationship between the legal weed world and its shadowy, black-market counterpart. It is a story of love, greed, and betrayal, set in a world where visionaries, hippies, masters of the universe, and stone-cold killers are all stakeholders, eager to exploit the power of the plant.

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