Talis lived his life alone, and now, adrift in the Romantic Ocean, he’s ready to die alone, too. The only thing left of his cargo is a sealskin bag packed with love letters he’ll never live to deliver. His slow demise is interrupted by Erowyn, a sharp-toothed siren whose magical song fails to lure the tone-deaf postman overboard. Erowyn instead offers a trade. She’ll keep him alive with coconut water if he opens his cargo and reads her the love letters inside. As the sun bakes the deck and time runs short, an unlikely connection blooms between a postman haunted by his past and a sea monster curious about love. Darkly funny and deeply poignant, The Oddest Sea delivers a haunting glimpse into the all-consuming nature of love and regret.

Talis lived his life alone, and now, adrift in the Romantic Ocean, he’s ready to die alone, too. The only thing left of his cargo is a sealskin bag packed with love letters he’ll never live to deliver. His slow demise is interrupted by Erowyn, a sharp-toothed siren whose magical song fails to lure the tone-deaf postman overboard. Erowyn instead offers a trade. She’ll keep him alive with coconut water if he opens his cargo and reads her the love letters inside. As the sun bakes the deck and time runs short, an unlikely connection blooms between a postman haunted by his past and a sea monster curious about love. Darkly funny and deeply poignant, The Oddest Sea delivers a haunting glimpse into the all-consuming nature of love and regret.

The key to living well in a high tech world is to spend much less time using technology. Georgetown computer scientist Cal Newport's Deep Work sparked a movement around the idea that unbroken concentration produces far more value than the electronic busyness that defines the modern work day. But his readers had an urgent follow-up question: What about technology in our personal lives? In recent years, our culture's relationship with personal technology has transformed from something exciting into something darker. Innovations like smartphones and social media are useful, but many of us are increasingly troubled by how much control these tools seem to exert over our daily experiences--including how we spend our free time and how we feel about ourselves. In Digital Minimalism, Newport proposes a bold solution: a minimalist approach to technology use in which you radically reduce the time you spend online, focusing on a small set of carefully-selected activities while happily ignoring the rest. He mounts a vigorous defense for this less-is-more approach, combining historical examples with case studies of modern digital minimalists to argue that this philosophy isn't a rejection of technology, but instead a necessary realignment to ensure that these tools serve us, not the other way around. To make these principles practical, he takes us inside the growing subculture of digital minimalists who have built rich lives on a foundation of intentional technology use, and details a decluttering process that thousands have already used to simplify their online lives. He also stresses the importance of never clicking "like," explores the underappreciated value of analog hobbies, and draws lessons from the "attention underground"--a resistance movement fighting the tech companies' attempts to turn us into gadget addicts. Digital Minimalism is an indispensable guide for anyone looking to reclaim their life from the alluring diversions of the digital world.

Recommended by Cosmopolitan, USA Today, Shondaland, & Book Riot A profound and intersectional text, Song of My Softening is a queer, fat, love song of the interior. A late-bloomer’s coming of age lyric. This collection is a study in tenderness, vulnerability and candor. James provides a window into what perseverance looks like, ungilded: a mirror for anyone born into a culture outside of their identity. These poems hum with multitudinous survival. Each poem is a celebration of sound. Born from revolutionary praise songs of Yoruba culture, Trinidadian Soca and Calypso, British Pop and Punk, American Gospel and R&B, Song of My Softening will sing itself into your soul. “It’s not often that fat women feel such thorough representation of themselves not only in poetry but in any media and not only in the beautiful moments but in the sorrowful ones, ranging throughout life. James does a brilliant job of portraying this and all her themes brilliantly; highly recommended.” —Starred review by Library Journal “James is a master of song, as adept at the minimalist line as she is with sweeping lines that span the page, continually surprising with turns of phrase that are equal parts prophetic and musical. This is a tremendous first collection.” —Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question "[Song of My Softening] is a siren song, a brilliant, harsh indictment of the way we communicate ideas about the body, sex, and womanhood to our young girls, and how we grow up into the women we are, as queer women of color. And even more than that, it is a poet’s handbook, viciously interrogating what makes a poem, and how to expand and contract the poem’s form into something useful and even something revolutionary. Finally, Song Of My Softening is a sharp, beautifully-wrought collection of poems, as well as a tool for grieving, a personal diary of loss." —Joanna Acevedo, The Adroit Journal “Song of My Softening is ultimately a journey toward love and an inspection of the burdens we bear in order to arrive there, in that unknown room we can only name for ourselves. This prosodic and nuanced formation-story-in-poems leaves me both speared and softened, like the “bent knife through pear.” Which is to say: James’s poems are as sharp as the knife, as soft as the pear. I leave this book like the speaker, in paradox: punctured, wounded, but ultimately more whole.” —Julie Marie Wade, Tupelo Quarterly “Omotara James is a poet of the body, and Song of My Softening moves us emotionally as it reminds us of our physical and sensual selves. These poems beg to be spoken aloud as one sister might to another, or as one sister might to an audience of sisters. These are daring poems from a poet brave enough to take the kind of risks that lead to beauty: ‘Your fat spills soft across the moonlit crown of grass./Your soulmates are a gaggle of fish, shoaling thick,/until you are schooled enough in this love.’” —Jericho Brown "Omotara James has used the page, the word and this wonderful book, Song of My Softening, to etch a particular achy wandering silence that is as loud and brilliant as any book I've read. One can only argue whether an abundance of skill or will was most necessary to pull off this literary feat. One cannot, and should not, ever argue about the book's multilayered longing boom." —Kiese Laymon "A sumptuous, unforgettable debut, Song of My Softening relentlessly unearths and acknowledges the pains of the past, though its work is ecstatic in equal measure. James wields language masterfully, not as a weapon but as an instrument that can transform pain into a song of praise, for pleasure and survival, for the body and its bounties. It is a song that rings and rings, that will ring in me for a very long time." —Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Body Work and Girlhood

From queer activist and sex educator Max Hovey, the essential modern guide for understanding what divides us and the path to building a better community—a revolutionary call to arms for embracing kindness and empathy. Exclusionary and derogatory rhetoric in online spaces like “no fats, no fems” is often an unfortunate reality for many queer people and speaks to a larger issue at hand—but it doesn’t have to be this way. Activist Max Hovey has gained thousands of supporters worldwide in his efforts to challenge stereotypes and unpack the problematic ideologies queer people can place on each other—and often on themselves. Combining diverse personal testimonies and the latest research from across the LGBTQIA+ community, his groundbreaking guide prejudice in queer spaces through discussions of race, class, and identitythe historical evolution of queer thoughtthe role of intersectionality in the fight for LGBTQIA+ rightsinternalized homophobia and its role in creating divisionbody image issues and the importance of sexual liberationhow to accept non-conformity and handle rejectionself-reflection through understanding different perspectivesways to promote positivity and acceptance in ourselves and otherswhat having pride and community really meansRegardless of background or sexual orientation, our mutual goal is empathy, and Max gives us all the tools needed to get there. The Velvet Rage for a modern audience, No Fats, No Fems is an urgent call to action, offering a roadmap to building stronger community and a much kinder future.

World-leading coffee expert and best-selling author of The World Atlas of Coffee shows you how to make barista-level coffee at home We all expect to be able to buy an excellent cup of coffee from the many brilliant coffee shops available. But what about the coffee we make at home? Shouldn't that be just as good? James Hoffmann is an entrepreneur and the international name in coffee, combining guru-level knowledge with a wonderful ability to communicate it. James runs Square Mile Coffee, as well as creating extremely informative, and popular, coffee and equipment reviews for his YouTube and Instagram channels. In his latest book he demonstrates everything you need to know to make consistently excellent coffee at home, including: what equipment is worth buying, and what isn't; how to grind coffee; the basics of brewing for all major equipment (cafetiere, aeropress, stovetop etc); understanding coffee drinks, from the cortado to latte; the perfect espresso; and taking it to the next level - home roasting.

The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.