A tender, moving, and insightful account of queer motherhood and an interrogation of life on the margins of American culture as a self-described “ugly” womanUgly is a word with fangs that can kill a woman’s self-esteem in one bite. Edicts about how women should look, behave, and think are the brutal forge through which they are made — not born. And to defy the pretty imperative is to become invisible. It can be a hard thing to admit to yourself, let alone to your child— to say the words, “I am ugly,” or “I am seen as ugly.” But early on in her motherhood journey, watching her young daughter begin to wrestle with beauty standards, Stephanie Fairyington felt compelled to face her own demons, to unpack her own ugly self-perception, one that she could trace to her own childhood, in order to conquer this seemingly immoveable frontier, far too taboo even among women to broach—the ways in which women’s lives are unfairly contoured by the nature of their looks. The multiple iterations of ugliness that Fairyington saw in her young self—her physical appearance, her unavoidably obvious queerness, and her dissonant gender expression—are not present in her beautiful and traditionally feminine daughter. But Fairyington’s old feelings of inadequacy take on new meaning as she confronts fresh insecurities around her role as the non-biological mother in her relationship, exacerbating wounds from a lifetime of being treated from the poverty of her genetic inheritance to questions about her parentage to doubts about the legitimacy of her family.Interlacing cultural history and analysis with memoir, Ugly is a probing investigation into cultural norms and the formation of our aesthetic sense of self. Fairyington contrasts her so-called ugliness with her daughter’s attraction and adherence to beauty ideals, a tender and tenuous condition that by age seven she was already walking a tightrope to maintain. By sharing the history of her troubled self-image, Fairyington invites us to go rogue, to invent a new language and logic to overthrow all the ways that women have been cultivated to hate themselves.

In the new thriller from #1 New York Times Bestseller Sarah Pekkanen, a young divorcee accepts a caretaker job for an elderly widow and is drawn into a decades-old mystery of four college girls who vanished after volunteering for parapsychology experiments.When Riley Bell lands a caretaker job for Betty Sadler, she imagines quiet afternoons of tea and card games - and a chance to heal from her shattering divorce. Instead, she steps into a house that feels suspended in time, with every lampshade, cocktail coupe and record album exactly as it was in 1964. No television. No microwave. And Betty has never even heard of a cell phone.For Betty, there’s only one thing left she wants in To locate her three best friends who seemingly disappeared after they all volunteered for mysterious experiments in their college’s psychology department. No clues, no contact, just an unanswered mystery that has shadowed Betty for six decades.Inspired by the real-life research once conducted at Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory, The Women In White is told in dual timelines- Betty’s sparkling world of pep rallies and 5 o’clock martinis, and Riley’s present-day search through hidden files into dark corners.Because whatever was swirling around these four exceptional young women is rising from its long-dormant state. Someone is resurrecting the old experiments, like a copy-cat serial killer. And Riley's efforts to get answers about the lost girls from the 1960s is putting her on a collision course with the person determined to finish the job.

A prize-winning sociologist’s radical vision of the social power of erotic life Recent years have seen moral panics over pronouns, polycules, pride parades, and anything trans and queer. What all these controversies have in common is a tendency to cast sex as a problem best solved in private. According to feminist sociologist Angela Jones, we must reject this solitary vision of desire if we are to liberate our sex lives and society at large.Sex in Public offers a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding sexuality in society. Sex is never strictly personal, Jones shows, but rather inherently social, shaped by power relations and possessing outsized power of its own. To make this case, Jones charts the inner workings of our erotic desires, behaviors, identities, relationships, and communities, and the linkages among them. Grounded in field-leading sociology, decades of sexual science, and the voices of sexual rule-breakers worldwide, Sex in Public pinpoints the repressive forces that distort eroticism, but also reveals our means of breaking free. Better sex is possible, through erotic power that uplifts bodily autonomy, social justice, and shared pleasure. Sex in Public is an invitation to know our sexualities fully, reimagining society as we do. 

In the new thriller from #1 New York Times Bestseller Sarah Pekkanen, a young divorcee accepts a caretaker job for an elderly widow and is drawn into a decades-old mystery of four college girls who vanished after volunteering for parapsychology experiments.When Riley Bell lands a caretaker job for Betty Sadler, she imagines quiet afternoons of tea and card games - and a chance to heal from her shattering divorce. Instead, she steps into a house that feels suspended in time, with every lampshade, cocktail coupe and record album exactly as it was in 1964. No television. No microwave. And Betty has never even heard of a cell phone.For Betty, there’s only one thing left she wants in To locate her three best friends who seemingly disappeared after they all volunteered for mysterious experiments in their college’s psychology department. No clues, no contact, just an unanswered mystery that has shadowed Betty for six decades.Inspired by the real-life research once conducted at Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory, The Women In White is told in dual timelines- Betty’s sparkling world of pep rallies and 5 o’clock martinis, and Riley’s present-day search through hidden files into dark corners.Because whatever was swirling around these four exceptional young women is rising from its long-dormant state. Someone is resurrecting the old experiments, like a copy-cat serial killer. And Riley's efforts to get answers about the lost girls from the 1960s is putting her on a collision course with the person determined to finish the job.

A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets As Daphné B obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist politics. In a looks-obsessed, selfie-covered present where influencers make the world go round, she brings us a breath of fresh air: an anti-capitalist look at a supremely capitalist industry, an intersectional feminist look at a practice many consider misogynist. Blending together the confessional, the poetic, and the essayistic, Made-Up is a lyric meditation on an industry in full bloom. Made-Up explores the complicated world of makeup, from how it’s made to how we wear it, talking about gender, identity, capitalism, and pop culture in the process. Makeup doesn’t get a lot of serious attention; it’s often derided as shallow. But Daphné proves that it’s worth looking at a little more in-depth. The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley―like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist―the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.

She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.

This innovative sci-fi novel explores the potential impact of alien infection on humankind as they traverse the stars and find themselves stranded on new and strange planets. Amid the Crowd of Stars is a grand scale science fiction novel examining the ethical implications of interstellar travel, a topic rarely addressed in science fiction novels. What responsibilities do we have to isolate ourselves from the bacteria, viruses, and other life of another world, and to prevent any of that alien biome from being brought back to Earth? What happens when a group of humans are stranded for centuries on another world with no choice but to expose themselves to that world? After such long exposure, are they still Homo sapiens or have they become another species entirely? These questions are at the heart of this intriguing novel, explored through the complicated lives and the viewpoints of the people who have come to rescue the stranded colony, the members of that colony, and the sentient alien life that dwells on the planet. Difficult life and death choices will be made by all involved.

Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms. Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a surfeit of aliveness. In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness. Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.

A day-in-the-life debut novel about a fading socialite on the hunt for someone to kill her before her next Soul Cycle class.New York City, 2014. Agnes Maurer is seeking the appropriate killer. Candidates an icy magazine editor with a special cutlery set; a Craigslist gun dealer; and Agnes' toxic novelist boyfriend. In her hunt, she stumbles into unexpected cleansing crystals, must-have handbags, a Tesla ride where someone else dies, naked housekeeping, and an encounter with deep, dark water. Through a murderously attuned kaleidoscope stained with image, money, and sex, Agnes' dwindling hours of icon-filled privilege become a breathless search for self. Agnes Lives! is a killer exhibition, an obsessive rendering of millennial sexuality as internalized abuse and consummate style, with the knob righty-tightened all the way. Newton's prose is disturbingly fun, relentless, shattering. A crafted study of mid-aughts values that have brought us to where we are now. The ping-pong pacing crashes into a worthy, intense denouement.

An electrifying collection of linked stories following a cast of characters navigating bodies, queerness, power, and sex—with radical results—from the bestselling author of Housemates. With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives. In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf. For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in Fat Swim dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and Fat Swim is her most incisive and provocative work yet.

A day-in-the-life debut novel about a fading socialite on the hunt for someone to kill her before her next Soul Cycle class.New York City, 2014. Agnes Maurer is seeking the appropriate killer. Candidates an icy magazine editor with a special cutlery set; a Craigslist gun dealer; and Agnes' toxic novelist boyfriend. In her hunt, she stumbles into unexpected cleansing crystals, must-have handbags, a Tesla ride where someone else dies, naked housekeeping, and an encounter with deep, dark water. Through a murderously attuned kaleidoscope stained with image, money, and sex, Agnes' dwindling hours of icon-filled privilege become a breathless search for self. Agnes Lives! is a killer exhibition, an obsessive rendering of millennial sexuality as internalized abuse and consummate style, with the knob righty-tightened all the way. Newton's prose is disturbingly fun, relentless, shattering. A crafted study of mid-aughts values that have brought us to where we are now. The ping-pong pacing crashes into a worthy, intense denouement.

Timnit Gebru, one of the fiercest voices in the world speaking truth to power, chronicles her journey as a refugee and Black woman in STEM—delivering an inspiring vision for better, human-centered, equitable technology. Timnit Gebru has been present at nearly every inflection point in tech’s recent history. She was an engineer at Apple on the cusp of the iPhone’s first release, a PhD student at Stanford’s computer vision lab as her advisor worked on the enormous datasets so crucial to AI’s development, and the most senior Black woman on the Ethical AI team at Google as DeepMind and Open AI took over the field of artificial intelligence—where she was forced out for having raised the alarm about bias in large language models, causing global shockwaves in the tech industry. Starting with her childhood during which she was forced to flee the 1998 Ethiopian-Eritrean war, through the fraught process of achieving refugee status, Gebru shows how her early love of science and math was inextricably intertwined with her belief that these were reliably objective safe spaces. Over time, through high school in Greater Boston, college at Stanford, and jobs at Apple, Microsoft, and Google, she came to realize that perhaps some of the biases and injustices she witnessed in her life outside of academics were true about technology, too. Over the course of her life, Gebru has seen up close how the destructive ideologies and outsized egos of the tech world have come to wreak havoc on our environment, our economies, and the lives of billions of people. She has also come to understand how we could have made a different choice every step of the way, and how we still can. Part memoir and part manifesto, Deep Unlearning is as much about ideology as it is about technology—and about how to privilege justice in both.

Meet the Mortons: In this family, murder is currency—and business is booming.The Mortons are a modern day, old-money dynasty with impeccable taste, from their exquisitely crafted cocktails to their expertly tailored vintage garments. They are also stone-cold killers. For the Mortons, homicide is heritage.They, along with the other legacy crime families, send their progeny to Helshire College, where the legacy kids strategically intermingle with ordinary students from wealthy families. Jessica Morton has always excelled at Helshire, secure in her knowledge that she is the prodigy of her generation. Now, having committed her first kill at her matriarch's behest, it should be Jessica's moment, her honor. But that kill will cut more ways than one, unknotting deep secrets that propel a series of revelations, spanning the Mortons' country estate, the New York City art world, and Helshire itself.What happens to Jessica when all of her dearly-held certainties face the axe?Sharp and hypnotic, The Mortons is an epic novel of alliances and power, loyalty and kinship, and the consequences of ruthless ambition.