News in September 2021

News in September 2021

16th September, 2021

WELL, Magazine Asia, calls Ron Gonen’s THE WASTE-FREE WORLD “[i]nsightful and comprehensive. Gonen’s experience in government and business, first as a deputy in the Bloomberg administration in New York, and then as leader of an investment firm dedicated to making the economy more circular, gives him a unique lens into the challenges and opportunities in deploying green solutions. A must-read.” Portfolio published the book April 6, 2021.

16th September, 2021

THE MUTANT PROJECT has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, a prestigious non-fiction book award in England. St. Martin’s Press published the book November 10, 2020.

16th September, 2021

Maggie Nelson's highly anticipated ON FREEDOM: FOUR SONGS OF CARE AND CONSTRAINT has landed on the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. Graywolf Press published the book September 7, 2021.

16th September, 2021
EVERYTHING NOW by Rosecrans Baldwin has re-entered the Los Angeles Times bestseller list in hardcover nonfiction. MCD/FSG published the book June 15, 2021.
TOMATOES FOR NEELA by Padma Lakshmi
9th September, 2021

Padma Lakshmi said, “Some of my fondest memories from childhood are of cooking with the women in my family. It is the foundation for all I have spent my life working on.” Her debut children’s book, Tomatoes for Neela, which was illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal, lovingly affirms how we can connect to other cultures, as well as to our own, through food. It hit number 1 on Amazon Books Children’s Travel books list. She participated in a Barnes & Noble Storytime for her new book which Viking Books for Young Readers published the hardcover August 31, 2021.

ON FREEDOM by Maggie Nelson
9th September, 2021

Maggie Nelson's 10th work, ON FREEDOM: FOUR SONGS OF CARE AND CONSTRAINT was published this week to a storm of positive praise and acclaim. In the New York Times book Review they rave: "With patience and equipoise, she helps us parse those specificities. . .Nelson displays the same eloquent equipoise when she ventures into recent debates about the ethics and politics of sex. . .In discussion after discussion, Nelson shows the same alertness to context, intellectual modesty and the conviction that ethical goodness is never all on one side." The Los Angeles Times describes how Nelson "bounds across knotty subjects like #MeToo, sex positivity, addiction, queer theory, anxiety and carceral feminism without tiring of the painstaking work of untangling controversies. . . . After reading Nelson, your understanding of the word ["freedom"], and of humanity itself, will expand in surprising directions."
Graywolf Press published the book September 7, 2021.

THE NEIGHBOR’S SECRET by L. Alison Heller
9th September, 2021

L. Alison Heller’s THE NEIGHBOR’S SECRET has been chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection for September 2021! The thriller also received a starred review from BookPage: “Heller excels at the complex characterization required to engage readers, resulting in a book that’s truly impossible to put down. The myriad anxieties her characters feel—fear for their children, their reputation, their community—are entirely relatable. A sense of dread and foreboding permeates the narrative. We know a murder is coming; Laurel, Abe and Lena all seem on the verge of imploding. With such a wonderful buildup and a truly surprising finish, The Neighbor’s Secret is a delight to read.” Flatiron will publish the book on October 5, 2021.

THE ONES WHO DON'T SAY THEY LOVE YOU by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
9th September, 2021

THE ONES WHO DON'T SAY THEY LOVE YOU by Maurice Carlos Ruffin was lauded in a review in the Los Angeles Times. The reviewer writes:
“ While Ruffin’s stories can’t help but transport the reader to humid, sunken, decaying New Orleans, it’s too easy to say this book is merely a set of love songs to the city. What makes such collections ring true is the way they subvert conventional knowledge. For too long, tourism has been a shorthand for worldliness. While mass and social media offer a superficially cosmopolitan perspective on global culture, writers like Ruffin reveal that travel is often less about cultural immersion than blithe escapism . . . Time and again, Ruffin constructs a life’s history in the space of a page or two. His skill as a writer and his birthright as a New Orleanian equip him for the task. Masquerading is a way of life in the city, even outside Carnival season.” One World published the stories August 17, 2021.

NOW BEACON, NOW SEA by Christopher Sorrentino
9th September, 2021

On the day of its anticipated release, NOW BEACON, NOW SEA: A SON'S MEMOIR by Christopher Sorrentino was reviewed in the New York Times. They write: “NOW BEACON, NOW SEA is perhaps more straightforward than [Sorrentino's] voicey, plotty novels, and his memoir indulges in novelistic and cinematic flourishes — cascading lists, lyrical still lifes — only occasionally. . . Acute, intimate and exceedingly fair, Sorrentino’s memoir is a post-mortem that examines not the causes of his parents’ deaths but the endurance and effects of their confounding marriage." Esquire also featured the memoir on their list of the Best Books of Fall 2021, deeming it an “unflinching look at the mother who terrified, confounded, and enraged him . . . . Mothers and sons have rarely been captured with such dark intimacy as in NOW BEACON, NOW SEA, an open wound of grief and regret.” Catapult published the memoir September 7, 2021.