All posts by Emily Berg

Quichotte; by Salman Rushdie

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. 

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Author: Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen previous novels—GrimusMidnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), ShameThe Satanic VersesHaroun and the Sea of StoriesThe Moor’s Last SighThe Ground Beneath Her FeetFuryShalimar the ClownThe Enchantress of FlorenceLuka and the Fire of LifeTwo Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph AntonThe Jaguar SmileImaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

Hurricanes: A Memoir; by Rick Ross, Neil Martinez-Belkin

The highly anticipated memoir from hip-hop icon Rick Ross chronicles his coming of age amid Miami’s crack epidemic, his star-studded controversies and his unstoppable rise to fame.
Rick Ross is an indomitable presence in the music industry, but few people know his full story. Now, for the first time, Ross offers a vivid, dramatic and unexpectedly candid account of his early childhood, his tumultuous adolescence and his dramatic ascendancy in the world of hip-hop.Born William Leonard Roberts II, Ross grew up “across the bridge,” in a Miami at odds with the glitzy beaches, nightclubs and yachts of South Beach. In the aftermath of the 1980 race riots and the Mariel boatlift, Ross came of age at the height of the city’s crack epidemic, when home invasions and execution-style killings were commonplace. Still, in the midst of the chaos and danger that surrounded him, Ross flourished, first as a standout high school football player and then as a dope boy in Carol City’s notorious Matchbox housing projects. All the while he honed his musical talent, overcoming setback after setback until a song called “Hustlin'” changed his life forever.From the making of “Hustlin'” to his first major label deal with Def Jam, to the controversy surrounding his past as a correctional officer and the numerous health scares, arrests and feuds he had to transcend along the way, Hurricanes is a revealing portrait of one of the biggest stars in the rap game, and an intimate look at the birth of an artist. 

Authors: Rick Ross is an American rapper, songwriter, entrepreneur and founder of the Maybach Music Group. All ten of his albums have landed in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, including five No. 1 debuts. He has received four Grammy Award nominations, and his single Hustlin” was the first song ever to reach certified platinum status before its associated album was released. He has worked closely with Jay-Z, Kanye West, Diddy, Drake, Lil Wayne and DJ Khaled, among many others. He lives in Miami. Hurricanes is his first book.

Neil Martinez-Belkin is the New York Times bestselling co-author of The Autobiography of Gucci Mane and the former music editor of XXL Magazine. He has written extensively about contemporary hip-hop for VICE, Apple Music, Beats By Dre, Complex, Mass Appeal, and others. He lives in Boston.

Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have; By Tatiana Schlossberg

From a former New York Times science writer, this urgent call to action will empower you to stand up to climate change and environmental pollution by making simple but impactful everyday choices.

With urgency and wit, Tatiana Schlossberg explains that far from being only a distant problem of the natural world created by the fossil fuel industry, climate change is all around us, all the time, lurking everywhere in our convenience-driven society, all without our realizing it.

By examining the unseen and unconscious environmental impacts in four areas-the Internet and technology, food, fashion, and fuel – Schlossberg helps readers better understand why climate change is such a complicated issue, and how it connects all of us: How streaming a movie on Netflix in New York burns coal in Virginia; how eating a hamburger in California might contribute to pollution in the Gulf of Mexico; how buying an inexpensive cashmere sweater in Chicago expands the Mongolian desert; how destroying forests from North Carolina is necessary to generate electricity in England.

Cataloging the complexities and frustrations of our carbon-intensive society with a dry sense of humor, Schlossberg makes the climate crisis and its solutions interesting and relevant to everyone who cares, even a little, about the planet. She empowers readers to think about their stuff and the environment in a new way, helping them make more informed choices when it comes to the future of our world.

Most importantly, this is a book about the power we have as voters and consumers to make sure that the fight against climate change includes all of us and all of our stuff, not just industry groups and politicians. If we have any hope of solving the problem, we all have to do it together.

Author: Tatiana Schlossberg is a journalist writing about climate change and the environment. She previously reported on those subjects for the Science and Climate sections of the New York Times, where she also worked on the Metro desk. Her work has also appeared in the AtlanticBloomberg View, the Record (Bergen County), and the Vineyard Gazette. She lives in New York.

A Door in the Earth; by Amy Waldman

From the author of the national bestseller The Submission comes the journey of a young Afghan-American woman trapped between her ideals and the complicated truth in this “penetrating” (O, Oprah Magazine), “stealthily suspenseful,” (Booklist, starred review), “breathtaking and achingly nuanced” (Kirkus, starred review) novel for readers of Cutting for Stone and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Parveen Shams, a college senior in search of a calling, feels pulled between her charismatic and mercurial anthropology professor and the comfortable but predictable Afghan-American community in her Northern California hometown. When she discovers a bestselling book called Mother Afghanistan, a memoir by humanitarian Gideon Crane that has become a bible for American engagement in the country, she is inspired. Galvanized by Crane’s experience, Parveen travels to a remote village in the land of her birth to join the work of his charitable foundation.

When she arrives, however, Crane’s maternity clinic, while grandly equipped, is mostly unstaffed. The villagers do not exhibit the gratitude she expected to receive. And Crane’s memoir appears to be littered with mistakes, or outright fabrications. As the reasons for Parveen’s pilgrimage crumble beneath her, the U.S. military, also drawn by Crane’s book, turns up to pave the solde road to the village, bringing the war in their wake. When a fatal ambush occurs, Parveen must decide whether her loyalties lie with the villagers or the soldiers — and she must determine her own relationship to the truth.
Amy Waldman, who reported from Afghanistan for the New York Times after 9/11, has created a taut, propulsive novel about power, perspective, and idealism, brushing aside the dust of America’s longest-standing war to reveal the complicated truths beneath. A Door in the Earth is the rarest of books, one that helps us understand living history through poignant characters and unforgettable storytelling.
Author: Amy Waldman’s first novel, The Submission, was a national bestseller, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and the #1 Book of the Year for Entertainment Weekly and Esquire. A former bureau chief for The New York Times and national correspondent for The Atlantic as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute and the American Academy in Berlin, she lives with her family in Brooklyn.

The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains; By Joseph LeDoux

A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today.

Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human.

In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living

organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible.

The Girl Who Lived Twice; By Lisbeth Salander

The sixth Lisbeth Salander story–the crime-fiction phenomenon that has sold more than 90 million copies worldwide.

Lisbeth Salander–the fierce, unstoppable girl with the dragon tattoo–has disappeared. She’s sold her apartment in Stockholm. She’s gone silent electronically. She’s told no one where she is. And no one is aware that at long last she’s got her primal enemy, her twin sister, Camilla, squarely in her sights.

Mikael Blomkvist is trying to reach Lisbeth. He needs her help unraveling the identity of a man who lived and died on the streets in Stockholm–a man who does not exist in any official records and whose garbled last words hinted at possible damaging knowledge of people in the highest echelons of government and industry. In his pocket was a crumpled piece of paper with Blomkvist’s phone number on it. 

Once again, Salander and Blomkvist will come to each other’s aid, moving in tandem toward the truths they each seek. In the end, it will be Blomkvist–in a moment of unimaginable self-sacrifice–who will make it possible for Lisbeth to face the most important battle of her life, and, finally, to put her past to rest.

Author: DAVID LAGERCRANTZ is an acclaimed Swedish author and journalist. In 2015 The Girl in the Spider’s Web, his continuation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, became a worldwide best seller, and it was announced that Lagercrantz would write two further novels in the series. The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye was published in September 2017. He is the coauthor of numerous biographies (including the internationally best-selling memoir I Am Zlatan😉 and the acclaimed novel Fall of Man in Wilmslow, on the death and life of Alan Turing.

Tidelands (The Fairmile Series #1)

The #1 New York Times bestselling author and “one of the great storytellers of our time” (San Francisco Book Review) turns from the glamour of the royal courts to tell the story of an ordinary woman, Alinor, who cannot bear to conform to the life that lies before her.

Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, England is in the grip of a civil war between renegade king and rebellious parliament. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even the remote tidelands —the marshy landscape of the south coast.

Alinor, a descendant of wisewomen, trapped in poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead, she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life.

Suspected of possessing dark secrets in superstitious times, Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her out from her neighbors. This is the time of witch mania, and Alinor, a woman without a husband, skilled with herbs, suddenly enriched, arouses envy in her rivals and fear among the villagers, who are ready to take lethal action into their own hands.

It is dangerous for a woman to be different.

About the Author

Philippa Gregory is the author of many New York Times bestselling novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl, and is a recognized authority on women’s history. Many of her works have been adapted for the screen including The Other Boleyn Girl. Her most recent novel, The Last Tudor, is now in production for a television series. She graduated from the University of Sussex and received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where she is a Regent. She holds honorary degrees from Teesside University and the University of Sussex. She is a fellow of the Universities of Sussex and Cardiff and was awarded the 2016 Harrogate Festival Award for Contribution to Historical Fiction. She is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She founded Gardens for the Gambia, a charity to dig wells in poor rural schools in The Gambia, and has provided nearly 200 wells. She welcomes visitors to her website PhilippaGregory.com.

The World Doesn’t Require You: Stories

As seen in the Summer Reading Previews of Esquire – NYLON – BuzzFeed – BookRiot – Southern Living

The World Doesn’t Require You announces the arrival of a generational talent, as Rion Amilcar Scott shatters rigid genre lines to explore larger themes of religion, violence, and love–all told with sly humor and a dash of magical realism.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading

Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated
Do you worry that you’ve lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you’re not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day’s news, the willingness to be alone.
The shelves of the world’s great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multi-tasked. Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions.
The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike.
About the Author
Leah Price has taught English at Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Rutgers University, where from fall 2019 onward she will be founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative. She is the author How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain and the editor of Unpacking My Library.

Nights in White Castle – Steve Rushin

Picking up where he left off in his acclaimed memoir Sting-Ray Afternoons, Steve Rushin brilliantly captures a bygone era, and the thrills of new adulthood in the early 80s.
 
It begins in Bloomington, Minnesota, with a 13-year-old kid staging his own author photo that he hopes will someday grace the cover of a book jacket. And it ends at a desk in the legendary Time & Life building, with that same boy-now in his early 20s and writing professionally-reflecting on how the hell he got there from what seems like a distant universe. In between, Steve Rushin whisks us along on an extraordinarily funny, tender, and altogether unforgettable journey.
From a menial summer job at suburban Bennigan’s, to first-time college experiences in Milwaukee, to surviving early adulthood in seedy New York City, this deeply touching odyssey will remind any reader of those special moments when they too went from innocence to experience.

About the Author
Steve Rushin is the author of Road Swing, which was named “Top 100 Sports Books of All Time”. He previously worked for Sports Illustrated and has filed stories for the magazine from all seven continents, including Antarctica. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Travel Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing collections, with essays appearing in Time magazine and The New York Times. He lives in Minnesota.