Buy now to get the main key ideas from Ari Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World Journalist Ari Shapiro has traveled the world, listening to human stories and seeking connection. In The Best Strangers in the World (2023), Shapiro shares his personal and professional journey. He recounts his time as an intern at NPR, his transition into a full-time journalist, and his experiences as a gay man navigating the changing landscape of LGBTQ+ rights in America. He also details his coverage of significant events such as the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, and what he has learned along the way.
“A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A visionary work of radical empathy. Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us. This work began when his father had a heart attack; two years later, Jeff, still in his forties, had a heart attack of his own. In the grip of writerly self-doubt, Jeff turned to images, taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram, writing short, true stories that bloomed into documentary. During those two years, he spent a lot of time on the road: meeting strangers working night shifts as he drove through the mountains to see his father; exploring the life and death of Charley Keunang, a once-aspiring actor shot by the police on LA’s Skid Row; documenting gay pride amidst the violent homophobia of Putin’s Russia; passing time with homeless teen addicts in Dublin; and accompanying a lonely woman, whose only friend was a houseplant, on shopping trips. Early readers have called this book “incantatory,” the voice “prophetic,” in “James Agee’s tradition of looking at the reality of American lives.” Defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers—night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless, the lost (or merely disoriented), and other people on the margins—This Brilliant Darkness erases the boundaries between author, subject, and reader to ask: how do people live with suffering?
From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The Best Strangers in the World is a witty, poignant book that captures Ari Shapiro’s love for the unusual, his pursuit of the unexpected, and his delight at connection against the odds.”—Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times-bestselling author of Catch and Kill and War on Peace From the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered, a stirring memoir-in-essays that is also a lover letter to journalism. In his first book, broadcaster Ari Shapiro takes us around the globe to reveal the stories behind narratives that are sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, but always poignant. He details his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama, or following the path of Syrian refugees fleeing war, or learning from those fighting for social justice both at home and abroad. As the self-reinforcing bubbles we live in become more impenetrable, Ari Shapiro keeps seeking ways to help people listen to one another; to find connection and commonality with those who may seem different; to remind us that, before religion, or nationality, or politics, we are all human. The Best Strangers in the World is a testament to one journalist’s passion for Considering All Things—and sharing what he finds with the rest of us.
A wry and poignant debut novel about a man’s search for true connection that is “both knowing and cutting, a satire of internet culture that is also a moving portrait of a lost human being” (Los Angeles Times). “A knowing and thought-provoking exploration of love, modern isolation, and what it means to exist—especially as a person of color—in our increasingly digital age.”—Celeste Ng, bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—NPR, The New York Public Library, Parade, Kirkus Reviews Lucas and Margo are fed up. Margo is a brilliant programmer tired of being talked over as the company’s sole black employee, and while Lucas is one of many Asians at the firm, he’s nearly invisible as a low-paid customer service rep. Together, they decide to steal their tech startup’s user database in an attempt at revenge. The heist takes a sudden turn when Margo dies in a car accident, and Lucas is left reeling, wondering what to do with their secret—and wondering whether her death really was an accident. When Lucas hacks into Margo’s computer looking for answers, he is drawn into her private online life and realizes just how little he knew about his best friend. With a fresh voice, biting humor, and piercing observations about human nature, Kevin Nguyen brings an insider’s knowledge of the tech industry to this imaginative novel. A pitch-perfect exploration of race and startup culture, secrecy and surveillance, social media and friendship, New Waves asks: How well do we really know one another? And how do we form true intimacy and connection in a tech-obsessed world? Praise for New Waves “Nguyen’s stellar debut is a piercing assessment of young adulthood, the tech industry, and racism. . . . Nguyen impressively holds together his overlapping plot threads while providing incisive criticism of privilege and a dose of sharp humor. The story is fast-paced and fascinating, but also deeply felt; the effect is a page-turner with some serious bite.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A blistering sendup of startup culture and a sprawling, ambitious, tender debut.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Every year over 200 million peasants flock to China’s urban centers, providing a profusion of cheap labor that helps fuel the country’s staggering economic growth. Award-winning journalist Michelle Dammon Loyalka follows the trials and triumphs of eight such migrants—including a vegetable vendor, an itinerant knife sharpener, a free-spirited recycler, and a cash-strapped mother—offering an inside look at the pain, self-sacrifice, and uncertainty underlying China’s dramatic national transformation. At the heart of the book lies each person’s ability to “eat bitterness”—a term that roughly means to endure hardships, overcome difficulties, and forge ahead. These stories illustrate why China continues to advance, even as the rest of the world remains embroiled in financial turmoil. At the same time, Eating Bitterness demonstrates how dealing with the issues facing this class of people constitutes China’s most pressing domestic challenge.
In their own words, the incarcerated, the formerly incarcerated, and those who love them in this moving anthology explore the complex realities of marriages and relationships lived in the long shadow of prison. Defying the frightening myths and stereotypes to which the media and society have reduced them, the people in this collection eloquently tell their own stories and speak their own truths. Love Lives Here, Too is a place where society can fully hear and see those who know prison's shadow. It is an important book that belongs on every shelf, for anyone who reads these stories will discover that it is not "us" against "them," but simply "us." Millions of people in the United States are in prison or have prison in their past Yet this population is largely ignored by society until a well-publicized crime by one person casts the wide net of demonization over them all, and over the people who love them. Dehumanized and stereotyped, these men, women, and families experience persistent, crippling disadvantages and discrimination that, few others in our society face. But behind, the stereotypes, hearts beat and yearn, break and endure. Deaths are grieved and births are celebrated. Bonds shatter; wounds heal. Hopes are realized, and dreams are trampled. Mistakes and bad choices are made. So, too, are wise decisions and hard-won transformations. Loneliness creeps here. Joy dances here. Love lives here, too. Behind the stereotypes and myths, real people live. I hope that people who know prison's shadow find in these pages and in all of the hooks in The Think Outside the Cell Series a reflection of their own unique personal power, and that they are encouraged to tell their own stories. I hope, too, that through these stories and others like them, the larger society comes to appropriate what those who know these men, women, and families already see-their value and humanity. Book jacket.
A celebration of this anniversary milestone, featuring both new content and some of the most historic and iconic moments in NPR's first forty years on the air.
We've all heard that, "you learn more from failure than you do from success." Which means that all those hours spent watching crappy movies wasn't a waste of your precious and ever-dwindling life span; it was an education! And Better Living Through Bad Movies can show you how to extract the profound, life-affirming lessons from films like Battlefield Earth, Coyote Ugly, and Indecent Proposal. In over 50 hilarious reviews, the authors show how you can use the worst movies ever made to improve your sex life (it involves cardboard cutouts and clog dancing), Apocalypse-proof your home (using the following materials: John Travolta, Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone and more Kevin Costner), and win omnipotence and a Happy Meal by solving Satan's Junior Jumble. You will also discover how to forge a love that will last a lifetime (by dating the moribund), use films like Batman and Robin and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace as grief counseling, and conquer the world using common fruit bats and dry cleaning fluid. And most important of all, you'll learn Hollywood's Ultimate Secret: Why Beaches and Armageddon are actually the exact same movie.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.
