Basketball player, Nancy Takahiro's life changes as her father and the mother of the All-State shooting guard move in together. Rivalry becomes intense friendship as the girls prepare to leave their inner-city neighborhood to face future that is no longer easily defined.
Two inner-city girls tackle love, basketball, high school graduation, and an uncertain future in this coming-of-age novel by the author of Wingshooters. The Necessary Hunger follows two basketball stars—Nancy Takahiro and Raina Webber—and several of their friends through their last year of high school. For some of them, their senior year will be full of glory, and the anticipation of college. For others, however, stranded in an inner-city Los Angeles neighborhood that promises little in the way of opportunity, it will mark not only the end of their time in school but also the end of their hope. As Nancy and Raina both prepare to leave the urban neighborhood that has nurtured them, they find themselves looking toward a future that is no longer easily defined. The Necessary Hunger is about families, friendship, racial identity, and young people who are nearing adulthood in a dangerous and challenging world. It is about sports as a means of salvation, about the nature of competition, and ultimately about the various kinds of love. Our reissue of The Necessary Hunger includes a new introduction by Lynell George, and a new afterword by Nina Revoyr. Praise for The Age of Hunger “A wholesome coming-of-age novel about two lesbian high-school basketball stars, Revoyr’s debut is a meditation on consuming passion and a reflection on lost opportunities.” —Publishers Weekly “A quietly intimate, vigorously honest, and uniquely American hoop dream: tough and tender, without a single false note.” —Kirkuks Reviews “The Necessary Hunger is absolutely pioneering: it may be the first work by an out, queer Asian American writer to be published out of a major press AND for that work to include a major queer Asian American lesbian courtship plot. The interracial dynamics and high school sporting plot all make for an engaging work, one well worthy of retaining in print forever!” —Asian American Literature Fans “[Revoyr’s] characters are diverse and full of vulnerabilities, passion, and drive, and it is commendable to see a gay, Asian-American, female athlete as the protagonist . . . All in all, the story is worth reading to experience the racial tensions and teenage gay love and angst in a city that is growing restless.” —The Eclectic Review
A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.
“In rich, evocative prose, Marion transports his readers back into the postapocalyptic parable he first brought to life—or death—in his brilliant debut Warm Bodies.” —Library Journal (starred review) “Refreshingly unique...I love this novella.” —LitStack The must-read prequel to the “highly original” (The Seattle Times) New York Times bestseller Warm Bodies—now a major motion picture—from the author whose genre-defying debut turned the classic horror story on its head. The end of the world didn’t happen overnight. After years of societal breakdowns, wars and quakes and rising tides, humanity was already near the edge. Then came a final blow no one could have expected: all the world’s corpses rising up to make more. Born into this bleak and bloody landscape, twelve-year-old Julie struggles to hold on to hope as she and her parents drive across the wastelands of America, a nightmarish road trip in search of a new home. Hungry, lost, and scared, sixteen-year-old Nora finds herself her brother’s sole guardian after her parents abandon them in the not-quite-empty ruins of Seattle. And in the darkness of a forest, a dead man opens his eyes. Who is he? What is he? With no clues beyond a red tie and the letter “R,” he must unravel the grim mystery of his existence—right after he learns how to think, how to walk, and how to satisfy the monster howling in his belly. The New Hunger is a crucial link between Warm Bodies and The Burning World, a glimpse into the past that sets the stage for an astonishing future.
'Irresistable.' Megan Abbott 'A gory, gorgeous feast of a book.' Kiran Millwood Hargrave 'This book is crazy. You have to read it.' Bon Appetit Dorothy Daniels has always had a voracious - and adventurous - appetite. From her idyllic farm-to-table childhood (homegrown tomatoes, thick slices of freshly baked bread) to the heights of her career as a food critic (white truffles washed down with Barolo straight from the bottle) Dorothy has never been shy about indulging her exquisite tastes - even when it lead to her plunging an ice pick into her lover's neck. There is something inside Dorothy that makes her different from everybody else. Something she's finally ready to confess. But beware: her story just might make you wonder how your lover would taste sautéed with shallots and mushrooms and deglazed with a little red wine. 'An unapologetic, rollicking satire of one woman's insatiable appetite.' Irish Times 'Thrilling and awful.' The Times 'One of the most uniquely fun and campily gory books in my recent memory.' New York Times 'Riotously funny and deliriously unhinged.' Refinery29 READERS ARE DEVOURING A CERTAIN HUNGER: 'Decadent, sleazy, visceral, disgusting. I can't believe this is a first novel.' 'If a female Hannibal starred in Orange is the New Black, it would give you a pretty good idea of what to expect from this novel. ... I could write pages about how much I loved this book but it would still not do it justice. Just read it!' 'This was everything I wanted from a book. Exciting, funny, gory, and most of all the absolutely exquisite writing.' 'I loved this book from beginning to end, it was dark, humorous and also made me a feel a little queasy in places!'
An eye-opening exploration of “book hunger”—the unmet need for books in underserved communities—and efforts to universalize access to print Worldwide, billions of people suffer from book hunger. For them, books are too few, too expensive, or do not even exist in their languages. Lea Shaver argues that this is an educational crisis: the most reliable predictor of children’s achievement is the size of their families’ book collections. This book highlights innovative nonprofit solutions to expand access to print. First Book, for example, offers diverse books to teachers at bargain prices. Imagination Library mails picture books to support early literacy in book deserts. Worldreader promotes mobile reading in developing countries by turning phones into digital libraries. Pratham Books creates open access stories that anyone may freely copy, adapt, and translate. Can such efforts expand to bring books to the next billion would-be readers? Shaver reveals the powerful roles of copyright law and licensing, and sounds the clarion call for readers to contribute their own talents to the fight against book hunger.
Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. —Winner of a 2004 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Award in Literature —Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award —Nominated for an Edgar Award The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel . . . But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page. —Los Angeles Times Jackie Ishida’s grandfather had a store in Watts where four boys were killed during the riots in 1965, a mystery she attempts to solve. —New York Times Book Review, included in “Where Noir Lives in the City of Angels” Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. A young Japanese-American woman, Jackie Ishida, is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his will, Jackie discovers that four black teenagers were killed in the store he ran during the Watts Riots of 1965—and that the murders were never solved or reported. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, she tries to piece together the story of the boys’ deaths. In the process, Jackie unearths the long-held secrets of her family’s history—and her own. Moving in and out of the past, from the shipping yards and internment camps of World War II; to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s; to the means streets of Watts in the 1960s; to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s, Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself. “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.
“If ever there was a book primed to show American children why families from other countries are often desperate to reach our shores, this is it.” —Booklist (starred review) “A timely reminder about conditions in our current world.” —The Horn Book “A worthy introduction to an important slice of history.” —Kirkus Reviews Through the eyes of twelve-year-old Lorraine this “moving personal story” (Booklist, starred review) from the award-winning author of Hidden and Hush gives insight and understanding into a little known part of history—the Irish potato famine. It is the autumn of 1846 in Ireland. Lorraine and her brother are waiting for the time to pick the potato crop on their family farm leased from an English landowner. But this year is different—the spuds are mushy and ruined. What will Lorraine and her family do? Then Lorraine meets Miss Susannah, the daughter of the wealthy English landowner who owns Lorraine’s family’s farm, and the girls form an unlikely friendship that they must keep a secret from everyone. Two different cultures come together in a deserted Irish meadow. And Lorraine has one question: how can she help her family survive? A little known part of history, the Irish potato famine altered history forever and caused a great immigration in the later part of the 1800s. Lorraine’s story is a heartbreaking and ultimately redemptive story of one girl’s strength and resolve to save herself and her family against all odds.
"Nothing less than astonishing..."—Booklist (starred review) From a renowned international journalist comes a galvanizing international bestseller about mankind's oldest, most persistent, and most brutal problem—world hunger. There are now over 800 million starving people in the world. An average of 25,000 men and women, and in particular children, perish from hunger every day. Yet we produce enough food to feed the entire human population one-and-a-half times over. So why is it that world hunger remains such a deadly problem? In this crucial and inspiring work, award-winning author Martín Caparrós travels the globe in search of an answer. His investigation brings him to Africa and the Indian subcontinent where he witnesses starvation first-hand; to Chicago where he documents the greed of corporate food distributors; and to Buenos Aires where he accompanies trash scavengers in search of something to eat. An international bestseller when it first appeared, this first-ever English language edition has been updated by Caparrós to consider whether conditions that have improved or worsened since the book's European publication. With its deep reflections and courageous journalism, Caparrós has created a powerful and empathic work that remains committed to ending humankind's longest ongoing crisis.