What do straight, married female revelers at an all-women's sex club in LA have in common with nomadic pastoralists in Namibia who bear children by men not their husbands? Like women worldwide, they crave sexual variety, novelty, and excitement. In ancient Greek tragedies, Netflix series, tabloids and pop songs, we've long portrayed such cheating women as dangerous and damaged. We love to hate women who are untrue. But who are they really? And why, in this age of female empowerment, do we continue to judge them so harshly? In Untrue, Wednesday Martin takes us on a bold, fascinating journey to reveal the unexpected evolutionary legacy and social realities that drive female faithlessness, while laying bare our motivations to contain women who step out. Blending accessible social science and interviews with sex researchers, anthropologists, and real women from all walks of life, Untrue will change the way you think about women and sex forever.
A National Indie Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year A New York Times Best Book of the Year An Amazon Best Book of the Year A Booklist Editors' Choice A BookPage Best Book of the Year A NECBA Windows & Mirrors Selection A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year A Today.com Best of the Year PRAISE "A modern masterpiece." —The New York Times Book Review "Supple, sparkling and original." —The Wall Street Journal "Mesmerizing." —TODAY.com "This book could change the world." —BookPage "Like nothing else you've read or ever will read." —Linda Sue Park "It hooks you right from the opening line." —NPR SEVEN STARRED REVIEWS ★ "A modern epic." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review ★ "A rare treasure of a book." —Publishers Weekly, starred review ★ "A story that soars." —The Bulletin, starred review ★ "At once beautiful and painful." —School Library Journal, starred review ★ "Raises the literary bar in children's lit." —Booklist, starred review ★ "Poignant and powerful." —Foreword Reviews, starred review ★ "One of the most extraordinary books of the year." —BookPage, starred review A sprawling, evocative, and groundbreaking autobiographical novel told in the unforgettable and hilarious voice of a young Iranian refugee. It is a powerfully layered novel that poses the questions: Who owns the truth? Who speaks it? Who believes it? "A patchwork story is the shame of the refugee," Nayeri writes early in the novel. In an Oklahoman middle school, Khosrou (whom everyone calls Daniel) stands in front of a skeptical audience of classmates, telling the tales of his family's history, stretching back years, decades, and centuries. At the core is Daniel's story of how they became refugees—starting with his mother's vocal embrace of Christianity in a country that made such a thing a capital offense, and continuing through their midnight flight from the secret police, bribing their way onto a plane-to-anywhere. Anywhere becomes the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy, and then finally asylum in the U.S. Implementing a distinct literary style and challenging western narrative structures, Nayeri deftly weaves through stories of the long and beautiful history of his family in Iran, adding a richness of ancient tales and Persian folklore. Like Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights in a hostile classroom, Daniel spins a tale to save his own life: to stake his claim to the truth. EVERYTHING SAD IS UNTRUE (a true story) is a tale of heartbreak and resilience and urges readers to speak their truth and be heard.
Borrowing its title from Oscar Wilde's essay "The Decay of Lying," this study engages questions of fraudulent authorship in the literary afterlife of Oscar Wilde. The unique cultural moment of Wilde's early-twentieth-century afterlife, Gregory Mackie argues, afforded a space for marginal and transgressive forms of literary production that, ironically enough, Wilde himself would have endorsed. Beautiful Untrue Things recovers the careers of several forgers who successfully inhabited the persona of the Victorian era's most infamous homosexual and arguably its most successful dramatist. More broadly, this study tells a larger story about Oscar Wilde's continued cultural impact at a moment when he had fallen out of favour with the literary establishment. It probes the activities of a series of eccentric and often outrageous figures who inhabited Oscar Wilde's much-mythologized authorial persona - in forging him, they effectively wrote as Wilde - in order to argue that literary forgery can be reimagined as a form of performance. But to forge Wilde and generate "beautiful untrue things" in his name is not only an exercise in role-playing - it is also crucially a form of imaginative world-making, resembling what we describe today as fan fiction.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Primates of Park Avenue, a bold, timely reconsideration of female infidelity that will upend everything you thought you knew about women and sex. What do straight, married female revelers at an all-women's sex club in LA have in common with nomadic pastoralists in Namibia who bear children by men not their husbands? Like women worldwide, they crave sexual variety, novelty, and excitement. In ancient Greek tragedies, Netflix series, tabloids and pop songs, we've long portrayed such cheating women as dangerous and damaged. We love to hate women who are untrue. But who are they really? And why, in this age of female empowerment, do we continue to judge them so harshly? In Untrue, feminist author and cultural critic Wednesday Martin takes us on a bold, fascinating journey to reveal the unexpected evolutionary legacy and social realities that drive female faithlessness, while laying bare our motivations to contain women who step out. Blending accessible social science and interviews with sex researchers, anthropologists, and real women from all walks of life, Untrue challenges our deepest assumptions about ourselves, monogamy, and the women we think we know. From recent data suggesting women may struggle more than men with sexual exclusivity to the revolutionary idea that females of many species evolved to be "promiscuous" to Martin's trenchant assertion that female sexual autonomy is the ultimate metric of gender equality, Untrue will change the way you think about women and sex forever.
In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright's desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved. Not Untrue and Not Unkind is Owen's story - a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa's wars. It is an astonishingly powerful and accomplished debut that immediately establishes Ed O'Loughlin as a mature master of the novel form.
In The Untrue Story of You, Bryan Hubbard presents a powerful, groundbreaking theory explaining who we really are, how our relationship to our past affects us and how we can finally find true healing. In the pages of this book, you will discover that 'you' are actually made up of Three Selves, or time-bodies – past, present and potential - and that these three distinct entities send out energetic pulses, or waves, that interact to create your experience of life. As you move through life, experiences you never fully understood from your past begin to weigh you down, causing you to respond in the present with anxiety and fear without knowing why. As this pattern repeats itself, it can drag you into depression or addictive behaviours that are seemingly out of your control. Sharing his own moving story of overcoming the painful experiences of his childhood, Bryan teaches you how to heal the negative patterns you have created in your life, and, through a 21-day programme, become the real 'you' – the child you once were who could see the world as it really is, an unfolding miracle in the present moment.
A twisting tale of a girl who would rather be anyone but herself, fi nds herself trapped in a world without feeling. So afraid of being betrayed, so afraid of trusting she refuses to let anyone see the real her and because of this fear her inner world threatens to envelope her forever. Yet will this world of distrust she has built turn on her? About one girls struggle to find herself in a world of money, betrayal, distrust and beauty before honesty. A coming of age novel, that takes you on the journey of Victoria Ramano, an actress on the stage of life with an intelligence for seduction. Victoria is sent to a boarding school in London, England away from the city she knows and any attachment to the world that she has left. Will she be able to let her true colors out in this posh school of pretenders? Victoria develops an obsession with an older boy who is a bit less than a boyfriend but more than a crush. She finds herself at a cross road of whether to keep up the facade that comforts her or finally step out of the ‘shell of lies’ she’s made, risking rejection, betrayal and social suicide. Will Victoria’s new obsession Mark a popular foot ball player save her or will she be plunged even deeper in to her lies and deception?
