A novel that punches you in the heart: the powerful, unbearably moving and ultimately uplifting story of twin brothers, Jon and Eden, as they grow up and begin to understand what it is to be men, and what it takes to knit a fractured family back together. Shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards 2022 Shortlisted for the Mud Literary Award 2022 This is a story about love. Love for nine-year-old twins Jon and Eden Hardacre is simple. Their mum, the creek that they swim in, each other – this is the love that they trust, love as clear and pure as sunlight, as honey, as water. But then there's a terrible accident. And in its wake, they develop a desperation – a yearning – to outgrow tragedy. They get older, compete with each other, fall in love with the same girl, and begin to realise that their lives – and who they love – demand something more. Something deeper. Richer. Heart-hammeringly original, intense and deeply moving, We Were Not Men is a powerhouse novel about all the various faces that love shows us and how sometimes, distracted by life, ambition or attraction, we take it for granted until it's too late – or almost too late. An unforgettable novel about the difference between getting older and growing up, from an astonishing new and original voice, pulsing with grief, hope and love. It is a revelation. 'As the author says, there is a difference between growing older and growing up, and this distinction, this tension, is at the heart of his tender, powerful debut novel... superbly intense...heartfelt.' The Australian 'Sparse, unashamedly intimate ... affecting' Books+Publishing 'A gut-punching, soul-restoring exploration of brotherhood and human bonds that bend but do not break. You'll dive in at the deep end and you won't want to stop swimming in Campbell Mattinson's words.' Trent Dalton 'Mattinson charts the rough terrain of grief with a tender, huge-hearted story of rivalry and love.' Mark Brandi
Includes information on AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), Laurie Anderson, authenticity, back up singing, Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Black Arts movement, Black Like Me (Griffin), black masculinity, balck nationalism, Black Power movement, breakdancing, Diahann, Carroll, designatory terminology, femininity, Nikki Giovanni, Harlem Renaissance, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), homosexuality, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson, Jane Doe v. State of Louisana, Earvin (Magic) Johnson, Motown Record Corporation, MTV, pop music, racial classificaton, racial passing, rap (music), Alice Beatrice Jones Rhinelander case, Max Robinson, Room 222 (television), Run DMC, RuPaul, O.J. Simpson, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, etc.
As seen on the cover of New York Magazine, America's longest running advice columnist goes on the road to speak to women about hideous men and whether we need them. "Carroll's lively prose careens in constant pursuit of pleasure...indefatigably funny and full of life." –Lindsay Zoladz, The Ringer “Darkly humorous and deadly serious.” –Sibbie O'Sullivan, Washington Post “A compulsively interesting feminist memoir.” –Virginia Heffernan, Slate "Somehow hilarious, in the way that only E. Jean could have written it" –Leigh Haber, Oprah Magazine “Roving, curious, compassionate, whimsical.” –Megan Garber, The Atlantic When E. Jean Carroll—possibly the liveliest woman in the world and author of the “Ask E. Jean” advice column in Elle Magazine, realized that her eight million readers and question-writers all seemed to have one thing in common—problems caused by men—she hit the road. Crisscrossing the country with her blue-haired poodle, Lewis Carroll, E. Jean stopped in every town named after a woman between Eden, Vermont and Tallulah, Louisiana to ask women the crucial question: What Do We Need Men For? E. Jean gave her rollicking road trip a sly, stylish turn when she deepened the story, creating a list called “The Most Hideous Men of My Life,” and began to reflect on her own sometimes very dark history with the opposite sex. What advice would she have given to her past selves—as Miss Cheerleader USA and Miss Indiana University? Or as the fearless journalist, television host, and eventual advice columnist she became? E. Jean intertwines the stories of the fascinating people she meets on her road trip with her “horrible history with the male sex” (including mafia bosses, media titans, boyfriends, husbands, a serial killer, and a president), creating a decidedly dark yet hopeful, hilarious, and thrilling narrative. Her answer to the question What Do We Need Men For? will shock men and delight women.
A GRIPPING, FEARLESS EXPLORATION OF MASCULINITY The effects of traditionally defined masculinity have become one of the most prevalent social issues of our time. In this engaging and provocative new book, beloved actor, director, and social activist Justin Baldoni reflects on his own struggles with masculinity. With insight and honesty, he explores a range of difficult, sometimes uncomfortable topics including strength and vulnerability, relationships and marriage, body image, sex and sexuality, racial justice, gender equality, and fatherhood. Writing from experience, Justin invites us to move beyond the scripts we’ve learned since childhood and the roles we are expected to play. He challenges men to be brave enough to be vulnerable, to be strong enough to be sensitive, to be confident enough to listen. Encouraging men to dig deep within themselves, Justin helps us reimagine what it means to be man enough and in the process what it means to be human.
Are We Not Men? offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible, revealing the male body as a source of persistent difficulty for the Hebrew prophets. Drawing together key moments in prophetic embodiment, Graybill demonstrates that the prophetic body is a queer body, and its very instability makes possible new understandings of biblical masculinity. Prophecy disrupts the performance of masculinity and demands new ways of inhabiting the body and negotiating gender. Graybill explores prophetic masculinity through critical readings of a number of prophetic bodies, including Isaiah, Moses, Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. In addition to close readings of the biblical texts, this account engages with modern intertexts drawn from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and horror films: Isaiah meets the poetry of Anne Carson; Hosea is seen through the lens of possession films and feminist film theory; Jeremiah intersects with psychoanalytic discourses of hysteria; and Ezekiel encounters Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Graybill also offers a careful analysis of the body of Moses. Her methods highlight unexpected features of the biblical texts, and illuminate the peculiar intersections of masculinity, prophecy, and the body in and beyond the Hebrew Bible. This assembly of prophets, bodies, and readings makes clear that attending to prophecy and to prophetic masculinity is an important task for queer reading. Biblical prophecy engenders new forms of masculinity and embodiment; Are We Not Men'offers a valuable map of this still-uncharted terrain.
'...And then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.' Harriet TubmanIn five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life, to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth--and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own. Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue high education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity.
The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” (The Stranger). In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women. “In this series of personal but unsentimental essays, Solnit gives succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized.” —The New York Times “Essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “This slim book hums with power and wit.” —Boston Globe “Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Essential.” —Marketplace “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” —Salon
With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
"You cannot win without a workplace where women and men have equal opportunities, equal input, and equal power." —Dominic Barton, Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company On almost a daily basis, we read stories in the news about high-profile male leaders, CEOs, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs harassing and acting inappropriately toward the women with whom they work. Following such revelations, these men generally lose their jobs, and their companies lose valuable female talent, customers/clients, and their reputations. And, although we regularly hear stories about the "bro culture" that obstructs women's progress and creates hostile work environments for them, we haven't heard as much about the efforts of good men who want to change the in-office behavior of their teams and companies so that they and women they work with can realize their full potential and their businesses can thrive. This book teaches men and managers how to respond in these situations and how to lead by example. In WE: Men, Women, and the Decisive Formula for Winning at Work, Rania Anderson lends her guidance on this exact topic. Social mores have changed, and yet, well-intentioned managers simply don't always know what to do and what's appropriate and useful to actively recruit, retain, and advance more women into leadership. They want to be told how this can make a difference to them and how they can make a difference— this book shows you how to improve your own results and win in business: A new playbook to recruit and retain high-caliber women Take actions to work effectively, elevate and lead with women in the workplace Discover how traditional social roles exert a powerful pull on people of both genders and what to do about it. End confusion of male leaders In the #MeToo era when everyone else is focused on what’s wrong and what not to do, WE: Men, Women, and the Decisive Formula for Winning at Work, is about what’s going well and what you can do. Men who are front-line managers, middle managers, and senior managers have been sidelined and left out of efforts to achieve gender parity for too long. Now, these guys can get back in the game!
