Summer 2018

Spring/Karl Ove Knausgaard

How to Change Your Mind/Michael Pollan

Sh*tshow!/Charlie Leduff

There Are No Grown-ups/Pamela Druckerman

The Dante Chamber/Matthew Pearl

Frenemies/Ken Auletta

The Secret Life of Cows/Rosamund Young

An Excellent Choice/Emma Brockes

My Year of Rest and Relaxation/Ottessa Moshfegh

The Omega Principle/Paul Greenberg

The Coddling of the American Mind/Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

Killing It/Camas Davis

A Short Film About Disappointment/Joshua Mattson

The Cut Out Girl/Bart van Es

A Life of My Own/Claire Tomalin

Summer 2018

SPR I NGK A R L O V E K N A U S G A A R D

isbn: 9780399563362price: $27.00

on sale date: 5/8/2019

You don’t know what air is, and yet you breathe. You don’t know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don’t know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don’t know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.

So begins Spring , the recommencement of Knausgaard’s fantastic and spellbinding literary project of assembling a personal encyclopedia of the world addressed directly to his now newly-born daughter. But here Knausgaard must also tell his daughter the story of the what

happened during the time when her mother was pregnant, and explain why he now has to attend appointments with child services. In order to keep his daughter safe, he must tell a terrible story, one which unfolds with acute psychological suspense over the course of a single day.

Utterly gripping, and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard’s famously sensitive, pensive, and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma, and the emotional epicenter of this singular literary series.

An emotionally intense stand-alone novel from a literary grandmaster, Spring follows the previous two volumes in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s four seasons series

K A R L OV E K N AU S G A A R D’s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize and his second, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family, the first of the My Struggle cycle of novels, was awarded the prestigious Brage Award. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.©

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SPR I NGK A R L O V E K N A U S G A A R D

isbn: 9781594204227price: $28.00

on sale: 5/15/2018

HOW TO C H A NGE YOU R M I N D M I C H A E L P O L L A N

When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into the experience of various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs

from the myths that have surrounded them since the Sixties, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research.

A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan’s “mental travelogue” is not just psychedelic drugs, but the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both struggle and beauty, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.

A brilliant and brave investigation by Michael Pollan, author of five New York Times best sellers, into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs—and the spellbinding story of

his own life-changing psychedelic experiences

M I C H A E L P O L L A N is the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

HOW TO C H A NGE YOU R M I N D

M I C H A E L P O L L A N

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SH* TSHOW ! C H A R L I E L E D U F F

isbn: 9780399563331price: $27.00

on sale: 5/22/2018

In the Fall of 2013, long before any sane person had seriously considered the possibility of a Trump presidency, Charlie LeDuff sat in the office of then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and made a simple but prophetic claim: The American people were at breaking point. The country was going broke and on high boil. No one in the bubbles of Washington, DC., New York, or Los Angles was talking about it--least of all the media. LeDuff wanted to go to the heart of the country to report what was really going on. Ailes baulked. Could the hard-living and straight-shooting LeDuff be controlled? But, then, perhaps on a whim, he agreed. And so LeDuff set out to record a TV series called, “The Americans,” and, along the way, ended up bearing witness to the ever-quickening unraveling of The American Dream.

For three years, LeDuff travelled the width and breadth of the country with his team of production irregulars, ending up on the Mexican border crossing the Rio Grande on a yellow rubber kayak alongside undocumented immigrants; in the middle of Ferguson as the city burned; and watching the children of Flint get sick from

undrinkable water. Racial, political, social, and economic tensions were escalating by the day. The inexorable effects of technological change and globalization were being felt more and more acutely, at the same time as wages stagnated and the price of housing, education, and healthcare went through the roof. The American people felt defeated and abandoned by their politicians, and those politicians seemed incapable of rising to the occasion. The old way of life was slipping away, replaced only by social media, part-time work, and opioid addiction.

Sh*tshow is that true, tragic, and distinctively American story, told from the parts of the country hurting the most. A soul-baring, irreverent, and iconoclastic writer, LeDuff speaks the language of everyday Americans, and is unafraid of getting his hands dirty. He scrambles the tired-old political, social, and racial categories, taking no sides--or prisoners. Old-school, gonzo-style reporting, this is both a necessary confrontation with the darkest parts of the American psyche and a desperately-needed reminder of the country’s best instincts.

CHARLIE LEDUFF is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, formerly at the New York Times and the Detroit News, and Detroit’s Fox 2 News. The author of Detroit, US Guys, and Work and Other Sins, he lives near Detroit.

A daring, firsthand, and utterly-unscripted account of crisis in America, from Ferguson to Flint to Cliven Bundy’s ranch to Donald Trump’s unstoppable

campaign for President—at every turn, Pulitzer-prize winner and bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie LeDuff was there

SH* TSHOW ! C H A R L I E L E D U F F

isbn: 9781594206375price: $27.00

on sale: 5/29/2018

T H E R E A R E NO GROW N-U PS

PA M E L A D R U C K E R M A N

When Pamela Druckerman turns 40, waiters start calling her “Madame,” and she detects a disturbing new message in mens’ gazes: I would sleep with her, but only if doing so required no effort whatsoever.

Yet forty isn’t even technically middle-aged anymore. And after a lifetime of being clueless, Druckerman can finally grasp the subtext of con-versations, maintain (somewhat) healthy relation-ships and spot narcissists before they ruin her life.

What are the modern forties, and what do we know once we reach them? What makes someone a “grown-up” anyway? And why didn’t anyone warn us that we’d get cellulite on our arms? Part frank memoir, part hilarious investigation of daily life, There Are No Grown-Ups diagnoses the in-between decade when...

• Everyone you meet looks a little bit familiar. • You’re matter-of-fact about chin hair. • You can no longer wear anything ironically.

• There’s at least one sport your doctor forbids you to play.

• You become impatient while scrolling down to your year of birth.

• Your parents have stopped trying to change you.

• You don’t want to be with the cool people anymore; you want to be with your people.

• You realize that everyone is winging it, some just do it more confidently.

• You know that it’s ok if you don’t like jazz.

Internationally best-selling author and New York Times contributor Pamela Druckerman leads us on a quest for wisdom, self-knowledge and the right pair of pants. A witty dispatch from the front lines of the forties, There Are No Grown-ups is a (midlife) coming-of-age story, and a book for anyone trying to find their place in the world.

The best-selling author of Bringing Up Bébé investigates life in her forties, and wonders whether her mind will ever catch up with her face.

PAMELA DRUCKERMAN is the author of four books including Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, which has been translated into 27 languages. She’s also a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.

T H E R E A R E NO GROW N-U PS

PA M E L A D R U C K E R M A N

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T H E DA N T E C H A M BE RM AT T H E W P E A R L

isbn: 9781594204937price: $28.00

on sale: 6/5/2018

The year is 1870. Five years after a series of Dante-inspired killings disrupted Boston, a man is found murdered in the public gardens of London with an enormous stone around his neck etched with a verse from the Divine Comedy . When more mysterious murders erupt across the city, all in the style of the punishments Dante memorialized in Purgatory, poet Christina Rossetti fears her brother, the Dante-obsessed artist and writer Gabriel Rossetti, will be the next victim.

Christina enlists poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and famous scholar Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, to assist in deciphering the literary clues. Together these unlikely investigators rush to unravel the secrets of Dante’s verses in

order to find Gabriel and stop the killings. Racing between the shimmering mansions of the elite and the dark corners of London’s underworld, they descend further and further into the mystery. But when the true inspiration behind the gruesome murders is finally revealed, Christina realizes that the perpetrator has even bigger and more horrific plans than she had initially thought.

A dazzling tale of intrigue from the writer Library Journal calls “the reigning king of popular literary historical thrillers,” The Dante Chamber is a riveting adventure across London and through Dante. Expertly blending fact and fiction, Pearl gives us a historical mystery like no other, captivating and enthralling until the last page.

M AT T H E W P E A R L is the award-winning and bestselling author of the novels The Last Bookaneer, The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens, and The Technologists. His books have been New York Times bestsellers and international bestsellers, and have been translated into more than 30 languages. His nonfiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and Slate.com. He has been heard on shows including NPR’s All Things Considered and Weekend Edition Sunday, and his books have been featured on Good Morning America and CBS Sunday Morning.

From Mathew Pearl, the bestselling author of The Dante Club, a masterful tale of literature, obsession, and murder

T H E DA N T E C H A M BE RM AT T H E W P E A R L

F R E N E M I ESK E N A U L E T TA

isbn: 9780735220867price: $30.00

on sale: 6/5/2018

Advertising and marketing touches on every corner of our lives, and is the invisible fuel powering almost all media. Complain about it though we might, without it the world would be a darker place. And of all the industries wracked by change in the digital age, few have been turned on its head as dramatically as this one has. We are a long way from the days of Don Draper; as Mad Men is turned into Math Men (and women—though too few), as an instinctual art is transformed into a science, the old lions and their kingdoms are feeling real fear, however bravely they might roar.

Frenemies is Ken Auletta’s reckoning with an industry under existential assault. He enters the rooms of the ad world’s most important players, some of them business partners, some adversaries, many “frenemies,” a term whose ubiquitous use in this industry reveals the level of anxiety, as former allies become competitors, and accusations of kickbacks and corruption swirl. We meet the old guard, including Sir Martin Sorrell, the legendary head of WPP, the world’s largest ad agency holding company; while others play nice with Facebook and Google, he rants, some say Lear-like, out on the heath. There is Irwin Gotlieb, maestro of the

media agency GroupM, the most powerful media agency, but like all media agencies it is staring into the headlights as ad buying is more and more done by machine in the age of Oracle and IBM. We see the world from the vantage of its new powers, like Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s head of Sales, and other brash and scrappy creatives who are driving change, as millennials and others who disdain ads as an interruption employ technology to zap them. We also peer into the future, looking at what is replacing traditional advertising. And throughout we follow the industry’s peerless matchmaker, Michael Kassan, whose company, MediaLink, connects all these players together, serving as the industry’s foremost power broker, a position which feasts on times of fear and change.

Frenemies is essential reading, not simply because of what it says about this world, but because of the potential consequences: the survival of media as we know it depends on the money generated by advertising and marketing—revenue that is in peril in the face of technological changes and the fraying trust between the industry’s key players.

K E N AU L E T TA has written the “Annals of Communications” column and profiles for The New Yorker since 1992. He is the author of eleven books, including Three Blind Mice, Greed and Glory on Wall Street, World War 3.0, and Googled. In naming him America’s premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review said, “No other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta.” He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

An intimate and profound reckoning with the changes buffeting the $2 trillion global advertising and marketing business from the perspective

of its most powerful players, by the bestselling author of Googled

F R E N E M I ESK E N A U L E T TA

isbn: 9780525557319price: $23.00

on sale: 6/12/2018

T H E SEC R ET L I F E OF COWS

R O S A M U N D YO U N G

At her famous Kite’s Nest Farm in Worcestershire, England, the cows (as well as sheep, hens, and pigs) all roam free. They make their own choices about rearing, grazing, and housing. Left to be themselves, the cows exhibit temperaments and interests as diverse as our own. “Fat Hat” prefers men to women; “Chippy Minton” refuses to sleep with muddy legs and always reports to the barn for grooming before bed; “Jake” has a thing for sniffing the carbon monoxide fumes of the Land Rover exhaust pipe; and “Gemima” greets all humans with an angry shake of the head and is fiercely independent.

An organic farmer for decades, Young has an unaffected and homely voice. Her prose brims with genuine devotion to the wellbeing of animals.

Most of us never apprehend the various inner lives animals possess, least of all those that we might eat. But Young has spent countless hours observing how these creatures love, play games, and form life-long friendships. She imparts hard-won wisdom about the both moral and real-world benefits of organic farming. (If preserving the dignity of animals isn’t a good enough reason for you, consider how badly factory farming stunts the growth of animals, producing unhealthy and tasteless food.)

This gorgeously-illustrated book, which includes an original introduction by the legendary British playwright Alan Bennett, is the summation of a life’s work, and a delightful and moving tribute to the deep richness of animal sentience.

Kite’s Nest Farm is on the edge of The Cotswold escarpment. It is run by ROSAMUND YOUNG, her brother Richard, and her partner Gareth. Nature is left to itself as much as possible and the animals receive exceptional kindness and consideration. Kite’s Nest Farm produces beef and lamb from 100% grass-fed animals which are butchered and sold in the farm shop.

In this affectionate, heart-warming chronicle, Rosamund Young distills a lifetime of organic farming wisdom, describing

the surprising personalities of her cows and other animals

T H E SEC R ET L I F E OF COWS

R O S A M U N D YO U N G

isbn: 9781594206634 price: $27.00

on sale: 6/26/2018

A N E XC E L L E N T C HOIC EE M M A B R O C K E S

When British journalist, memoirist, and New York-transplant Emma Brockes decides to become pregnant, she quickly realizes that, being single, 37, and in the early stages of a same-sex relationship, she’s going to have to be untraditional about it. From the moment she decides to stop “futzing” around, have her eggs counted, and “get cracking”; through multiple trials of IUI, which she is intrigued to learn can be purchased in bulk packages, just like Costco; to the births of her twins, which her girlfriend gamely documents with her iPhone and selfie-stick, Brockes is never any less than bluntly and bracingly honest about her extraordinary journey to motherhood.

She quizzes her friends on the pros and cons of personally knowing one’s sperm donor, grapples with esoteric medical jargon and the existential brain-melt of flipping through donor catalogues and conjures with the politics of her Libertarian

OB/GYN—all the while exploring the cultural circumstances and choices that have brought her to this point. Brockes writes with charming self-effacing humor about being a British woman undergoing fertility treatment in the US, poking fun at the starkly different attitude of Americans. Anxious that biological children might not be possible, she wonders, should she resent society for how it regards and treats women who try and fail to have children?

Brockes deftly uses her own story to examine how and why an increasing number of women are using fertility treatments in order to become parents—and are doing it solo. Bringing the reader every step of the way with mordant wit and remarkable candor, Brockes shares the frustrations, embarrassments, surprises, and, finally, joys of her momentous and excellent choice.

E M M A B RO C K E S is the author of She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me.She writes for The Guardian’s Weekend magazine and has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Economist and Vogue. She is the winner of two British Press Awards—Young Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year—and while at Oxford won the Philip Geddes Memorial Prize for Journalism. She lives in New York.

From the author of She Left Me The Gun, an explosive and hilarious memoir about the exceptional and life-changing decision

to conceive a child on one’s own via assisted reproduction

A N E XC E L L E N T C HOIC EE M M A B R O C K E S

M Y Y E A R OF R EST A N D R E L A X AT ION

OT T E S S A M O S H F E G H

isbn: 9780525522119price: $26.00

on sale: 7/10/2018

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.

OT T E S S A M O S H F E G H is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award.

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists

in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes

M Y Y E A R OF R EST A N D R E L A X AT ION

OT T E S S A M O S H F E G H

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isbn: 9781594206344price: $27.00

on sale: 7/10/2018

T H E OM EG A PR I NC I PL EPA U L G R E E N B E R G

Omega-3 fatty acids have long been celebrated by doctors and dieticians as key to a healthy heart and a sharper brain. In the last few decades, that promise has been encapsulated in one of America’s most popular dietary supplements. Omega-3s are today a multi-billion dollar business, and sales are still growing apace--even as recent medical studies caution that the promise of omega-3s may not be what it first appeared.

But a closer look at the omega-3 sensation reveals something much deeper and more troubling. The miracle pill is only the latest product of the reduction industry, a vast, global endeavor that over the last century has boiled down trillions of pounds of marine life into animal feed, fertilizer, margarine, and dietary supplements. The creatures that are the victims of that industry seem insignificant to the untrained eye, but turn out to be essential to the survival of whales, penguins, and fish of all kinds, including many that we love to eat.

Behind these tiny molecules is a big story:

of the push-and-pull of science and business; of the fate of our oceans in a human-dominated age; of the explosion of land food at the expense of healthier and more sustainable seafood; of the human quest for health and long life at all costs. James Beard Award-winning author Paul Greenberg probes the rich and surprising history of omega-3s--from the dawn of complex life, when these compounds were first formed; to human prehistory, when the discovery of seafood may have produced major cognitive leaps for our species; and on to the modern era, when omega-3s may point the way to a bold new direction for our food system. With wit and boundless curiosity, Greenberg brings us along on his travels--from Peru to Antarctica, from the Canary Islands to the Amalfi Coast--to reveal firsthand the practice and repercussions of our unbalanced way of eating.

Rigorously reported and winningly told, The Omega Principle is a powerful argument for a more deliberate and forward-thinking relationship to the food we eat and the oceans that sustain us.

PAU L G R E E N B E R G is the author of the James Beard Award-winning Four Fish and American Catch and a regular contributor to The New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, and GQ, among other publications, and he has lectured widely on ocean issues at institutions ranging from Google to Yale to the U.S. Senate. He lives in New York.

By the bestselling author of Four Fish and American Catch, an eye-opening investigation of the history, science, and business

behind omega-3 fatty acids, the “miracle compound” whose story is intertwined with human health and the future of our planet

T H E OM EG A PR I NC I PL EPA U L G R E E N B E R G

isbn: 9780735224896price: $28.00

on sale: 7/17/2018

T H E CODDL I NG OF T H E A M E R IC A N M I N D

G R E G L U K I A N O F F & J O N AT H A N H A I D T

The generation now coming of age has been taught three Great Untruths: their feelings are always right; they should avoid pain and discomfort; and they should look for faults in others and not themselves. These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility. The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations.

This is a book about how we got here. First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt take us on a tour of the social trends stretching back to the 1980s that have produced the confusion and conflict on

campus today, including the loss of unsupervised play time and the birth of social media, all during a time of rising political polarization.

This is a book about how to fix the mess. The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life, with devastating consequences for them, for their parents, for the companies that will soon hire them, and for a democracy that is already pushed to the brink of violence over its growing political divisions. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity.

This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.

GREG LUKIANOFF is an attorney and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. His writings on campus free speech have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, in addition to dozens of other publications. A regular columnist for the Huffington Post, he is a frequent guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and has made numerous television appearances, including on the CBS Evening News and Stossel. He received the 2008 Playboy Foundation Freedom of Expression Award and the 2010 Ford Hall Forum’s Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE. Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School.

J O N AT H A N H A I D T is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He obtained his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and then taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis. He lives in New York City.

A timely investigation into the campus assault on free speech and what it means for students, education, and our democracy.

T H E CODDL I NG OF T H E A M E R IC A N M I N D

G R E G L U K I A N O F F & J O N AT H A N H A I D T

K I L L I NG I TC A M A S D AV I S

isbn: 9781101980071price: $27.00

on sale: 7/24/18

Camas Davis was at an unhappy crossroads, to say the least. A longtime magazine writer and editor in the food world, she’d returned to her home state of Oregon with her boyfriend from New York City to take an appealing job at a smart Portland lifestyle magazine. But neither job nor boyfriend delivered on the dream, and before she knew what hit her, Davis was unemployed, on her own, with nothing to fall back on. What she did know was that she was sick of being in the business of mediating other people’s experiences. She didn’t want to write about the real thing any longer; she wanted to be the real thing.

A child of the country, Camas grew up hunting and fishing, and she found in her Portland foodie world that her core self connected deeply with animals and food. But she had moral and philosophical questions about the ethics of meat-eating, and where food fits in a larger environmental framework. She knew just enough to know what she didn’t know and wanted to learn. So when a friend told her about an American woman in Gascony, France who ran a sort of

communal cooking school and took in strays in exchange for odd work, it sounded like just what the doctor ordered. Her new teacher offered her entree to a nearby family of French butchers, the Chapolard brothers, who were willing to take her under their wing and induct her in their way of life, which prizes pleasure, compassion, community, and authenticity. So when she found a forgotten credit card that had just enough credit on it to buy a plane ticket, she took it as kismet.

So begins Camas Davis’s funny, heartfelt, searching memoir of her journey to becoming a successful and enlightened butcher, of all things. It’s a story that takes her from an eye-opening stint in a rural France where deep artisanal craft thrives despite the rise of mass scale agribusiness, back to a Portland in the throes of a food revolution, where it suddenly seems possible to translate much of this old-world craft into a new world setting. The journey is not without its heartaches and fiascos, but in the end it amounts to a triumphant story of figuring out what being the real thing means to you and carving out a path until you get it.

C A M A S DAV I S is a former editor and writer for magazines including Saveur and National Geographic Adventure. In 2009, she traveled to southwest France to study whole animal butchery and charcuterie and subsequently founded the Portland Meat Collective, a transparent, hands-on meat school that has become a local and national resource for meat education and reform. In 2014, Camas launched the Meat Collective Alliance (MCA), a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring responsible meat production and consumption through experiential education across the country. Camas and the Portland Meat Collective have been covered in media outlets such as the New York Times Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, and Dark Rye.

The story of a wayward young woman’s transformation from knowing magazine journalist to humble butcher, in the process

discovering what it means to take life into her own hands

K I L L I NG I TC A M A S D AV I S

isbn: 9780525522843price: $25.00

on sale: 8/7/2018

A SHORT F I L M A BOU T DISA PPOI N T M E N T

J O S H U A M AT T S O N

In near-future America, film critic Noah Body uploads his reviews to an underread content aggregator. His job is dreary routine: watch, seethe, pan. He dreams of making his own film, free of the hackery of commercial cinema. Faced with writing on lousy movies for a website that no one reads, Noah smuggles into his reviews depictions of his troubled life on the margins.

Amid his movie reviews, we learn that his apartment in the vintage slum of Miniature Aleppo has been stripped of furniture after his wife ran off with his best friend--who Noah believes has possessed his body. He’s in the middle of an escalating grudge match against a vending machine tycoon with a penchant for violence. And

he’s infatuated with a doctor who has diagnosed him with a “disease of thought.” Exhausted by days spent watching flicks featuring monks with a passion for rock and roll and slashers featuring rampaging hairdressers, Noah is determined to create his own masterpiece: a filmed meditation on art-with-a-capital-A, written by, directed by, and starring himself.

Set in a wildly imaginative and uncannily familiar world of nanny states and extreme rationing, Safe Zones and New Koreas, A Short Film About Disappointment is an uproarious story of trying to keep it together in turbulent times. Joshua Mattson is a debut novelist with a rotten wit and the creative vision of a hyperactive child.

J O S H UA M AT T S O N has worked as a short-order cook, baker, chef, and organization manager for various restaurants and food businesses in the Twin Cities. He has cooked for the Queen of Spain, several television stars, and the mother of Justin Bieber.

An ingenious novel about art and revenge, insisting on your dreams and hitting on your doctor, told in the form of 80 movie reviews

A SHORT F I L M A BOU T DISA PPOI N T M E N T

J O S H U A M AT T S O N

isbn: 9780735222243price: $28.00

on sale: 8/14/2018

T H E C U T OU T GI R LBART VAN ES

Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: a young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents, who understood the danger they were in all too well. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, there was a falling out, and they were no longer in touch. What was the girl’s side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war, and after?

So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es’s life, and change it. After some sleuthing, he learned that Lientje was now in her 80s and living in Amsterdam. Somewhat reluctantly, she agreed to meet him, and eventually they struck up a remarkable friendship, even a partnership. The Cut Out Girl braids together a powerful recreation of that intensely harrowing childhood story of Lientje’s with the present-day account of Bart’s efforts to piece that story together, including bringing some old ghosts back into the light.

It is a story rich with contradictions. There is great bravery and generosity--first Lientje’s parents, giving up their beloved daughter, and then the Dutch families who face great danger from the

Nazi occupation for taking Lientje and other Jewish children in. And there are more mundane sacrifices a family under brutal occupation must make to provide for even the family they already have. But tidy Holland also must face a darker truth, namely that it was more cooperative in rounding up its Jews for the Nazis than any other Western European country; that is part of Lientje’s story too. Her time in hiding was made much more terrifying by the energetic efforts of the local Dutch authorities, zealous accomplices in the mission of sending every Jew, man, woman and child, East to their extermination. And Lientje was not always particularly well treated, and sometimes, Bart learned, she was very badly treated indeed.

The Cut Out Girl is an astonishment, a deeply moving reckoning with a young girl’s struggle for survival during war, a story about the powerful love of foster families but also the powerful challenges, and about the ways our most painful experiences define us but also can be redefined, on a more honest level, even many years after the fact. A triumph of subtlety, decency and unflinching observation, The Cut Out Girl is a triumphant marriage of many keys of writing, ultimately blending them into an extraordinary new harmony, and a deeper truth.

B A RT VA N E S is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine’s College. He is the author of Spenser’s Forms of History, Shakespeare in Company, and Shakespeare’s Comedies. He was born in the Netherlands and now lives with his family in England.

The extraordinary true story of a young Jewish girl in Holland under Nazi occupation who finds refuge in the homes of an underground network of foster families, one of them the author’s grandparents

T H E C U T OU T GI R LBART VAN ES

isbn: 9780399562914price: $27.00

on sale: 8/21/2018

A L I F E OF M Y OW N C L A I R E TO M A L I N

In A Life of My Own, the renowned biographer of Charles Dickens, Samuel Pepys, and Thomas Hardy, and former literary editor for the Sunday Times reflects on a remarkable life surrounded by writers and books. From discovering books as a form of escapism during her parents’ difficult divorce, to pursuing poetry at Cambridge, where she meets and marries Nicholas Tomalin, the ambitious and striving journalist, Tomalin always steered herself towards a passionate involvement with art. She relives the glittering London literary scene of the 1960s, during which Tomalin endured her husband’s constant philandering and numerous affairs, and revisits the satisfaction of being commissioned to write her first book, a biography of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In biography, she found her vocation. However, when Nick is killed in 1973 while reporting in Israel, the mother of four put aside her writing to assume the position of literary editor of the New Statesman. Her

career soared when she later moved to the Sunday Times, and she tells with dazzling candor of this time in her life spent working alongside the literary lights of 1970s London. But, the pain of her young daughter’s suicide and the challenges of caring for her disabled son as a single mother test Claire’s strength and persistence. It is not until later in life that she is able to return to what gave her such purpose decades ago, writing biographies, and finds enduring love with her now-husband, playwright Michael Frayn.

Marked by honesty, humility, and grace, rendered in the most elegant of prose, A Life of My Own is a portrait of a life, replete with joy and heartbreak. With quiet insight and unsparing clarity, Tomalin writes autobiography at its most luminous, delivering an astonishing and emotionally-taut masterpiece distinguished by the deep and hard-won wisdom of devastating loss but even more extraordinary love.

C L A I R E T O M A L I N is the author of eight highly acclaimed biographies, including Thomas Hardy and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which won the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. She has previously won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Whitbread Biography Award. Educated at Cambridge University, she served as literary editor of the New Statesman and The Sunday Times. Claire Tomalin lives in London and is married to the playwright Michael Frayn.

Esteemed biographer and legendary literary editor Claire Tomalin’s stunning memoir of a life in literature

A L I F E OF M Y OW N C L A I R E TO M A L I N