ODY New Books Collection

The Writer's
Room

"Virginia Woolf famously wrote in A Room of One's Own that "it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry." Writers have worked in all kinds of places, from garrets and sheds to boarding houses, bathrooms, and even while on the move. What is it that fascinates us about the writer's room? This book takes readers inside literature's creative spaces to explore this tantalizing question. Beginning with her own secondhand writing desk, Katie da Cunha Lewin invites us to consider how these environments embody the craft of writing and shape the literary works we love. She paints vivid portraits of Woolf's garden room at Monk's House, Emily Brontë's shared table in the parsonage, Sigmund Freud's study with its legendary couch, and the bustling Parisian cafés where Ernest Hemingway crafted stories in notebooks. She dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer's room to cast it in a surprising new light, from the hotel rooms where Maya Angelou wrote poetry to the busses where Lauren Elkin wrote on her phone to the kitchen tables around which Audre Lorde and the founders of Women of Color Press convened. Lyrical, insightful, and rich with personal insights, The Writer's Room reveals how these spaces are brimming with possibilities, shaping the creative process of authors and capturing the imaginations of readers."-- Provided by Publisher

World Cup Fever

In World Cup Fever, Simon Kuper explores the history and cultural impact of the FIFA World Cup through his personal experiences attending nine tournaments since 1990. The book traces the evolution of the World Cup from its inaugural event in 1930 in Montevideo to contemporary tournaments, highlighting changes in professionalism, globalization, media coverage, and the broader social, political, and economic contexts surrounding the games. Through a combination of reporting, historical analysis, and first-hand observation, Kuper examines how soccer reflects and influences cultural identity, national pride, and global connections.

Why I Am Not an Atheist

"Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author (and cradle Catholic) Christopher Beha gave up on God. Helped along by a reading of Bertrand Russell's classic text Why I Am Not a Christian, he became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him. A youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning in a godless world. Why I Am Not an Atheist tells the story of this search for secular answers to what Immanuel Kant called the most urgent human questions: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? Along the way, Beha traces the development of what he understands to be the two major atheist worldviews: scientific materialism and romantic idealism. Beha's passage through these rival forms of atheism leads him to the surprising conclusion that faith--particularly faith in a created order in which each human life has a meaningful part--preserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality. This magisterial investigation of the heights of human intellectual achievement is at once deeply personal and universal--grounded in decades of reading and thinking about the problems of suffering, mortality, and ultimate meaning. Why I Am Not an Atheist is not a polemic on behalf of belief but a record of Beha's long engagement with the enduring human questions, and a call for readers to take up these questions for themselves."-- Publisher's website

What Boys Learn

Over the course of a single weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in an affluent Chicago suburb. As the community responds to the deaths, Abby Rosso, a high school counselor at the girls' school, begins to question whether her son may have had undisclosed connections to them. Her concerns are shaped by her professional experience and by personal history, including a family member's past criminal conviction. As Abby investigates the circumstances surrounding the deaths, she reflects on patterns of behavior, memory, and responsibility, while confronting uncertainties about her own perceptions and decisions as a parent. What Boys Learn examines family dynamics, community response to violence, and the influence of gender and upbringing through a psychological lens.

Vigil

"Not for the first time, Jill 'Doll' Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this one, she soon discovers, isn't like the others. The powerful K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn't it? Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man's room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone's postdeath future. With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we've come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time--the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress--and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution." -- Provided by publisher

Two Women Living Together

This memoir, co-written by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, recounts their decision to live together as chosen family rather than romantic partners or traditional roommates. The authors explore the challenges and rewards of cohabiting in midlife, navigating independence, companionship, and societal expectations. Their story highlights themes of female friendship, interdependence, and redefining domestic life outside traditional norms.

To Catch a Fascist

"A searing, provocative investigation into the rise of white nationalist and neo-Nazi movements in the United States, centered on the anti-fascist groups working to expose and stop these hateful factions. Demonized as "extremist" by conservatives and liberals alike, "antifa" became a bogeyman during Donald Trump's first term. But few Americans understood the dangerous work antifa was doing to disrupt and unmask a new generation of white supremacists or listened when antifa sounded the alarm about these white supremacists taking positions of power. Now this underground network of militant anti-fascists is determined to stop the rising tide of fascism in America. No matter the cost. In the tradition of in-the-room investigative classics such as The Smartest Guys in the Room and Bad Blood, To Catch a Fascist follows different factions of antifascists as they work to unmask hateful extremists before they commit devastating acts of violence. With searing detail and exclusive reporting, To Catch a Fascist paints a vivid picture of the stakes in this ongoing, often unseen war between opposite ends of the political spectrum, highlighting the scrappy resourcefulness and resilience of anti-fascist movements against their increasingly violent adversaries. Utilizing razor-sharp storytelling and eye-opening insight, this timely and necessary book reveals the human cost, moral dilemmas, and unwavering determination involved in fighting white supremacy. Both a call to action and a pulse-raising look at the powerful work being done to combat today's gravest threat to democracy, To Catch a Fascist will inspire you to fight for your community."-- description from https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/To-Catch-a-Fascist/Christopher-Mathias/9781668034767, accessed 20260226

This Is Not about Us

"Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubenstein family, it could go either way. When their beloved older sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into decades of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives-divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals--their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible. With This is Not About Us, master storyteller Allegra Goodman--whose prior collection was heralded as "one of the most astute and engaging books about American family life" (The Boston Globe)--returns to the form and subject that endeared her to legions of readers. Sharply observed and laced with humor, This is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters. A big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations."-- Provided by publisher

Starry and Restless

"She hid on a Red Cross boat to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. She walked the abandoned streets of Hong Kong to take food to her daughter's father, a prisoner of war. She fought off the advances of overzealous Yugoslavian diplomats, found overlooked details of world history in a dentist's kitchen in Sarajevo. She traveled alone to Mexico. She traveled alone to Congo. She traveled alone to the American South. She married Hemingway. She married a Chinese poet-playboy-publisher, then married a British war hero. She fell in love with H. G. Wells. She gave birth and raised a child on her own. She landed on the front page of the newspaper. She wrote for the great magazines of her time--Vogue, The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar. She wrote a play. She wrote a memoir. She wrote a genre-breaking travel narrative. She wrote bestsellers. She wrote and wrote and wrote. She changed the very way we think about writing and the way journalists craft stories--which sources are viable, which details are important--and the way women move and work in the world. She was Martha Gellhorn. She was Emily "Mickey" Hahn. She was Rebecca West. Each woman was starry-eyed for success, for adventure, and helped ensure that other starry and restless women could make unforgettable lives for themselves. They fought for their lives and their work. They were praised and criticized for it all."

Salvation

"Tom Horak has just murdered his best friend, Rust Hawkins. Morris Green, the town's Lutheran pastor, is experiencing a profound crisis of faith, questioning the very existence of God. And Marshal Thomlison, the local peace officer looking forward to retirement, is now thrown into the middle of a murder investigation. Following his violent act, Tom retreats to a cabin in the hills, remembering the events of his hardscrabble childhood--a rural upbringing on a ranch with a distant mother and abusive father. Rust Hawkins's son is taken in by Pastor Green, since the boy has nowhere else to go. Thomlison's murder investigation acts as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the various threads of this moving novel: What could cause a man to commit such a violent act? What does this isolated community owe to one another? Can Tom find the peace he is searching for, even with blood on his hands? Can Pastor Green discover enough faith in our human condition to help Rust's orphaned son, and can their growing bond perhaps offer the family life that each is sorely lacking?"-- Provided by publisher

The Renovation

"A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell--where she is an unlikely inmate--in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration."-- Provided by publisher

The Last Kings of Hollywood

"The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries -- Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg -- revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it. In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely-unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed twenty-year-old from a peripatetic Jewish family, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right. Within a year, the three men would become friends. Spielberg, prioritizing security, got his seven-year contract directing television. Lucas and Coppola, hungry for independence, left Hollywood for San Francisco to found an alternative studio, American Zoetrope, and make films without answering to corporate capitalism. Based on extensive research and hundreds of original interviews with the inner circle of these Hollywood icons, The Last Kings of Hollywood tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how, over the next fifteen years, the three filmmakers rivalled and supported each other, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema. Along the way, Coppola directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all-time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws--whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T. By the early 1980s, they were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, each with an empire of their own. The Last Kings of Hollywood is an unprecedented chronicle of their rise, their dreams and demons, their triumphs and their failures -- intimate, extraordinary, and supremely entertaining."-- Provided by publisher

Kin

"An unforgettable novel about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy."-- Provided by publisher

A Killing in Cannabis

"Santa Cruz is one of the country's surf meccas and a favored getaway of the Silicon Valley elite. For decades, marijuana has been cultivated, consumed, and trafficked in these mountains, one of the most important regions in the country for the crop. It's where Ken Kesey threw his wild parties, where back-to-the-land types came to live off the grid, and where Tushar Atre, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was found brutally murdered. Charismatic, ambitious, arrogant, and rich, Atre was the leader among a clutch of tech execs and venture capitalists with a voracious appetite for risk, work, and money, riding waves at dawn and then putting in fourteen-hour days. When he met Rachael Lynch, a maverick cannabis grower and mover of product, he had a vision of how their lives could come together in business and in love. Atre sought to disrupt the newly legal cannabis trade by funding a start-up with black-market capital. This illegal pursuit would entangle him with an array of colorful and dangerous characters, many of whom had compelling reasons to want him dead." -- Provided by publisher

The First Fascist

"With the Marquis de Morès's unique blend of oligarchic privilege and democratic populist appeal, this nineteenth-century figure (1858-1896) was the first populist, white supremacist, and openly anti-Semitic leader in the Western world. He embodies the archetype of today's strongmen. While the marquis is largely unknown today, his short, adventurous life anticipated and propelled cultural, social, and political changes that would dominate the twentieth century, and that are all too familiar to the present-day reader." -- Provided by publisher

Evil Genius

"It's 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be working at the phone company and to be married to her Drew, a man who says he loves her. Celia's contentment with her little life is shattered, though, when a woman she knows from work is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die for love--or to kill for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full awareness that each breath is bringing her closer to her last? Before Celia knows it, her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. Suddenly she's playing hooky from work and searching for a love tryst of her very own. She's practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range and thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband's ear. It's all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course. Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir exploring obsession and desire--and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life."-- Provided by publisher

Everything Is Photograph

"The first full biography of the innovative 'father of modern photography' vividly depicts his life and works, from Hungary to France and America, across the 20th century. Born in Budapest in 1894, André Kertész soared to star status in Jazz Age Paris, tumbled into poverty and obscurity in wartime New York, slogged through 14 years shooting for House & Garden, then improbably reemerged into the spotlight with a 1964 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. By the time of his death in 1985, he had exhibited around the world, taken more than 100,000 images, and steered the medium in new and vital directions: He was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica, the camera now mythically linked to street photography, and he pioneered subjective photojournalism, publishing what is arguably the world's first great photo essay. Drawing on dozens of interviews, previous scholarship, and deep archival research, and interrogating the images themselves, Patricia Albers retrieves aspects of Kertész's life that he and his pictures gloss over, among them the ordeals of trench warfare, the impact of the Holocaust, and the tale of his tangled romances. She takes Kertész from the Eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively Central European diaspora. From Condé Nast's postwar media empire to the 'photo boom' of the 1970s. She revisits Kertész's relationships with other photographers, among them his 'frenemy' Brassaï and protégé Robert Capa. She breathes life into a gentle, generous, and unassuming man endowed with Old-World charm but also sputtering with grievance and rage and inclined to indulge in deception. Everything Is Photograph immerses readers in the heyday of a now lost version of photography. Formally vigorous, emotionally rich, and aesthetically charged, Kertész's images speak of the medium as a tool for human connection, self-narration, self-invention, and inquiry about the world, even as they project its mysteries." -- Provided by publisher

Eradication

"A novel about a bereaved man alone on an island who's been tasked with killing its inhabitants." -- Provided by publisher

The End of Romance

Sylvie Broder, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, leaves an emotionally abusive marriage and develops a philosophy of separating pleasure from emotional attachment. As she navigates her personal and romantic life in graduate school, she encounters two men--Robbie and Abie--whose differing approaches challenge her beliefs and provoke questions about love, happiness, and commitment. The novel explores themes of personal growth, self-discovery, and modern relationships with humor and emotional depth.

End of Days

"On August 21, 1992, shots rang out while federal agents were surveilling a cabin in Boundary County, Idaho as part of an operation to arrest Randy Weaver--a reclusive, mountain-dwelling survivalist--for failure to appear in court on a gun charge. When Weaver finally surrendered to the authorities eleven days later, his wife, son, and dog lay dead, as did a US Marshal. Ever since, America has been trying to make sense of what happened on Ruby Ridge. Today, the question could not be more urgent, as the shock waves from Ruby Ridge have amplified and compounded, cracking the very foundations of our democracy. In End of Days, Chris Jennings explains the significance of this historic siege by setting the story of the Weaver family within the long history of apocalyptic Christianity in the United States, illuminating the ways in which that faith has gradually transformed the nation. The strain of doomsday Christianity that gripped the Weavers, he shows, was grounded in a particular reading of biblical prophecy that can be traced back to the 1870s and up through the twentieth-century rise of Christian fundamentalism to the right-wing conspiracism that now defines American society and politics. The events at Ruby Ridge acted as an accelerant for this spreading worldview, and are essential to understanding the crisis that our nation confronts today." -- Provided by publisher