ODY New Books Collection

Ecstasy

"In this dark horror reimagining of a Greek tragedy, a hedonistic cult leader teaches a new widow the true price of female freedom. Lena wants her life back. Her wealthy, controlling, humorless husband has just died, and now she contends with her controlling, humorless son, Drew. Lena lands in Athens with her best friend in tow for the unveiling of her son's, pet project-the luxurious Agape Villas. Years of marriage amongst the wealthy have whittled Lena's spirit into rope and sinew, smothered by tasteful cocktail dresses and unending small talk. In Athens she yearns to rediscover her true nature, remember the exuberant dancer and party girl she once was, but Drew tightens his grip, keeping her cloistered inside the cavernous, marble rooms of Agape, demanding that she fall in line. But Lena is intrigued by a group of women living in tents on the beach in front of the hotel. She can their music at night, hear them calling her to dance. Soon she'll find that an ancient God stirs here on the beach, and women are waking up all around the island, driving mother and son toward a monstrous, gory battle, where only one of them will make it out alive."-- Provided by publisher

King of Kings

"A stunningly revelatory narrative history of one of the most momentous events in modern times, the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government, and the dawn of the age of religious nationalism."-- Provided by publisher

Moderation

"A bold and inventive novel about real romance in the virtual workplace -- bringing Castillo's trademark wit and sharp cultural criticism to an irresistible story about the possible future of love. Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global pandemic, she's going places: she's getting a promotion. Now thanks to her parent company Paragon's purchase of Fairground -- the world's preeminent virtual reality content provider -- she's on the way to becoming an elite VR moderator, playing in the big leagues and, if her enthusiastic bosses are to be believed, moderating the next stage of human interaction. Despite the isolation that virtual reality requires from colleagues, friends, and family, the unbelievable perks of her new job mean she can solve a lot of her family's problems with money and mobility. She doesn't have to think about the childhood home they lost back in the Bay Area, or history at all -- she can just pay any debts that come due. But when she meets William Cheung, Playground's wry, reticent co-founder (now Chief Product Officer) and slowly unearths some of his secrets, and finds herself somehow falling in love, she'll learn that history might be impossible to moderate and the future utterly impossible to control."-- Provided by publisher

2024

"The definitive, inside story of the most tumultuous and consequential presidential campaign in our history "The whole world was against me, and I won," said Donald Trump in an exclusive interview, ten days before his second inauguration. Nearly four years after Trump's first turbulent presidency concluded in a violent attempt to overturn the election, he made a political comeback on a scale that stunned the nation. How did the first U.S. president to become a convicted felon regain control of the White House? And at what cost? In 2024, award-winning reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf bring us the definitive and explosive account of how Trump and his advisers overcame a dozen primary challengers, four indictments, two assassination attempts, and his own past mistakes to defeat the Democrats, and pave the way for a second term that would be far more aggressive and ruthless than the first. Drawing on extraordinary access to the Trump, Biden, and Harris teams, 2024 takes readers beyond the speeches, rallies, and debates to reveal the innermost workings of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns. Beginning in August 2022 with the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, and Trump's subsequent decision to run once again for president, Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf chart how Trump stifled the rise of Republican opponents, including Ron DeSantis, and how his campaign, led by Susie Wiles, landed on a winning strategy. They reveal in unrivaled detail how Joe Biden and his team brushed off concerns about his age, ignored polling numbers, and held off the next generation of eager Democratic hopefuls-even as Biden was dealing with his own special counsel investigation and the trial of his son Hunter. After his disastrous debate performance forced him to withdraw, Biden anointed Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate and tasked her with running the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history. With only 107 days to distinguish herself from the past four years, Harris lacked the time or space to outrun Biden's shadow-a challenge in and of itself, but one which Biden would make even more difficult. On November 5th, 2024, Trump was elected the nation's forty-seventh president, and would return to power vindicated, emboldened, unrestrained, and burning for revenge. Gripping, revelatory, and deeply reported, 2024 is the shocking inside story of the election that tested American democracy and would go on to shape the future of the free world." -- Provided by publisher

What Is Wrong with Men

"How to be a Man? That question--and all the anxiety, anger, and resentment it stirs up--is the starting point for a crisis in masculinity that today manifests as misogyny, nativism, and corporate greed; incels and mass shooters; and panic over the rights of women and minorities. According to Jessa Crispin, creator of the celebrated blog BookSlut, it is the most important question of our time, and the answer to it might be found in an unlikely place: the films of Michael Douglas. In the 1980s, the rules for masculinity began to change. The goal was no longer to be a good, respectable family man, carrying on the patriarchal traditions of generations past. Not only was it becoming unfashionable, but increasingly difficult: the economic and political shifts--a slashed social safety net, globalization--made it harder to find a breadwinning income, a stable home life, and a secure place in the public sphere. So, then, how to be a man? From the early eighties to the late nineties, Michael Douglas showed us how: he was our president, our Wall Street overlord, our mass shooter, our failed husband, our midlife crisis, our cop, and our canary in the patriarchal coal mine. His characters were a mirror of our cultural shift, serving as the foundation for everything from the 1994 Crime Bill to Trump's ultimate rise. With wry wit and wisdom, Crispin examines the phenomenon of the "Douglas character" as a silver-screen seismograph registering the tectonic movements within our society that have fractured it in shocking ways. From "Fatal Attraction" to "Wall Street" to "The Game," WHAT IS WRONG WITH MEN investigates how Michael Douglas's box office domination illustrates the dark hearts of masculinity's crisis. Blending feminist arguments and pop culture criticism, Crispin uses the iconic roles of Michael Douglas as a lens to explore men's and our culture's ongoing anxieties around women, money, and power. Ultimately, revealing that the patriarchy has now fully betrayed men, along with everyone else-and how unpacking one of its most fervent icons can help us envision a pathway forward."-- Provided by publisher

The Book of Alchemy

"For as long as she can remember, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She has used it to mark life's biggest occasions and to ride its roughest waves. It has buoyed her through illness, through heartbreak, and the deepest oceans of uncertainty. And Suleika is not alone. For so many people, journaling is a process of discovery, sometimes vulnerable and terrifying, always transformative. The Book of Alchemy is based on the premise that journaling is an essential tool for navigating the challenges of modern life. We live in a world where we're not only forced to grapple with personal peaks and valleys but also global upheavals far beyond our control-political, social, economic, technological, environmental. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through. Designed to be a companion through challenging times, The Book of Alchemy will explore the art of journaling, offering encouragement, direction, and support to those looking for a way to navigate the in-between. It is designed to expand that space, giving readers tools to engage with discomfort, to ask questions, to peel back the layers, to uncover their truest self-and in doing so, to find clarity and calm, to hold the astonishingly beautiful and the often unbearable facts of life in the same palm."-- Provided by publisher

The Aviator and the Showman

The Aviator and the Showman reveals the untold story of Amelia Earhart's complex marriage to publicist George Putnam, exploring how their partnership--both romantic and professional--shaped her public image and daring aviation career. Drawing from newly uncovered sources, the book offers a nuanced portrait of Earhart as a determined feminist and visionary, and of Putnam as a relentless promoter who fueled both her fame and risk-taking. This intimate biography reclaims the human truths behind the legend, portraying a woman navigating ambition, love, and societal expectation.

Bonding

"Electrifying, urgent, and darkly funny, Mariel Franklin's debut, Bonding, is a story of sex, tech, and pharmaceuticals set in the messy tangle of our digital age." -- Provided by publisher

Great Black Hope

A young Black man is caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy a friend's mysterious death and his own arrest.

Via Ápia

"Life on the morro, the hill, is good. Five young people--the brothers Washington and Wesley and their friends Douglas, Murilo, and Biel--live close to Rocinha's main avenue, Via Ápia, just a quick bus ride from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. But the rhythms of their lives stutter and scratch when Brazil's militarized police storm Rocinha as part of 'pacification' efforts ahead of the upcoming World Cup and an influx of international tourists. Via Ápia charts the expectant anxiousness before the police's invasion, the chaos born from their occupation of the hill, and the aftermath of their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year."-- Provided by publisher

Vera, or Faith

"The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original. Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world."-- Provided by publisher

The Trembling Hand

"A provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the lives and times of some of our most beloved poets-with urgent lessons for today. A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair. Percy Shelley's gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats's calm face. Byron's silk-lined leather boot. Who would have known there could be vast worlds contained in these items? In a completely new interpretation of the Romantics and their context, Whiting Award-winning scholar and literary sleuth Mathelinda Nabugodi uses these items to frame her interrogation of the poets, leading us on an expansive journey through time and memory, situating us in depth of their world, and her own. 'Freedom, liberty, autonomy are the period's favorite words,' Nabugodi writes. Romantic poets sought truth in the depth of their souls and in the mind's unbounded regions. Ideals of free speech and human rights were being forged. And yet the period was defined by a relentless commitment to the displacement and stolen labor of millions. Romanticism, she argues, can no longer be discussed without the racial violence with which it was complicit. Still, rather than using this idea to rehash Black pain and subjugation, she mines the archives for instances of resistance, beauty, and joy. Nabugodi moves effortlessly between the past and present. She takes us into the physical archives, and, with startling clarity, unpacks her relationships with them: what they are and should be; who built them; how they are entwined with an industry that was the antithesis of freedom; and how she feels holding the materials needed to write this book, as a someone whose ancestry is largely absent from their ledgers. The Trembling Hand presents a dazzling new way of reading the past. This transfixing, evocative book reframes not only the lives of the legendary Romantics, but also their poetry and the very era in which they lived. It is a reckoning with art, archives, and academia bound to echo through the conversation for a long time to come."-- Provided by publisher

Plundered

Follows the lives of two Detroit grandfathers--one Black the other white--and their grandchildren.

The Plunder of Black America

"Wealth is central to the American pursuit of happiness and is an overriding measure of well-being. Yet wealth is conspicuously absent from African American households. Why do some 3.5 million Black American families have zero or negative wealth? Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization-what Frederick Douglass called plunder-through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder. From the story of Anthony and Mary Johnson, abducted from Angola and brought to Virginia in 1619, to the enslaved Black workers dispossessed by the Custis-Washington family, to Venture Smith (born Broteer Furro), who purchased his freedom, to three generations of a family enslaved in the South who moved north after Emancipation, to the Tulsa massacre and the subprime lending crisis, Schermerhorn shows that we cannot reckon with today's racial wealth inequality without understanding its unrelenting role in American history." -- Dust jacket

Notes on Infinity

"A singular, extraordinary debut about Zoe and Jack, Harvard students who find themselves propelled into the intoxicating biotech startup world when they announce they've discovered the cure for aging. A different kind of love story where the thirst for achievement consumes and the stakes are forever. Zoe, the daughter of an MIT professor who grew up in her brother's shadow, can envision her future anew at Harvard. Jack, a boy in Zoe's organic chemistry class with unruly hair and a gleam of competitiveness, matches her intellect and curiosity with every breath. When Jack refers Zoe for a position in a prestigious professor's lab, the two become entwined as colleagues, staying up late to discuss scientific ideas. They find themselves on the cusp of a breakthrough: the promise of immortality through a novel antiaging drug. Zoe and Jack set off on their new project in secret. Finding encouraging results, they bring their work to an investor, drop out of Harvard, and form a startup. But after the money, the magazine covers, and the national news stories detailing their success, Zoe and Jack receive a startling accusation that threatens to destroy both the company they built and their partnership. A captivating novel about young love, the allure of immortality, and the recklessness that can come with early success, Notes on Infinity asks: How far would you go to achieve your dreams?"-- Provided by publisher

A Marriage at Sea

A Marriage at Sea tells the true story of Maurice and Maralyn, an unlikely couple who abandon ordinary life to sail the world--only to face disaster when a whale sinks their boat in the Pacific. Stranded in a raft with little hope of rescue, they battle starvation, the elements, and each other in a gripping tale of survival, obsession, and the limits of love.

Killing Stella

"Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children are visiting her in-laws, the narrator of Killing Stella recounts the addition of her friend's daughter, Stella, into their already tense and tumultuous household. Staring out the window at her garden, she worries about the baby bird in the linden tree, about her husband, Richard (who flits from one adulterous affair to another), about her son's gloomy demeanor and her daughter's obliviousness, and, most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has just met a sudden and disastrous end. A domestic horror story that builds to an apocalyptic ending, Killing Stella distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer's acclaimed novel The Wall into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella"-- Provided by publisher

The Key to Everything

"One of the most important and original poets of the twentieth century, May Swenson (1913-1989) was born in Utah to Swedish immigrant parents. After graduating from Utah State University and working briefly as a reporter, she moved to New York City in the mid-1930s and began her life as a poet. She took various office jobs to support herself, including time with the Federal Writers' Project and, later, as a manuscript reader for New Directions in the 1950s. Swenson went on to publish seven collections of poetry (with several more collections published posthumously), and three poetry books for children. Swenson's work is often compared to the poetry of E. E. Cummings and Elizabeth Bishop, with whom Swenson corresponded for decades. Her many awards include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1980 to 1989. This book provides an account of Swenson's life that draws on her extensive diaries, which have never been made available to the public. The narrative concentrates on Swenson's life from 1935 to 1959, a period that encompasses her departure from Utah, her personal and professional struggles before her first breakthrough publications, and her early years of literary success. The poet expresses her anxieties and aspirations as she experiments with her sexuality, extricates herself from a sheltered Mormon upbringing, and begins a new life in New York at the height of the Depression. The author traces Swenson's struggles with poverty, anonymity, and predatory men; her romantic relationships, primarily with women; the people she met, books she read, and the work she produced, offering a unique portrait of the times, the place, and a poet who resisted labels throughout her life."-- Provided by publisher

A Day like Any Other

"The first biography of the poet James Schuyler, the Pulitzer Prize winner who helped shape the New York School of poetry in the 1960s."-- Provided by publisher

Black Power Scorecard

"Historically, Black Americans' quest for power has been understood as an attempt to gain equal protections under the law. But power in America requires more than basic democratic freedoms. It is inextricably linked with economic influence and ownership-of one's self, home, business, and creations. Andre M. Perry draws on extensive research and analysis to quantify how much power Black Americans actually have. Ranging from property, business, and wealth to education, health, and social mobility, he moves across the country, evaluating people's ability to set the rules of the game and calculating how that translates into the ultimate means of power-life itself, and the longevity of Black communities. Along the way, he identifies woefully overlooked areas of investment that can close the power gap and benefit all. An expansive take on power supported by documentation and data, Black Power Scorecard is a fresh contribution to the country's reckoning with structural inequality, one that offers a new approach to redressing it."-- Provided by publisher