ODY New Books Collection

The Land and Its People

"David Sedaris reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, a brother, a lifelong friend. He tries on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh's hip-replacement surgery, and both succeeds and fails. He buys his sister a cape and discusses his brother with a jaded Duolingo bot. He walks dozens of miles with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. Ever adding to his list of 'Countries I Have Been To,' he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest's cassock in Vatican City, and goes on safari in Kenya without taking a single photo. There is sadness here--scrolling through his address book, he realizes how many dear friends are now deceased--but also delight: he revels in authors' biographies, the malapropism that becomes a decades-long inside joke, and pair of well-made cotton underpants. He is bitten by a dog. A train passenger vomits in his face. A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn't. Look how hard it is to be alive! Throughout these essays, Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity this fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit."-- Provided by publisher

Korean Messiah

"A landmark history of North Korea, told through the rise of the Kim Dynasty and its surprising ties to American Christianity--a spectacular, penetrating account of a world like no other. North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom. For eight decades, it has marched defiantly to its own beat, shaking off its Soviet and Chinese sponsors to emerge as one of the world's most enigmatic nations-a nuclear-armed state ruled by a dictatorial dynasty unlike any the world has seen. Underpinning the state is a personality cult larger and more soaked in religiosity than those constructed by Stalin or Mao-one that, unbeknownst to the world, traces its roots back to the Christian fervor of post-Civil War America. In Korean Messiah, Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal's China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief, takes us deep inside Pyongyang, a city once so dominated by Christianity it was known as "the Jerusalem of the East." Cheng introduces us to Samuel Moffett, a Presbyterian missionary from Madison, Indiana who would venture into Pyongyang at the turn of the nineteenth century and build a remarkable following-one that would include the very Kim family that today presides over one of the world's harshest persecutors of the Christian faith. At the center of this story-its messiah-is North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, son of two fervent Christians and progenitor of an ideology known as Kimilsungism, an exercise in idolatry that has elevated him, and his successor son and grandson, to Christ-like status, from the humble manger where he was born to the subway seat on which the venerated leader once placed his posterior, cordoned off as if it were a religious relic. Drawing on letters, diaries, and never-before-unearthed archival material that temper and oftentimes contradict the glorious historical record promoted by Kim Il Sung's legions of hagiographers, Korean Messiah tells the true story of a country shrouded in fictions." -- Provided by publisher

Jean-Paul Marat

"In this monumental work, influential historian Keith Michael Baker takes readers on a journey through the life of Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793). Starting with Marat's family and upbringing, Baker then sheds light into Marat's early years in England, his career as an aspiring scientist (including his writings on fire, light, and electricity), his gradual transformation from pamphleteer to revolutionary newspaperman, and, finally, his murder and martyrdom. Throughout, Baker offers readers the unique opportunity to reconsider the lead-up and development of the French Revolution through Marat's eyes and in his words. To help make sense of Marat's trajectory, Baker focuses on his subject's lifelong distrust of representation, from the political realm to the scientific and back again. Just as Marat railed against the abstract representation of natural forces in scientific discourse, so, too, in his political thought, he preferred direct embodiment. The Revolution, with its debates between sovereignty represented (in national assemblies) and sovereignty embodied (in the people) provided the perfect occasion for Marat's escalating rhetoric of denunciation and purge. Baker shows how Marat's incendiary public calls to render unseen forces visible, for immediacy in an increasingly abstract modern world, would transform classical republicanism into the language of the Terror."-- Provided by publisher

An Inconvenient Widow

"Mary Lincoln was at the center of politics at a time when society's expectations for women were rigid and circumscribed. The product of Southern aristocracy, she grew up among an influential clan of politicians and elites who founded Lexington, Kentucky. Mary's early exposure to the male-dominated world of politics instilled in her a keen political acumen and a fierce ambition. Proclaiming as a child that she was destined to become the wife of a president, she played a crucial role in boosting her husband to greatness. But her hopes for a triumphant experience at the pinnacle of power were lost to the Civil War and unfathomable family tragedies. Still, Mary persevered. She steadfastly supported the Union war effort, visited encampments, tended to wounded soldiers, and generously donated money and gifts to refugees from slavery. She was an unconventional, larger-than-life character who dressed too ostentatiously, grieved too publicly, suffered a shopping addiction, and seemed unable or unwilling to corral her emotions, her temper, and her opinions. She made enemies--influential men who wrote her story for her, often unfairly. After Lincoln was assassinated, she was all but abandoned by the nation he had given his life to defend and preserve. Former Washington Post writer and columnist Lois Romano rectifies the tortured legacy of Mary Todd Lincoln, who was failed at nearly every turn in her widowhood--by her family, by her government, by medical professionals ill-equipped to diagnose her mental illness, and finally, by history. Romano draws on hundreds of archives, letters, and memoirs to provide the most complete portrait--of not simply of an inconvenient widow, but of a brilliant and flawed woman, who possessed uncommon tenacity in the face of extraordinary adversity and personal torment, and helped launch one of America's greatest presidents." -- Provided by publisher

How to Rule the World

"Winner of the George Polk Award for his investigation that brought down Stanford's president, Theo Baker offers a revelatory and gripping account of Silicon Valley hubris. Slush funds. Shell companies. Yacht parties. This is life for Silicon Valley's favored teenagers. Seventeen-year-old Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids, with few safeguards to catch bad behavior. Stanford, he realized, was less a school than a business. Its annual budget was nearly twice that of Harvard or Yale and higher than those of 116 countries. The product? Students. Especially those special few identified as the next trillion-dollar-startup founders. For them, there were secret societies, "pre-idea" funding offers, and social calls from billionaires, all with the expectation that these geniuses would soon join the ruling elite. As the helm of this business was Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a superstar neuroscientist and wealthy biotech executive. But when Baker joined the student newspaper and started poking around the Stanford president's record, he discovered never-reported allegations of research misconduct in studies published across two decades bearing Tessier-Lavigne's name. Only one month into college and thousands of miles from home, Baker began receiving anonymous letters, going on stakeouts, and tracking down confidential sources. High-powered lawyers and public relations teams were hired to attack his reporting. Stanford opened an investigation into its own leader. And by the end of the year, Tessier-Lavigne was out as president. This is the incredible journey of a reluctant teenage reporter who uncovered a story that shook the scientific world and became front-page news across the country. It is also an unprecedented inside view of the students learning to rule the world -- and what they're learning from those who already do. How to Rule the World is a shocking, hilarious, and moving debut, showcasing Silicon Valley's training ground as never before." -- Book jacket

The Hothouse

"The Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after WWII. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn. Until this point he has led a life guided by principle and political optimism. Here, in spellbinding internal monologue and jarring montage, he meets his end. The Hothouse is an existential masterpiece and a portrait of a moral man crushed by an immoral world. Bitterly controversial at home and a cult writer abroad, Koeppen (1906- 1996) brought a volcanic modernist style to German literature that remains unparalleled to this day. His uniquely radical voice and breathtaking prose is rendered magnificently by Michael Hofmann."-- Provided by publisher

The Hill

"After her mother is sentenced to life in a hilltop prison, Suzanna vows to return to the hill forever. An unexpectedly funny and deeply moving novel about the many ways we punish and return to each other. Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna's mother, who will never be released. At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter's crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother's friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it. Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark's The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the tale of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction." -- Provided by publisher

Hexes of the Deadwood Forest

"An explosive, jaw-dropping debut about a woman who loses her job as an oil company CEO after she's filmed having sex with a tree in her sleep, a calamity that unravels her mind, spiraling her through history until she's united with a centuries-old coven of ecstatically revolutionary women." -- Provided by publisher

Here Where We Live Is Our Country

"This story begins with Molly Crabapple's discovery of the art and ephemera left behind by her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort. Sam was a rough-and-tumble kid who worked at a tannery deep in the Pale of Settlement in 19th century Russia. As a young man he discovered that he was not just a laborer, but an artist--and soon after that, a revolutionary, enlisted in the strikes, street fights, and study groups of a new group of radicals sweeping the Pale: the Jewish Bund. Crabapple saw herself not just in her great-grandfather's career as an artist, but in his revolutionary inclinations. In the story of the Bund, she discovered a movement of artists, philosophers, working people, and street fighters with a thrilling utopian vision for the world. The founders of the Bund understood themselves as Jews--people with a special history of oppression--but also as part of an international movement that rejected all forms of ethnonationalism. They fought for this vision in parlors, cafes, battlefields and prison camps. Their ideas helped spark the Russian Revolution, which soon swept them aside. Their fighters battled pogromists in an age of nationalism and their leaders tangled with Zionists over the destiny of the Jewish people. Their last stand was in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where they helped lead a doomed uprising, the heroic and tragic climax to their story. In retelling the epic history of the Bund and its extraordinary cast of characters during one of the most politically and culturally volatile periods in European history, Crabapple asks a critical question: did the Bund fail because of an unworkable dream of solidarity? Or did the world, in thrall to zero-sum nationalism, fail the Bund? This dynamic story is driven by that urgent question--and offers a new lens through which to see our contemporary struggles." -- Provided by publisher

Ghost Town

"Jimmy Perrini lives in 1970s suburban New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan, but a world apart. At the end of eighth grade, after tragedy strikes, Jimmy finds himself lost in a fog of grief that alienates him from friends and family, drifting instead into troubling friendships with two older teenagers: one a notorious local burnout with a fast car, an endless supply of weed, and a shaky grasp of reality; the other a smart, eccentric girl, whom Jimmy finds himself drawn to as they become entranced by her Ouija board, which may just offer the only salve to their grief. As a fateful public drama unfolds, Jimmy is torn between the occult beyond and the cold realities of the place he has called home. Narrated by a much older Jimmy, a literary-turned-commercial novelist, Ghost Town reveals how the past haunts the present the way our ghosts are always with us, even when we think we've left them behind." -- Provided by publisher

Five Weeks in the Country

"From the acclaimed award-winning author of 1974 and The Vixen comes an utterly original novel inspired by Charles Dickens's true, strange friendship with his fellow literary genius, Hans Christian Andersen, set against the summer Dickens's family life famously exploded In the summer of 1857, as the newspapers are full of an impending comet that may or may not destroy civilization, an unusual looking stranger arrives by express invitation to Charles Dickens's estate, Gad Hill. He is a fellow writer of almost equal renown to Dickens, who chanced to meet him at a dinner party years before. But Hans Christian Anderson, far from receiving a receptive welcome at the bustling household filled with a large brood of children, finds himself immediately estranged and unmoored. Unable to communicate in a language he doesn't speak, he's all the same attuned to an electric tension in the air between Charles and Catherine Dickens that pervades the home. He's also witness to Dickens's fervent attachment to his new play, and his new leading lady, Ellen Tiernan . . . . Despite the awkwardness of his surroundings, for reasons that remain mysterious even to him, Andersen finds himself paralyzed, lingering at Gad's Hill far past the point of welcome. Five Weeks in the Country, inspired by an actual literary encounter, is Francine Prose at her dazzling best."-- Provided by publisher

Enormous Wings

"At seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is too old to be a stranger in a strange land. She didn't choose the Vista View Retirement Community of Austin, Texas--that would be her three grown children--but when she grudgingly moves in, she not only makes new friends, she falls in love. Then the exhaustion, vomiting, and confusion start. Her children and grandchildren worry it's cancer, dementia, a stroke. But a raft of tests later, the news is even more shocking: she's pregnant. Once word gets out, everyone wants a piece of her: the press and the paparazzi, activists and medical researchers, all descending on Vista View as Pepper tries to determine her next move. Soon Pepper has some hard decisions to make--and some she's not allowed to make. Enormous Wings is an urgent novel about female agency and bodily autonomy, morality and mortality. It's about what happens when you don't get to choose. It's about motherhood and family, sex and love and friendship, and how those bedrocks--even so late in the day--can still change, and then change everything."-- Provided by publisher

The Ending Writes Itself

In this mystery novel by Cat Clarke and V. E. Schwab, six writers are invited to a remote private island after the death of a famous and reclusive bestselling author. They are informed that they must collaborate--or compete--to complete the author's unfinished manuscript within a strict time limit. As the participants work under pressure in an isolated setting, tensions rise and questions emerge about the circumstances surrounding the author's death and the motives of those present.

Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I've Cried about

"From the social media superstar behind @SimonSits, Isabel Klee--known for her heartwarming tales of dog rescue--comes an utterly winning memoir about a twenty something woman's search for true love in New York City and how the four-legged matches that she fostered helped her find her two-legged match. A Jersey girl by birth, Isabel Klee had always wanted to live in New York City. At age 20, she got her chance, ditching her college upstate and moving into a grungy basement apartment in Manhattan. Dog-obsessed since childhood, her first post-grad job was becoming an assistant to a dog photographer, and something clicked into place: a career focused on helping dogs was the new dream. Isabel quickly found a passion for rehabilitating rescue dogs and helping them get adopted. At the same time, she was caught up in a whirlwind of friendships, parties, fickle boyfriends and grand romances, which she recounts in honest, tender, and sometimes devastating chapters about the search for love and belonging. Isabel's first true love, though, was Simon, a fluffy puppy who'd been saved from the meat trade. As the highs and lows of her twenties hit Isabel in wave after wave, it was Simon who kept her grounded. Together, Isabel and Simon created a community of dog-lovers and a tight-knit group of friends pursuing their dreams. In this honest and moving memoir, Isabel weaves together the stories of her foster dogs--and the challenges she helped them overcome--with tales of complicated relationships, hard decisions, and great loves in New York City, all leading to a happy ending not only for the rescue pups, but for Isabel herself."-- Provided by publisher

Death in Rome

"Death in Rome tells the story of four members of a German family-a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator-reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. A chilling account of Nazis after the war, here the older generation is resentful but not repentant. From the old unreconstructed Nazi officer Jude- jahn (the name has a suggestion of 'Jew hunter') to the young and apparently gay priest, from the supposedly reformed Mayor to the acclaimed but haunted young composer Siegfried, no clear hope emerges. And amid haunting flash-backs and against the shadows of Rome with its imperial echoes, the darkness is alive. Brace yourself: the novel takes place over a two-day period, mostly at night, and it's certain that the present will be governed by the past, if you let it. In Death in Rome, Koeppen amply demonstrates that evil doesn't simply cease once it loses a war-it seeps out, hungry to exist in other forms. And as Siegfried confesses: "In my daydreams and nightmares I see the Browns and the nationalist idiocy on the march again." Death in Rome-following Pigeons on the Grass and The Hothouse- blazingly concludes Koeppen's masterful trilogy." -- Provided by publisher

Dear Monica Lewinsky

"A novel about a middle aged court stenographer who must reexamine an ill-advised affair she had with a professor during the summer of the Monica Lewinsky scandal." -- Provided by publisher

Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young

"The son of Weather Underground radicals tells the story of a childhood on the run and a half-century of revolutionary struggle in America. Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His parents were fugitives after a decade fighting the US government; his mother was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. All his life, Dohrn's parents said his birth marked a clean break with violent revolutionary struggle, but in this explosive memoir, he discovers that story wasn't entirely true. This masterpiece of personal and social history brings us inside an infamous family and their lives underground. Drawing on exclusive interviews, declassified FBI files, and long-hidden letters, photos, and diaries, Dohrn tells a new story of radical resistance, including revelations about the Weathermen's bombing campaign, their secret alliance with the Black Liberation Army, and the dramatic prison break of Assata Shakur. Reckoning with the emotional damage the Weathermen inflicted on their victims, their children, and themselves, Dohrn's unflinching memoir explores the roots of radicalism and asks how a young person survives when the place they feel safest - with their family - also puts them in danger." -- Book jacket flap

The Counting Game

"Southwest Ireland, 1995 : Two children go into the woods. Only one comes out. When thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough goes missing, panic grips a rural Irish community. Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in the forest, rumored by locals to be haunted, and the only witness--her troubled younger brother, Jack--refuses to speak. Saoirse went missing when they were playing the Counting Game, a ritual believed to ward off evil, and Jack has sworn to protect the forest's secrets. Freya Hemmings, a psychotherapist still healing from a loss of her own, is brought in to help investigators break Jack's silence. As the race to find Saoirse alive accelerates, the search threatens to unravel a family facing the unthinkable. Everyone is a suspect, and the closer Freya and Jack become, the more danger they find themselves in."-- Dust jacket

Chaos in the Green Zone

"In 2004, Thomas Mowle was a professor at the United States Air Force Academy and a noncombat junior officer when he volunteered to go to Iraq. Many futures seemed possible during the second year of the Iraq War, between the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraq's first free election. Mowle provides insights about Iraqi political dynamics and describes how collective ignorance, toxic optimism, and partisan considerations affected coalition decision making. The result has been twenty years of dysfunctional Iraqi politics, increased Iranian influence in the Middle East, and many more unnecessary Iraqi and American deaths. This first-person account is drawn from the journal Mowle kept while deployed, unclassified material he brought home, and conversations after the fact with some of those who served with me. It captures the frenetic cycle of activity that transpires seven days a week, fifteen hours a day at a wartime forward headquarters. Time and focus are in short supply during a war. Everything happens at once, and the enemy gets to schedule events. Reconsideration of decisions presses against hard deadlines, such as the election dates and the start and end of Ramadan. Important tasks are put on hold for urgent distractions. Frequent indirect fire attacks, the deaths of colleagues, heat-induced illnesses, and personality conflicts add to the stress." -- Provided by publisher

Centroeuropa

"Revelations - and frozen corpses - multiply in a small, European village 'Male, Prussian, hussar soldier, frozen. That was the first body I found while digging in the frozen earth to bury my wife.' At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European feudalism is starting to crumble. Newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small town far from home to claim a plot of arable land and the simple life of a farmer. But when Redo begins to dig up the field, the perfectly preserved, frozen corpse of a soldier emerges. The next day, Redo uncovers two more soldiers, dressed in uniforms of an earlier age. And then there are more. As bodies from past and future wars proliferate exponentially, Redo enlists the aid of eccentric villagers, but risks exposing a precious personal secret and the great love at the heart of it. What will be excavated and what will remain buried? Subtle, subversive, and full of surprises, this ingeniously structured novel heralds a talented writer whose experimentations in style are as dazzling as his humane, spirited story of oppression, erasure, and endurance."-- Provided by publisher