ODY New Books Collection

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

Effingers

"Three generations of German Jewish family undergo the tumult, upheaval, and brutality of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in this panoramic and skillfully nuanced family drama, rich with gossip and incident, capturing a Germany now lost to time. Gabriele Tergit's Effingers is a novel both epic and intimate as it chronicles the lives and fates of three generations of a German Jewish family. Beginning from 1878-the year after the narrative of Buddenbrooks ends-and ending in 1948, we follow the Effingers, a family of modest craftsmen from southern Germany, who are joined through marriage to two families of high-society financiers in Berlin, the Goldschmidts and the Oppners. The Effingers soon rise to prominence as one of the most important German industrialist families in Berlin, but with the outbreak of World War I, they fall on hard times, and must then navigate the tumultuous changes of the Weimar Republic. Full of parties and drama and the most delicious gossip, and featuring a kaleidoscopic cast of unforgettable characters, Effingers is a vibrant and keenly observed account of German Jewish life in all its richness and complexity. Tergit's journalistic precision and limpid prose dazzle in Sophie Duvernoy's elegant, fluid translation. Criminally underrated when it first came out in 1951, and only in recent years undergoing rediscovery, Effingers is a searching meditation on identity and nationality that establishes Tergit as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century." -- Provided by publisher

Darkology

A groundbreaking history, decades in the making, that chronicles how blackface dominated American society culturally, financially, and racially for nearly two centuries.

The Blood Countess

There have long been whispers, coming from the castle, from the village square and from the dark woods. The great lady--a countess, from one of Europe's oldest families--is a vicious killer. Some even say she bathes in the blood of her victims. But despite claims that Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed as many as 650 girls, some have wondered if the Countess was herself a victim of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns known to history. So, was Elizabeth Bathory a monster, a victim, or a bit of both? With the breathlessness of a whodunit, drawing upon new archival evidence and questioning old assumptions, Shelley Puhak traces the Countess's downfall, bringing to life an assertive woman leader in a world sliding into anti-scientific, reactionary darkness--a world where nothing is ever as it seems.

A Better Life

"In a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration by the sharply observant Lionel Shriver, a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant--who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be. Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city program that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Liberal to the extreme, Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is skeptical. A classic live-at-home Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents any interruption of his "hovercraft repose." As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico's sisters, while finding her way into Gloria's heart and even, briefly, Nico's. But as Martine's disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico conceives a dark twin hostile to both his mother's altruism and the "migrant crisis" in general--and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself. Based loosely on a program New York City Mayor Eric Adams floated but did not initiate, A Better Life is Lionel Shriver at her best: smart, funny, and sensitive to the moral nuances of perhaps the most divisive issue of our times."-- Provided by publisher

Bernie for Burlington

"In this symphonic origin story of an era-defining politician, Dan Chiasson, a Burlington native who had a ringside seat to Bernie Sanders's development, reconstructs the rise of an American icon. With in-depth reporting and remarkable remembered scenes, Chiasson tracks a faint political signal that traveled from the Vermont communes, hardluck neighborhoods, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the town meetings and ballot boxes of his home state, and finally to Washington, D.C., to transform our national political landscape. Sanders, insisting on a socialist platform that hasn't changed to this day, defied a corrupt Democratic machine to find his coalition among Burlington's often feuding communities: the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose grandparents and great-grandparents--including Chiasson's own--had worked in the mills; the puppeteers, hippies, and NYC transplants who'd moved to Vermont to find land and authenticity; the anti-nukers, activist nuns, baseball fans, developers, cops, and small businessmen like Ben and Jerry, who became Ben & Jerry's right there in town. Bernie captivated them all, running on the slogan 'Burlington Is Not for Sale' to become the modern era's first socialist mayor, one who got the streets plowed but also boasted a foreign policy and a bullhorn to speak directly to Ronald Reagan. In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground, this people's epic shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee and one neighborhood door-knock at a time, even as the analog era wanes and a new digital politics appears on the horizon. Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, Bernie for Burlington is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America."-- Publisher's website

A Woman's
Work

"Mothers make history. But what it has meant for mothers to do the physical and emotional work of mothering has, for centuries, been neglected in the stories of the past. Patriarchal control of motherhood has relegated the acts of growing, birthing, nurturing and loving to the sidelines, and deemed it unimportant, women's work. Now, through the voices of the women themselves, Elinor Cleghorn reclaims and retells the history of motherhood, showcasing the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, community leaders and more who have shaped the course of history. Beginning in the ancient world, we encounter a figurine made for a childbirth ritual over three-thousand years ago. We meet extraordinary writers and poets, like Anne Bradstreet and Elizabeth Jocelin, who were expressing their innermost feelings about motherhood. During the seventeenth century, in the streets of London we encounter unmarried mothers struggling against stigma and shame, and the women who strove to help them. Later, pioneers like Mary Wollstonecraft laid the intellectual foundations for the liberation of motherhood from male control, and the abhorrent treatment of enslaved mothers was brought to public attention by courageous activists like Sojourner Truth. These and many other brave characters lobbied for mothers of all classes and circumstances to be valued, respected, and supported--not as reproductive vessels, but as people. A Woman's Work is a powerful, inspiring, and ground-breaking new history."-- Provided by publisher

A Hymn to Life

"In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity in her legal fight against her ex-husband and the fifty men accused of sexually assaulting her, a courageous decision that inspired millions of people around the world. Only four years prior, [she] had made the shattering discovery that her partner, Dominique Pelicot, had been secretly drugging and raping her, and inviting strangers to also abuse her in their home for nearly a decade. 'Shame must change sides,' Gisèle bravely declared at the opening of the trial in Avignon, France, and the dictum soon became an international rallying cry to radically transform public sentiment and legislation surrounding cases of sexual violence. Beginning in 2020, when she received the first phone call from a local police station, Gisèle recounts the fateful investigation that turned her life inside out. She retraces the steps of a life built over the course of five decades, the final decade of her marriage and its hidden abuse, and the long path of emotional healing that ensues. Part memoir, part act of defiance, A Hymn to Life is a story of survival, testimony, and courage, and a portrait of a woman who broke her silence, reclaimed her voice, and forced a reckoning." -- Provided by publisher

A World Appears

"When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature's greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives -- scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic -- to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life. When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view -- assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to "plant neurobiologists" searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness. In Pollan's dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves." -- Provided by publisher

The Wall Dancers

"An indelible, deeply reported human narrative of contemporary China in which the country's carefully controlled internet offers a lens into the broader national tension between freedom and control. In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power of the internet as a space of unprecedented connection and opportunity, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship that became known as the Great Firewall. The online world that sprouted up behind the firewall was no less vibrant for being controlled, and in the years that followed China incubated a booming tech culture and a digital public square. But today, as the country's leadership has tightened the reins on public discourse and western headlines reduce the Chinese populace to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu argues, China's singular online ecosystem may well be the most direct lens we have into the on-the-ground reality of life there. In tracing the evolution of the Chinese internet-from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship-Liu equips readers with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power. Ingeniously conceived and meticulously reported, Dancing in Shackles spans the last three decades in China, a period that encapsulates the country's transformation into both the world's largest online userbase and one of its most dominant authoritarian states-from 1995, when ordinary Chinese people first logged onto the internet, swept up by its emancipatory promise, to the present day, as China polices its physical and virtual borders with unprecedented intensity. Drawing on years of intimate reporting, Liu weaves together the stories of individual citizens striving for freedom and community within state boundaries. A journalist-turned-activist taps into a nationwide feminist awakening, stoking a grassroots revolution on social media before being forced underground. The CEO of a gay dating app steers the company to a successful IPO despite laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. A disillusioned tech worker turns to writing science fiction to construct alternative visions of China's future. As Liu's subjects experience firsthand the internet's power as a tool of both state control and individual liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and survival. Dancing in Shackles is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital window into a global power that we simplify and misunderstand at our peril." -- Provided by publisher

A Very Cold Winter

"In A Very Cold Winter, it is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men--lost to war, death, or abandonment--leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to incubate fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this 'hotel for the poor' consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they're able to escape the weight of what they've lived through. Fausta Cialente's exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. An introduction from author and Italian translator Claudia Durastanti frames this classic feminist icon for the modern American reader. Tender, thought-provoking, and devastatingly beautiful, A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it." -- Publisher's description

Until I Find You

"In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption―but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora―a baby broker. Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation. Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South." -- Amazon