ODY New Books Collection

Talking Classics

"Why the ongoing fascination with the ancient world? This witty, approachable book asks why--for better or (sometimes) worse--antiquity continues to exert such a powerful hold on the contemporary imagination. Recalling a formative childhood encounter with a four-thousand-year-old piece of bread in a museum, Beard introduces the idea of thauma, or wonder, that kick-started a lifetime engaging with classics. It was not the canonical 'greats' of ancient literature and art that initially drew her in, she confesses, but rather the more intimate, messy, and humdrum evidence of daily life in the remote past. Confronting the uses and abuses of symbols of the ancient world, Beard reminds us that the traditions and 'masterpieces' of Greece and Rome have certainly been politicized, but they belong to neither the left nor the right. Happily, no one owns the past. She warns us not to let a sense of reverence or overfamiliarity dampen the 'shock of the old,' arguing that one of the most important things that classics teach us is how to grapple with complicated and controversial things. 'The Greeks and Romans are long dead, they cannot answer back, and you can say what you like about them,' she reminds readers. 'The simple fact that classics belong to none of us can offer a safe space to argue about the most difficult debates we face now.' Beard welcomes everyone into classics. 'It is not compulsory to be excited by the ancient world,' she writes. 'But it can be a shame not to be.' This charming, sharp, and readable book from one of the world's most entertaining classicists offers something for both new and established fans of classics, bringing new wonder and curiosity to even the most ancient of ideas." -- Provided by publisher

The Summer Boy

"In the summer of 1985, on a scruffy resort island off the coast of France, six teenagers--five boys and one girl--band together for a final golden season before adulthood. Their days are drenched in sun and freedom, and their nights simmer with secrets, jealousy, and longing. Philippe is drawn to Nicolas, the quiet new boy who sees him in a way that no one else does. As their bond deepens, part of Nicolas remains unreachable--and then a sudden tragedy brings everything to a brutal end."-- Jacket flap

Sublimation

"When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home. Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance, Soyoung, called her home for the funeral. She doesn't know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life. How far would you go to live the choice you didn't make?"-- Book jacket flap

The Story of Birds

"Tens of billions of birds share the planet with us, an astonishingly diverse array of species that are present nearly everywhere humans call home--and many places we do not. With their flamboyant plumage, joyous dawn serenades, extraordinary aerial feats, they have captivated human imagination for millennia. Undeniably delicate creatures with hollow bones and thin skin protected by downy feathers, how did such a seemingly fragile species break the bounds of Earth and begin to fly, how have they survived millennia, and how does their legacy shape our world? Hailed as 'one of the stars of modern paleontology' (National Geographic), Steve Brusatte now tells the extraordinary story of the dinosaurs' living legacy: birds. He begins by exploring how dinosaurs gradually developed the trademark features of birds one-by-one--feathers, wings, beaks, big brains, keen senses, and warm-blooded metabolisms. He investigates why birds where the only dinosaurs to survive the cataclysmic asteroid impact 66 million years ago and chronicles how these survivors rapidly proliferated to produce the diversity of avian species we know today."-- Provided by publisher

Stalin's
Apostles

"The riveting story of the ring of spies known as the Cambridge Five, who infiltrated the highest levels of the British establishment and helped Stalin cement a half century of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe The Cambridge Five was the most infamous spy ring in history. Its members-Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and John Cairncross-met at university, amid the left-wing ferment overtaking British campuses between the World Wars. The Five were soon recruited by Soviet agents and pledged allegiance to Stalin, and each quickly took up a place in the British government. From the 1930s, they funneled top-secret intelligence to the USSR, some so sensitive that their Soviet handlers feared a double cross. Their unmasking in 1951 rocked Britain, helping to end a chummy, boys' club stranglehold on the country's institutions of power. But, as Antonia Senior shows, the Five's treachery had much graver and more devastating consequences across the world. Their work invaluably aided Stalin as he sought to build a Red Empire, condemning millions across Eastern Europe to decades of repression, violence, and death. Rife with code names, smuggled documents, clandestine rendezvous, and copious amounts of gin, Stalin's Apostles wields impeccable research and storytelling and all the thrilling details and high tragedy of a classic spy thriller." -- Provided by publisher

Spawning Season

Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a lesbian couple he had known since college came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them? Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two partners communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe's whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology. -- Publisher's description

Something We Said

"Part memoir by the daughter of the iconic comedian Richard Pryor, part exploration of the historical and contemporary use of the N-word, this hybrid book peels back the curtain on the life of Pryor and interrogates the most perplexing word in the American lexicon, a word he helped popularize. The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It's a word that Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor has not only contemplated, it's one that she has taught and observed up close. When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor's worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s. As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn't thought about for decades. In reckoning with those memories, Elizabeth goes on a more public journey of discovery of the messy and sometimes surprising legacies of racism in the United States. A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth's own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, Something We Said follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map."-- Provided by publisher

The Sexual Evolution

"In The Sexual Evolution, Lents takes readers on a journey through the animal world, from insects to apes, revealing what the incredible array of sexual diversity can teach us about our own diverse beauty. Nature, it turns out, has made a lot of space for diverse genders and sexual behaviors. And why? Because when it comes to evolution--diversity wins. This is not just a political or social message, instead it's rooted in science and cultivated from understanding the full breadth of sexuality that exists throughout the world. With shades of both Frans de Waal and Esther Perel, Lents's storytelling is as fascinating as it is topical, offering eye-opening stories about the diversity of animal life, while relating it to our own sexual journey as a species. At once a forceful rebuttal to bigotry and a captivating dive into the secret sex lives of animals, The Sexual Evolution is the rare book of pop science that leans into the controversy. Sex, the reactionaries say, should only be for procreation between a man and a woman, anything else goes against nature. Well, nature would like a word with them."-- Provided by publisher

Seek the Traitor's
Son

Elegy Ahn did not ask for destiny to find her. She is happy with her life as a soldier, defending her small country from the Talusar, a powerful nation that worships a deadly Fever. A fever that blesses half of its victims with mysterious gifts. But then Elegy is summoned to hear a prophecy--her, and the most ruthless of Talusar generals, Rava Vidar. Brought face to face, they learn that one of them will lead their people to victory over the other ... but they don't know which. And at the center of both of their fates: a man. A man who, Elegy is told, she will fall in love with. In just one day, Elegy's old life--her job, her purpose, and her future--is over. She and Rava are destined to collide, with the fate of their nations hanging in the balance. And when they do, only one will be left standing. Elegy intends to make sure it's her.-- Front book flap

Riverwork

"A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary life: from the cult-favourite poet and author of The Baudelaire Fractal comes a glittering and erudite new novel of Paris. Some ruins are invisible. Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, Lucy Frost has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris's academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt's youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river's documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers - and laundries. She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river's laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost. Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers."-- Provided by publisher

RFK Jr.

"A revelatory portrait of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chronicling his battles with addiction and his astonishing journey from entitled scion to environmental activist to a prominent member of the president's cabinet, based on RFK Jr.'s secret journals and the author's interviews with dozens of sources close to him."-- Provided by publisher

Rasputin Swims the Potomac

Reporter Clarence Thomas Jr. is looking for a great story, former country music teen star Faith Spack has parlayed her fame into a job at the White House, and the two-term incumbent president is campaigning for a constitutionally dubious third term. After an outbreak at a campaign rally, a mysterious new pandemic of "weeping sickness" sweeps the nation, threatening the president's hold on the Oval Office. Desperate to retain power, he enlists the mystical pro wrestler Rasputin to help ensure his reelection and guarantee additional seasons of his presidential reality TV show, The Real West Wing. But as Rasputin's appeal threatens to exceed the president's, and the wrestler's supposedly supernatural powers start to seem like the real thing, the campaign finds itself trapped in a spandex-clad destiny no number of executive orders can control, one in which both Clarence and Faith are compelled to play increasingly large parts. Hilarious, compelling, and tragically relevant, Rasputin Swims the Potomac is both an escape and a warning, a scathing satire that explores the twists and turns of American democracy as it hurtles toward authoritarianism.

Radical Duke

When Danielle Allen unearthed a parchment of the Declaration of Independence buried away in Sussex, England, little did she know that she had discovered a story of historical magnitude that would alter our understanding of British and American history. Revealing that the Age of Revolution began earlier than we thought--not with the Boston patriots nor with the Parisian Jacobins, but in Britain itself--Allen demonstrates in Radical Duke that the rights of man, the theory of revolution, and calls for popular sovereignty all emerged from the radical energies of London before they spread across the Atlantic and the Channel. At the center of this new age was Charles Lennox, the progressive Third Duke of Richmond, a rarely cited historical figure who becomes the biographical focus of Allen's groundbreaking work. Even with royal blood coursing through his veins, the handsome, gallivanting Duke (1735-1806) preferred to rub shoulders with ordinary folk--supporting the rights of jurors, freedom of the press, and religious toleration. As Allen shows, from 1767 to 1782, he was England's leading voice of opposition to the Crown, and, as the leader of the Sussex militia, even a threat to the King's power. But the Duke did not challenge the Crown alone. The archives have long hidden the covert alliance between the young Duke and his age-mate Thomas Paine, the future author of Common Sense. While working as an obscure tax collector, Paine was engaged by the Duke to contribute to the most influential but anonymous newspaper essays of the age, The Letters of Junius, which spawned sedition trials, defined the rights of man, and brought England to the brink of revolution. Along with a small cadre of radicals, Paine and the Duke fired hearts across two continents and secretly stoked a burgeoning political movement. Throughout Radical Duke, Allen sets the record straight. Through archival evidence, confirmed with computational tools, she reveals the anonymous authors of the inflammatory Junius letters; she also identifies a new Paine work, his first book, The Juryman's Touchstone, cowritten in 1771. In the end, the Duke swerved. He did not advocate the overthrow of the monarchy but remained loyal to both Crown and people, launching an age of reform. With her penetrating prose, Allen resuscitates a seminal political figure who has been egregiously neglected throughout history.

Prestige Drama

"In Derry, the locals are already in a twist about the arrival of Hollywood actress Monica Logue to research her role for a show about the Troubles--and then she goes missing. Everyone has a story to tell--about Monica's possible whereabouts, and about the historic events that brought her here in the first place: the show's screenwriter, desperate for this last shot at success; the grieving mother whose story he's adapting; the ex-IRA member who knows the price of survival; the local psychic who's seen too much... Prestige Drama brings to life a chorus of characters as they locate themselves in Monica's disappearance, and in the truth about their own history."-- Front cover flap

Polar War

Russian spies. Nuclear submarines. Sabotaged pipelines. Undersea communications severed in the dark of night. The fastest-warming place on earth--where apartment buildings, hospitals, and homes crumble daily as permafrost melts and villages get washed away by rising seas--the Arctic stands at the crossroads of geopolitical ambition and environmental catastrophe. As climate change thaws the northern latitudes, opening once ice-bound shipping lanes and access to natural resources, the world's military powers are rushing to stake their claims in this increasingly strategic region. We've entered a new cold war--and every day it grows hotter. In Polar War, Kenneth R. Rosen takes readers on an extraordinary journey across the changing face of the far north. Through intimate portraits of scientists, soldiers, and Indigenous community leaders representing the interests of twenty-one countries across four continents, he witnesses firsthand how rising temperatures and growing tensions are reshaping life above and below the Arctic Circle. He finds himself on the trail of Navy SEALs training for arctic warfare, embarks on Coast Guard patrols monitoring Russian incursions, participates in close-quarter-combat training aboard foreign icebreakers in the Arctic sea ice, and visits remote research stations where international cooperation is giving way to espionage and the search for long-frozen biological weapons. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and three years of reporting from the frontlines of climate change and great power competition, Rosen blends incisive analysis with the vivid immediacy of a travelogue. His deeply researched and personal accounts capture the diverse landscapes, people, and conflicted interests that define this complex northern region. The result is both an elegy for a vanishing landscape and an urgent warning about how the race for Arctic dominance could spark the next global conflict.

Poking the Squid

"The secret sex lives of animals are not so secret anymore, thanks to this brilliant, punchy illustrated guide to how the other 99.99% get it on. In delightful watercolor comics of pregnant seahorse dads, spider oral sex, and the four-headed echidna penis, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland takes us on a wild biodiversity ride through queerness, infidelity, consent, divorce, sex change, and even sexual cannibalism in the animal world. Poking the Squid illustrates the splendid diversity of nature's eroticism. For too long, science has prudishly obscured the wildly creative kinkiness of animal sexual behavior. But Poking the Squid celebrates how assumptions about sex are shifting. Ireland interviews researchers probing the leading edge of animal reproductive biology and, with the help of her cats Ursula and Pudge, brings readers along as she learns the latest discoveries that implode traditional notions of sex roles, relationships, and just who is mounting whom. These researchers are making dolphin vaginal popsicles, retrieving sperm packets from male squid mouths, and documenting dolphin orgies. From the externalized clitoris of the spotted hyena to mating-by-fusion in anglerfish, Poking the Squid draws on decades of feminist and queer theory to show that sexual diversity is biodiversity, and boisterous boinking is only natural. Ireland reminds us that we humans, from habitat destruction to climate change, impact all of animal life, including their private lives. Yet Earth's sexual ecosystem is filled with joy, resilience, and vitality--a balm to climate grief and a reason to protect all forms of nature's pleasure. And by illuminating and celebrating animal diversity, Poking the Squid invites us to embrace our own." -- Provided by publisher

One State under God

"One State Under God is the first broad, synthetic history of religion in Texas, a critical narrative that weaves together the many strands of religion in the state. This story begins with prehistoric Texans, and moves on to tell the intertwined religious histories of Comanche warriors, Spanish invaders, irreligious Anglo colonists, slaves, slaveholders, freethinking frontiersmen, prohibitionists, agrarian insurgents, Latino farmworkers, and Muslim immigrants, as well as the equally colorful and attention-grabbing fundamentalists and religious politicians that the state has become known for. Religion dominates the landscape (literally, in the form of giant crosses) of Texas, shapes culture, and determines state politics. While recent history gives the impression that Texas was naturally and inevitably a religious state, Locke argues that it was not always so, from the struggles of isolated Catholic parishes in New Spain, to the prohibition of Protestant churches, to the popularity of free thought amongst newly arrived immigrants." -- Provided by publisher

On Eating

"As a girl, I ate like a king. So begins beloved author, journalist, and influencer Alicia Kennedy's captivating new book. On Eating is more than a memoir; in true Alicia Kennedy style, it is also on desire, on the roles of women "in the kitchen," on domesticity, on diaspora, on foodways and food sovereignty, on home and how we find home through food, on how food can help us bring us back to those we love. Beautifully rooted in place-from Long Island (on oysters, on martinis) to San Juan (on plantains, on sugar), On Eating is not only a provocative bildungsroman and a celebration of appetite, it also challenges each of us to consider our own relationship with food, and how our need to eat-to live-impacts the world. Ultimately, On Eating is a paean to food and those who grow and cook it, asking the urgent questions in our world today about what and how we eat." -- Provided by publisher

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

"In contemporary Paris, a narrator and two companions explore the life and work of Gertrude Stein: a subversive imagining of a truly subversive female artist."-- Provided by publisher

My World Is Melting

"Norwegian journalist Line Nagell Ylvisåker lives with her family in Longyearbyen, the world?s most northerly town. The settlement is in Svalbard, an archipelago in a region where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else on the planet. In 2015, a devastating avalanche struck the town center, claiming the lives of a young girl and a father. The following autumn brought rain and landslides. When winter arrived, a second avalanche smashed into yet more of Longyearbyen?s homes. The recurring storms and mild weather begin to make Line feel worried. What is happening to her town and to the Arctic? In search of answers, she talks to a meteorologist who was herself buried in the first avalanche. She visits a trapper who has spent 40 inhospitable winters in Svalbard. She follows the sea currents and weather systems; hunts for the fossils of Svalbard's ancient forests; and encounters three polar bears while out hiking with her children. Along the way, she records the changes Longyearbyen has been through and reflects on the paradoxes of a town built on coal mining and tourism." -- Author's website