ODY New Books Collection

Our Fragile Freedoms

In this collection of essays and reviews, renowned historian Eric Foner explores the evolving meaning of American freedom and its ongoing struggles. Covering topics from slavery and the Civil War to civil rights and contemporary politics, Foner examines key figures, events, and constitutional issues with clarity and insight. Highlighting how rights can be gained, lost, and must be continually defended, the book underscores the relevance of history in understanding today's political challenges and debates over how the past is remembered and taught.

The Original

Raised on the fringes of her uncle's crumbling Oxfordshire estate, gifted art forger Grace plots her escape until the arrival of a man claiming to be her long-lost cousin forces her to confront shifting boundaries of identity and truth.

On Earth as It Is beneath

"In a remote corner of Brazil, life in a forgotten prison takes a sadistic, deadly turn."--Page 4 of cover

The Old Man by the Sea

Domenico Starnone's ,'The Old Man by the Sea' is a slim masterpiece of a novel about an 82-year-old Neapolitan man, Nicola, who has spent his entire life telling stories, becoming very, very good at it. In words, with his pen, in the notebook he carries with him everywhere, he records life's minutiae, its ephemera, those vibrating essences and almost imperceptible atoms of existence that most of us barely notice but that constitute the very stuff of life. Now, ensconced in a house on the dunes south of Rome, Nicola spends his mornings writing, watching the waves, and observing Lu, a store clerk in her twenties whose graceful canoeing stirs faint echoes of his mother--a glamorous, headstrong woman who defied convention with her beauty and creativity. As Nicola reflects on the women who shaped him and the passions he has never outgrown, he finds himself drawn into the nefarious intrigues of the small seaside town and its inhabitants. He will end by embarking on an improbable and ill-advised kayaking adventure of his own with Lu's young son.-- Provided by publisher

No Sense in Wishing

"An essay collection from culture critic Lawrence Burney that is a personal and analytical look at his home city of Baltimore, music from throughout the global Black diaspora, and the traditions that raised him. For fans of Hanif Abdurraqib, Kiese Laymon, and Isaac Fitzgerald. There are moments throughout our lives when we discover an artist, an album, a film, or a cultural artifact that leaves a lasting impression, helping inform how we understand the world, and ourselves, moving forward. In No Sense in Wishing, Lawrence Burney explores these profound interactions with incisive and energizing prose, offering us a personal and critical perspective on the people, places, music, and art that transformed him. In a time when music is spearheading Black Americans' connection with Africans on The Continent, Burney takes trips to cover the bubbling creative scenes in Lagos and Johannesburg that inspire teary-eyed reflections of self and belonging. Seeing his mother perform as the opening act at a Gil Scott-Heron show as a child inspires an essay about parent-child relationships and how personal taste is often inherited. And a Maryland crab feast with family facilitates an assessment of how the Black people in his home state have historically improvised paths for their liberation. Taking us on a journey from the streets of Baltimore to the concert halls of Lagos, No Sense in Wishing is a kaleidoscopic exploration of Burney's search for self. With its gutsy and uncompromising criticism alongside intimate personal storytelling, it's like an album that hits all the right notes, from a promising writer on the rise."-- Provided by publisher

No New Things

"From award-winning sustainability expert Ashlee Piper, a witty, no-nonsense guide to regaining control over your time, consumerist impulses, and financial and mental wellness. For nearly two years, Ashlee Piper challenged herself to buy nothing new. And in the process, she got out of debt, cut clutter, crushed her goals, and became healthier and happier than ever--all the things she'd always wanted to do but 'never had time to' (because she was mindlessly scrolling, shopping, spending, and stressing). After a decade of fine-tuning, No New Things guides readers through the same revolutionary simple challenge that has helped thousands of global participants find freedom and fulfillment in just thirty days. The book follows the rise of what Piper calls 'conditioned consumerism' and how it sneakily hijacks our time, money, and mental bandwidth, as well as harms the planet. From there, readers follow customizable daily action items that bring about the ease and richness of a life less bogged down by spending and stuff, without compromising on style, convenience, or fun. Whether you're a bona fide shopaholic or someone who just wants to buy less and live more, No New Things is the antidote to modern overwhelm."-- Provided by publisher

Night People

"Night People conjures the undeniable magic of the city's bygone nightlife--a time when clubs were diverse, glamorous, and a little lawless, and each night brought a heady mix of music, ambition, danger, delight, and possibility. It's about the beauty of what you can create with just two Technics and a mixer, in a golden era before Giuliani, camera phones, and bottle service upended everything. It's also about a teenager finding his way--stalking DJ Stretch Armstrong and biting his mixes, crate-digging in every corner of New York, grinding gig after gig through a decade of incredible music--and finding a community of people who, in their own strange, cracked ways, lived for the night. Organized around the venues that defined his experience of the downtown scene, Ronson evokes the specific rush of that decade and those spaces--where fashion folks and rappers on the rise danced alongside club kids and 9-to-5'ers--and invites us into the tribe of creatives and partiers who came alive when the sun went down. A heartfelt coming-of-age tale, Night People is the definitive account of '90s New York nightlife and the making of a musical mastermind."-- Provided by publisher

Lost in the Dark

"A garishly painted figurine contains a terrible curse; the ten-year anniversary of a sensational horror film shot in an abandoned mine reveals stunning secrets; endnotes for a book review uncover a strange high-tech pathogen; a man witnesses something uncanny and unexplained as his friend succumbs to a watery death; a seasick woman aboard a ferry is pursued by a barnacle-covered specter; a professor reveals the mysterious connection between Joseph Conrad and Peter Pan; a man encounters the ghost of his lost sister in a liminal space between the land and sea; an academic meets a mythical creature on a mysterious island." -- Provided by publisher

Little World

"He has no notion of how to care for a saint. Even a small one. Does not even believe... still. Catholic or not. You don't turn away a saint. Little World opens with the body of a child saint stranded in the Australian desert. Her name is unknown, as is the story of her life and the status of her canonization. She arrives in a box made of canoe timber, and Orrin Bird is dressed in his best clothes to receive her. As the novel sweeps across time and place, from the 1950s to the present day, we encounter the lives the saint touches: from the retired engineer who unwittingly becomes her custodian, to a woman driving across the Nullarbor Plain in the mid-1970s with a pair of young lovers, and ending in contemporary Victoria. A haunting reflection on violence and the interdependency of all things, Little World is a dazzling feat by one of Australia's finest writers." -- Cover, page 4

Life, Law & Liberty

"Justice Anthony Kennedy was at the ideological center of a closely divided U.S. Supreme Court for thirty years. Often writing landmark opinions in pivotal cases, he affirmed and redefined liberty for our nation--protecting political speech, upholding a women's right to choose, abolishing the death penalty or minors, and legalizing gay marriage... In [this book], Kennedy tells his story--filled with personal heartbreak and incredible accomplishment--and reflects on the nuanced role of a judge." -- Dust jacket flap

If You Love It, Let It Kill You

"Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P.-the metafictional version-has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the flagship university, living with a fellow academic, and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. Her sister's sprawling family lives just across the street, and their long-divorced, deeply complicated parents have also newly moved to town. One day, Hana learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently-and soon-in her ex-husband's debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news-she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains-but the morning after baking mac 'n' cheese from scratch for her nephew's sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she's long been enjoying is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous mid-life crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean's office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek-like chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana's auto-fictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body. Playing with the subtleties and strangeness of contemporary life, If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression for readers of Miranda July's All Fours and Sigrid Nunez's The Friend."-- Provided by publisher

I Went to Prison so You Won't
Have to

"Ambushed by five armed FBI agents at Reagan airport, shackled in leg irons, and strip-searched, [Peter] Navarro became the first ever top presidential aide in US history to be put in federal prison for defending the Constitution. ... [This book] presents Peter's raw, unfiltered account ot what really happens when the American justice system is weaponized for political revenge. Told through a powerful exchange of personal letters between Peter and his fiancée [Bonnie Brenner], this book pulls back the curtain on a corrupt and bloated federal prison system." --Flap page 1 of dust jacket

How to Think about AI

"People are confused about what artificial intelligence is, what it can and cannot do, what is yet to come, and whether AI is good or bad for humanity and civilization -- whether it will provide solutions to mankind's major challenges or become our gravest existential threat. There is also ongoing debate how we should regulate AI and where we should draw moral boundaries on its use. In How to Think About AI, Richard Susskind draws on his experience of working on AI since the early 1980s. For Susskind, balancing the benefits and threats of artificial intelligence -- saving humanity with and from AI -- is the defining challenge of our age. He explores the history of AI and possible scenarios for its future. His views on AI are not always conventional. He positions ChatGPT and generative AI as no more than the latest chapter in the ongoing story of AI and claims we are still at the foothills of developments. He argues that to think responsibly about the impact of AI requires us to look well beyond today's technologies, suggesting that not yet invented technologies will have far greater impact on us in the 2030s than the tools we have today. This leads Susskind to discuss the possibility of conscious machines, remarkable new AI-enabled virtual worlds, and the impact of AI on the evolution of human beings." -- Jacket flap

Heart the Lover

"'You knew I'd write a book about you someday.' Our narrator understands good love stories--their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules. In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self. Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today." -- Provided by publisher

Gertrude Stein

"Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained andfostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this ... biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonniáere, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, ... presenting us with this towering literary figure as we've never seen her before. ... Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, [this book] is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself,in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible."-- Provided by publisher

Friends until the End

"Edmund Burke and Charles Fox made common political cause in 18th-century Britain: they supported the rebellious American colonies, attacked the British slave trade, defended religious liberty and attempted to shield Britain's credit from the crisis-prone East India Company. The two men were an improbable pair. But the hard-drinking, mistress-collecting Fox loved and admired Burke, feelings that the clean-living political philosopher and statesman warmly reciprocated. 'Friends Until the End' traces Burke and Fox's relationship through three key events: the American Revolution; the impeachment of the East India Company's governor-general; and the French Revolution, which ended their political union and shattered their friendship."-- Provided by publisher

Food Fight

"Food is life but our food system is killing us. Designed in a different century for a different purpose--to mass-produce cheap calories to prevent famine--it's now generating obesity, ill-health and premature death. We need to transform it, into one that is capable of nourishing all eight billion of us and the planet we live on. In Food Fight, Stuart Gillespie reveals how the food system we once relied upon for global nutrition has warped into the very thing making us sick. From its origins in colonial plunder, through the last few decades of neoliberalism, the system now lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful transnationals whose playbook is geared to profit at any cost. Both unflinching exposé and revolutionary call to arms, Food Fight shines a light inside the black box of politics and power and, crucially, maps a way towards a new system that gives us hope for a future of global health and justice."-- Provided by publisher

The Feeling of Iron

"In 1941, SS Major Hans Lichtblau is put in charge of a research program that uses concentration camp prisoners as guinea pigs, but also as lab assistants, organized into a unit known as the Kommando Gardenia. The experiments are conducted as part of the infamous 'final solution to the Jewish problem' and with the Nazi advance in Russia and the colonization of the Eastern territories as the backdrop. The Kommando includes Shlomo Libowitz, born in a Polish shtetl and converted to Zionism in the Lager, and Anton Epstein, an assimilated Jew from the Prague bourgeoisie, convinced that the only possible answer to barbarism is socialism. Shlomo and Anton survive the war and Lichtblau's treatment of them to become inconvenient witnesses of a world that has ended and yet still determines the present. Forty years later, on behalf of different and apparently irreconcilable clients, the two veterans set out on the trail of Lichtblau, who is fighting the Sandinistas on behalf of the CIA, raiding villages and trafficking in drugs. Anton and Shlomo's manhunt is a race against time, because one life may be too short to settle all accounts. At once a thrilling spy story that spans two continents and two eras and a novel of ideas about a civilization in crisis, 'The feeling of iron' is Alonge's English-language debut." -- Inside cover flap

Exit Lane

"After a postgraduation drive from Iowa City to NYC, Teddy and Marin have both had enough of each other to last the rest of their lives. But that doesn't stop their paths from crossing over eight rocky years, punctuated by chance encounters and transatlantic visits, on a journey that eventually brings them right back to where it all started." --Page 4 of cover

The Einstein of Sex

An illuminating portrait of a lost thinker, German-Jewish sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld. More than a century ago, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, dubbed the "Einstein of Sex," grew famous (and infamous) for his liberating theory of sexual relativity. Today, he's been largely forgotten. Journalist Daniel Brook retraces Hirschfeld's rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles rigid, Hirschfeld taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients toward self-acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin's cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world's queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis, who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to America, Asia, and the Middle East to research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late-in-life interracial romance, he came to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirschfeld spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism. Rich in passion and intellect, The Einstein of Sex at last brings together this unsung icon's work on sexuality, gender, and race and recovers the visionary who first saw beyond the binaries. A century after his groundbreaking work--as the fights for personal freedom and societal acceptance rage on - Hirschfeld's gift for thinking beyond the confines of his world has much to teach us.