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The Art of Insight: How to Have More Aha! Moments
by Malcolm Constable Charles F. KieferInspiration Whenever You Need It We have all experienced it: the jolt of an insight arriving like a thunderclap, unexpectedly and without warning. But what if insights could be accessed more reliably? Drawing on years of research, reflection, and experiences with colleagues, friends, and clients, Charles Kiefer and Malcolm Constable present a thorough, pragmatic approach for dependably generating fresh thoughts and perspectives. Guided by their user-friendly practices and helpful exercises (both in the book and online at www.TAOI-Online-Learning.com), you'll develop your own personal approach to cultivating a mindset where insights come so readily that new or long-standing problems are solved with confidence and ease. “Creating insights isn't a magical process-this book provides a practical framework for generating insights for yourself and your organization. We've used many of these techniques with our innovation teams and they work.” -Wayne Delker, Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Vice President, The Clorox Company “Conventional wisdom holds insights to be elusive and mysterious. Kiefer and Constable turn conventional wisdom on its head with this marvelous addition to the libraries of all those devoted to improving the quality of their thinking.” -Len Schlesinger, President, Babson College, and former Vice Chairman, Limited Brands “In my forty-five years in business, I have found insights to be invaluable in strategy formulation and vital in forming best-in-class products and services. This book provides a simple road map of how to achieve such insights.” -Dick Kovacevich, retired Chairman and CEO, Wells Fargo & Company
Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth
by David C. KortenNEW EDITION, REVISED AND UPDATED Nearly two years after the economic meltdown, joblessness and foreclosures are still endemic, Wall Street executives are once again getting massive bonuses, and our leaders in Washington lack the will to make desperately needed fundamental changes to the economy. Change will have to come from below. Agenda for a New Economy is the handbook for that revolution. In this revised and updated edition David Korten has fleshed out his vision of the alternative to the corporate Wall Street economy: a Main Street economy based on locally owned, community-oriented “living enterprises” whose success is measured as much by their positive impact on people and the environment as by their positive balance sheet. We will lose nothing in the process because, as Korten ably demonstrates, the supposed services Wall Street offers are simply a con game. And Korten now offers more in-depth advice on how to mount a grassroots campaign to bring about an economy based on shared prosperity, ecological stewardship, and citizen democracy.
The Self-Made Myth: And the Truth about How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed
by Mike Lapham Brian MillerThe Self-Made Myth exposes the false claim that business success is the result of heroic individual effort with little or no outside help. Brian Miller and Mike Lapham bust the myth and present profiles of business leaders who recognize the public investments and supports that made their success possible—including Warren Buffett, Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s, New Belgium Brewing CEO Kim Jordan, and others. The book also thoroughly demolishes the claims of supposedly self-made individuals such as Donald Trump and Ross Perot. How we view the creation of wealth and individual success is critical because it shapes our choices on taxes, regulation, public investments in schools and infrastructure, CEO pay, and more. It takes a village to raise a business—it’s time to recognize that fact.
Street Smart Sustainability: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Profitably Greening Your Organization's DNA (false)
by David Mager Joe SibiliaGo Green While Making Green You already know why your company should go green. This comprehensive guide tells you how to do it profitably. It details every step of the process—from getting employee buy-in and conducting a current sustainability audit to developing a plan of action and measuring progress. Nuts-and-bolts guidance helps you make continuous, cost-effective improvements and shift the prevailing business culture by infusing green practices into your organization’s very DNA. Through illustrative examples from a wide variety of industries, this book shows how to: • Design sustainable products • Green your facilities • Find green vendors • Use renewable energy • Reduce harmful emissions • Recycle waste products, and more The emphasis is on practicality—stand-alone chapters you can read when you need them and tools you can use to implement change in any area of your organization. enough
Organizational Project Management: Linking Strategy and Projects
by Pmp Rosemary HossenloppImprove Your Business Results Through Organizational Project ManagementOrganizational project management (OPM) aligns project deliverables with strategy. Understanding this emerging process is essential for all stakeholders, from the corporate sponsor to project team members. OPM is a valuable new tool that can enhance your organization's successful execution of projects in alignment with strategic priorities.Under the editorship of Rosemary Hossenlopp, PMP, ten contributors from around the globe, representing a wide variety of industries, offer valuable insights on how OPM can give any organization the competitive edge. They discuss how to• Improve business outcomes• Better align project work with strategies• Set priorities• Organize project workWhether you direct projects, fund projects, or conduct project work, Organizational Project Management: Linking Strategy and Projects is vital to your understanding of this emerging business discipline.
The Confidence Myth: Why Women Undervalue Their Skills, and How to Get Over It
by Helene LernerNot only do we need more female leaders at the top, but we need more women at all levels of business, government, and nonprofits to step up—there's no time to waste. The problem, says Helene Lerner, isn't so much that women lack confidence but that they misunderstand what confidence really is. True confidence isn't fearlessness; it's having the courage to jump in even when your knees are shaking. Any woman who waits until she feels 100 percent confident before offering a big idea or asking for a raise or promotion will never get anywhere. Drawing on her own and other female leaders' experiences, as well as on her survey of over 500 working women, Lerner lays out practical strategies for beating this confidence myth and overcoming obstacles like gender bias. The book features dozens of Confidence Sparks, simple but powerful exercises and techniques that can catapult anyone's career to the next level.
The Power of Servant-Leadership
by Robert K. GreenleafBased on the seminal work of Robert K. Greenleaf, a former AT&T executive who coined the term almost thirty years ago, servant-leadership emphasizes an emerging approach to leadership—one which puts serving others, including employees, customers, and community, first. The Power of Servant Leadership is a collection of eight of Greenleaf's most compelling essays on servant-leadership. These essays, published together in one volume for the first time, contain many of Greenleaf's best insights into the nature and practice of servant-leadership and show his continual refinement of the servant-as-leader concept. In addition, several of the essays focus on the related issues of spirit, commitment to vision, and wholeness.
Yes Lives in the Land of No: A Tale of Triumph Over Negativity
by Steve Ventura BJ GallagherIt seems like everywhere we turn, we're confronted by shaking heads, thumbs down, brick walls, brush-offs, and closed doors. NOs surround us--in our workplaces, in our communities and places of worship, in government, in social settings, in schools, and even within our families. Whether you're applying for a job, making a request, looking for a house, dating to find the right mate, seeking some type of approval, selling a product or an idea (or yourself), or trying to organize others into getting something accomplished, you're going to encounter rebuffs and resistance. What can you do to overcome so much negativity? This wise, insightful parable follows our hero who ventures into the Land of NO in search of YES. He watches well-intentioned characters flounder and fail--while noticing other characters using different approaches and achieving success. Our observant hero learns from others' experiences, as well as his own. Through his journey, you will discover how you, too, can persist in the face of frequent NOs--both the NOs uttered by people around you and, perhaps more importantly, the insidious NOs whispered by your own inner voices. The second half of the book takes you from parable to practice--with proven tips, tools, and strategies to help you persevere, develop tenacity, persist in the face of rejection, and overcome the inertia of the status quo. Taken together, the two parts of this book provide a how-to manual that's both practical and entertaining. It will help you find the YESes you seek--faster, more effectively, and with a lot less discouragement and despair in the process.
Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (Bk Currents Ser.)
by Paul PolakBased on his 25 years of experience, Polak explodes what he calls the "Three Great Poverty Eradication Myths": that we can donate people out of poverty, that national economic growth will end poverty, and that Big Business, operating as it does now, will end poverty. Polak shows that programs based on these ideas have utterly failed--in fact, in sub-Saharan Africa poverty rates have actually gone up. These failed top-down efforts contrast sharply with the grassroots approach Polak and IDE have championed: helping the dollar-a-day poor earn more money through their own efforts. Amazingly enough, unexploited market opportunities do exist for the desperately poor. Polak describes how he and others have identified these opportunities and have developed innovative, low-cost tools that have helped in lifting 17 million people out of poverty.
The Resilient Investor: A Plan for Your Life, Not Just Your Money
by Michael Kramer Christopher Peck Hal BrillIf you want to build a better life and a better world—and really be prepared for any possible future in these turbulent times—you need to become a resilient investor! This trailblazing guide will expand your ideas of investing way beyond Wall Street. Your time, your energy, and the things you own are investments too, and you'll learn to diversify them in ways that move you toward your life goals. The Resilient Investment Map lays out all your assets—personal and physical as well as financial—and then provides three essential, timely strategies (Close to Home, Sustainable Global Economy, and Evolutionary Investing) that will help you grow each of them. The goal is to become more resilient: able to anticipate disturbance, rebuild as necessary, and improve when possible. You'll discover that the choices making you more resilient also enhance our communities, our economy, and the planet—building real wealth for all.
Why Digital Transformations Fail: The Surprising Disciplines of How to Take Off and Stay Ahead
by Tony SaldanhaFormer Procter & Gamble Vice President for IT and Shared Services, Tony Saldanha gives you the keys to a successful digital transformation: a proven five-stage model and a disciplined process for executing it. Digital transformation is more important than ever now that we're in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds are becoming ever more blurred. But fully 70 percent of digital transformations fail. Why? Tony Saldanha, a globally awarded industry thought-leader who led operations around the world and major digital changes at Procter & Gamble, discovered it's not due to innovation or technological problems. Rather, the devil is in the details: a lack of clear goals and a disciplined process for achieving them. In this book, Saldanha lays out a five-stage process for moving from digitally automating processes here and there to making digital technology the very backbone of your company. For each of these five stages, Saldanha describes two associated disciplines vital to the success of that stage and a checklist of questions to keep you on track. You want to disrupt before you are disrupted—be the next Netflix, not the next Blockbuster. Using dozens of case studies and his own considerable experience, Saldanha shows how digital transformation can be made routinely successful, and instead of representing an existential threat, it will become the opportunity of a lifetime.
Untapped Agility: Seven Leadership Moves to Take Your Transformation to the Next Level
by Jesse FewellThis balanced guide to agility gets past the hype and frustration to help frustrated leaders transform their agile transformations. Agile transformations are supposed to make organizations modern, competitive, and relevant. But in the well-intentioned effort to move into the future, change leaders find themselves frustrated by pushback, limited impact, poor practices, and unfair criticism. What's going on? Jesse Fewell's book cuts through the "quick-fix" hype of agile theory and explains a recurring transformational pattern that unpacks what holds organizations back. The boost is the initial gains from logical first steps; the barrier is the unavoidable roadblock that must come next; and the rebound is the way forward to further gains by leaning against the concept of the original boost. With these counterintuitive rebounds, Fewell identifies seven leadership moves that can be used to unblock stalled agile transformations. No, your transformation is not a failure. It turns out the buy-in, the talent, the alignment, and the growth you need to break through are already in front of you; it's all simply hidden under the surface—undiscovered, unutilized, and untapped.
Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life
by Kevin CashmanThis classic bestseller by Kevin Cashman pioneered a holistic approach to leadership development: grow the whole person to grow the whole leader. The third edition turns leadership development inside out for a new generation of authentic, purpose-inspired leaders.This book was the first to reveal and build on a foundational insight: we lead by virtue of who we are. Cashman's trademark whole-person approach is essential to success in today's talent-starved marketplace and provides a measurable return on investment. Framed in seven simple yet profound personal mastery areas, this book serves as an integrated coaching experience that helps leaders understand how to harness their authentic, value-creating influence and elevate their impact as individuals, in teams, and in organizations. The third edition contains updated content in the first three chapters-Personal Mastery, Purpose Mastery, and Interpersonal Mastery (the most foundational chapters in the book)-and includes a new chapter, Story Mastery: Leading with Inspiration. This chapter deepens comprehension of authenticity, provides a more significant sense of meaning and purpose, and inspires more profound interpersonal connection. For everyone from CEOs to emerging leaders, this long-awaited third edition advances the art and science of leadership, which makes the book even more relevant today than when it was first published.
Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless: What I Learned from 9/11, the NFL, and Ukraine
by Thom MayerPractical leadership for difficult times, from a crisis management expert who has led response teams through the 9/11 Pentagon attack, NFL on-field medical emergencies, and the war in Ukraine.Dr. Thom Mayer knows first-hand that true leadership stems from our actions, not our positions, especially in times of crisis.Drawing on his experiences heading the 9/11 Pentagon rescue efforts, dealing with on-field emergencies in the NFL (he was at Damar Hamlin’s bedside after his injury), training mobile response medical teams in Ukraine, and more, Mayer covers such topics as:Why trust is vital for innovationThe critical role of failure in devising new ways of leadingHow questions fuel innovative actionWhy every leader should have the title Chief Story TellerThe importance of distinguishing between data, knowledge, and wisdomEach chapter begins with a provocative and seemingly contradictory statement, like the book’s title, and includes stories, historical examples, and literary lessons selected to guide pragmatic and practical solutions.Leadership is worthless because it is something you say, a noun. But leading is priceless because it is a verb—it is the things we do that make a difference. From Pentagon generals to corporate CEOs to football players on the field to parents driving their kids to school, Mayer shows how leaders ensure that their actions will help others to succeed.
The Influence Effect: A New Path to Power for Women Leaders
by Jill Flynn Kathryn Heath Mary Davis Holt Diana FaisonWomen hold over half of all professional jobs today, yet they represent just four percent of CEOs in the S&P 500. Even worse, that percentage has barely budged in a decade.That's where The Influence Effect comes in. Based on recent research by the authors of the New York Times bestseller Break Your Own Rules, this book begins with the premise that when it comes to political savvy, what works for men at work won't work for women. Packed with the authors' coaching insights and their "Big Five" strategies designed specifically for female executives, this book guides women to break past political barriers and get right to what they really want—influence. Authors Kathryn Heath, Jill Flynn, Mary Davis Holt, and Diana Faison make success far less complex, helping women overcome entrenched resistance to their ideas, create their own access points to power, and attract followers in a way that works for them. They present tools such as Influence Loops (to organically increase influence), Personal Scaffolding (to grow a groundswell of support), and Scenario Thinking (a savvy twist on strategic planning). These and other smart strategies finally allow women to succeed on their own terms.Illustrated with dozens of engaging, real stories culled from the authors' many years of coaching experience, The Influence Effect moves women past the politics problem and offers a new path to power. Actually, it's more than a path—it's a runway—it frees women to take off in their careers on their own terms. The Influence Effect will work for women, not because gender barriers will no longer exist, but because they will no longer hold women back.
Sprout!: Everything I Need to Know about Sales I Learned from My Garden
by Alan Vengel Greg WrightSales has always been a high burnout profession. These days, with the intense focus on quarterly earnings reports, there is more pressure on sales professionals than ever before. The relentless push for immediate results can leave salespeople exhausted, frustrated, and wondering why they ever got themselves into this business. And it can leave sales organizations with a serious turnover problem. SPROUT! was written by two long-time sales veterans to help their fellow professionals rediscover enthusiasm for their chosen profession and to help sales organizations retain top talent. Vengel and Wright use a page-turning story to outline a new strategy for sales, one that will make salespeople better able to cope with the inevitable ups and downs and take a more effective, long-term approach. As the book begins, Marsha Molloy has had it. Once a top pharmaceutical sales representative so crackerjack her nickname was Marsha Money, she's been laid low by a tough economy and just plain exhaustion. The once-hungry top producer has seemingly lost her touch and grown indifferent to a sales culture that appears to value faxes, emails, and cell phone chats instead of the relationship building that had been her forte. An avid gardener on a visit to her local nursery, Marsha runs into Bob Rawlings, the store's new owner and an ex-sales professional himself. They begin to chat, and Marsha mentions her career frustrations. Bob replies that he'd had the same problem, but found that the more he began treating his business like his garden, the better his business grew - and a happier, more relaxed salesman appeared. Marsha is intrigued but puzzled - how could sales be like gardening? Bob takes Marsha under his wing and, with the assistance of several other salespeople he's mentored, teaches her the secrets of his sales garden. By using the authors' sales garden metaphor to change their whole way of thinking about sales, and by adhering to the easy, practical steps outlined in SPROUT! salespeople can beat the career blues, increase their sales, and sustain themselves for the long term.
The Long-Distance Team: Designing Your Team for Everyone's Success (The Long-Distance Worklife Series)
by Kevin Eikenberry Wayne TurmelDesign and cultivate remote work teams that actually work.From the experts who brought you The Long-Distance Leader and The Long-Distance Teammate comes the proven and practical guide for leaders to consciously design teams, define and create their desired culture, and encourage and nurture employee engagement-all from a distance. Team design and culture are often presented as separate concepts when they are in fact intertwined in the remote work setting. Using the 3C model of communication, collaboration, and cohesion, leaders will be given the tools to overcome challenges, such as proximity bias and deteriorating social connections, to create an environment where everyone can contribute and add value equally, regardless of location. The 3Cs are Communication-While communication is a fundamental part of being human, it is also a critical foundation of successful work. Without it, teams break down. Collaboration-Remote leaders face the misguided belief that physical presence is required to have a collaborative team. The truth is that proximity has nothing to do with successful collaboration. Cohesion-This dimension includes decidedly nonstructural aspects, such as relationships, trust, and accountability. While difficult to measure, a team's cohesion is critical to its success. Using this framework, leaders of all levels will learn to assess, design, and develop their communication channels, methods for remote collaboration, and ability to foster cohesion to build successful long-distance teams. While a hybrid culture will be different, it can, when done right, be better than what existed before.
Prayer for the Living: Stories
by Ben OkriTopical and timely, Booker Prize–winning author Ben Okri’s new collection of short stories blurs parallel realities and walks the line between darkness and magic.A Library Journal Best Book of 2021“No matter how different each story is in context or story line, Prayer for the Living is not simply a collection of different tales, it is a deliberate assemblage of universal truths that explores what it means to seek and to live.” —Los Angeles Review of BooksPlayful, frightening, shocking—these stories from a writer at the height of his power will make you think, or make you laugh. Sometimes they’ll make you want to look away, but they will always hold your gaze.These are stories set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, and in a printer’s shop in Lagos. Characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a woman in a dream, a man in a mirror, a little girl, a prison door, and the author himself.Each one of these twenty-four stories will make you wonder if what you see in the world can really be all there is . . .
Tigerbelle: The Wyomia Tyus Story
by Wyomia Tyus Elizabeth TerzakisA timely memoir about world record–breaking Tyus's 1964 and 1968 Olympic victories, amid the turbulence of the 1960s, along with contemporary reflections.“Tyus proves as winning a storyteller as she was a runner . . . The ‘a’ in Wyomia is silent, but thankfully, the woman who owns that name is not.” —New York Times Book Review“Tigerbelle offers a fresh perspective on the history of women’s sports in the United States. From her one-of-a-kind accomplishments on the track to her contributions to equal pay and publicity for women through the Women’s Sports Foundation, Wyomia Tyus has earned her place in the pantheon of American sports sheroes and heroes.” —Billie Jean KingThe latest from Akashic’s Edge of Sports imprint, curated by Dave Zirin.In 1968, Wyomia Tyus became the first person ever to win gold medals in the 100-meter sprint in two consecutive Olympic Games, a feat that would not be repeated for twenty years or exceeded for almost fifty. Tigerbelle chronicles Tyus’s journey from her childhood as the daughter of a tenant dairy farmer through her Olympic triumphs to her post-competition struggles to make a way for herself and other female athletes.The Hidden Figures of sport, Tigerbelle helps to fill the gap currently occupying Black women’s place in American history, providing insight not only on what it takes to be a champion but also on what it means to stake out an identity in an often hostile world. Tyus’s exciting and uplifting story offers inspiration to readers from all walks of life.With a foreword by MSNBC host Joy Reid, and an afterword by sportswriter Dave Zirin.
Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist
by Marc RibotThe paperback edition of iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot’s darkly funny and subversive collection of writing, featuring brand-new essays not included in the hardcover.“A slim yet powerful book in which Marc Ribot blends bits of memoir with strange little fictions, many of which are based on his own life and career.” —Wall Street JournalThroughout his genre-defying career as one of the most innovative musicians of our time, iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot has consistently defied expectation at every turn. Here, in the expanded paperback edition of Ribot’s first collection of writing, we see that same uncompromising sensibility at work as he playfully interrogates our assumptions about music, life, and death. Through essays—including some new material not included in the hardcover—short stories, and the occasional unfilmable film “mistreatment” that showcase the sheer range of his voice, Unstrung captures an artist whose versatility on the page rivals his dexterity onstage. In the first section of the book, "Lies and Distortion," Ribot turns his attention to his instrument--"my relation to the guitar is one of struggle; I'm constantly forcing it to be something else"--and reflects on his influences (and friends) like Robert Quine (the Voidoids) and producer Hal Willner (Saturday Night Live), while delivering an impassioned plea on behalf of artists' rights. Elsewhere, we glimpse fragments of Ribot's life as a traveling musician--he captures both the monotony of touring as well as small moments of beauty and despair on the road. In the heart of the collection, "Sorry, We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties," Ribot offers wickedly humorous short stories that synthesize the best elements of the Russian absurdist tradition with the imaginative heft of George Saunders. Taken together, these stories and essays cement Ribot's position as one of the most dynamic and creative voices of our time.
Police Brutality and White Supremacy: The Fight Against American Traditions
by Etan ThomasAn NBA veteran offers engaging interviews and reflections that explore police brutality, white supremacy, and the struggle for racial justice in America. "Thomas's interviews demand careful reading by all who want to expose racism, hold police accountable, and create an American society that practices social justice." —Library Journal, a Best Book of the Year in Political Science/Civil Rights "My family and I are extremely grateful for the support and love from my brother in the movement, Etan Thomas." —Emerald Garner, daughter of Eric Garner Etan Thomas, an eleven-year NBA veteran and lifelong advocate for social justice, weaves together his personal experiences with police violence and white supremacy with multiple interviews of family members of victims of police brutality like exonerated Central Park Five survivor Raymond Santana and Rodney King’s daughter Lora Dene King; as well as activist athletes and other public figures such as Steph Curry, Chuck D, Isiah Thomas, Sue Bird, Jake Tapper, Jemele Hill, Stan Van Gundy, Kyle Korver, Mark Cuban, Rick Strom, and many more. Thomas speaks with retired police officers about their efforts to change policing, and white allies about their experiences with privilege and their ability to influence other white people. Thomas also examines the history of racism, white supremacy, and the prevalence of both in the current moment. He looks at the origins of white supremacy in the US, dating back to the country’s inception, and explores how it was interwoven into Christianity--interviewing leading voices both in and outside of the church. Finally, with prominent voices in the media and education, Thomas discusses the continued cultivation of these injustices in American society.Police Brutality and White Supremacy demands accountability and justice for those responsible for and impacted by police violence and terror. It offers practical solutions to work against the promotion of white supremacy in law enforcement, Christianity, early education, and across the public sphere. Featuring original interviews with: Steph Curry, Chuck D, Yamiche Alcindor, Isiah Thomas, Jemele Hill, Craig Hodges, Stan Van Gundy, Mark Cuban, Jake Tapper, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Sue Bird, Kyle Korver, Rick Strom, Cenk Uygur, Tim Wise, Chris Broussard, Breanna Stewart, Rex Chapman, Stephen Jackson, Kori Mccoy, Lora Dene King, Chikesia Clemons, Raymond Santana, Alissa Findley, Amber and Ashley Carr, Michelle and Ashley Monterrosa, Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., Abiodun Oyewole, Marc Lamont Hill, Officer Carlton Berkley, Pastor John K. Jenkins Sr., Officer Joe Ested, Captain Sonia Pruitt, and Bishop Talbert Swan.
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse: Stories (Little House on the Bowery #0)
by Lonely ChristopherDennis Cooper unveils a mesmerizing debut story collection for his Little House on the Bowery fiction series.“[A] provocative and refreshing debut collection.” —Publishers Weekly “Praise seems superfluous for a book as accomplished, cohesive, and devastating as Lonely Christopher’s debut collection, so consider these words admiration instead, and admonishment: if you still think fiction counts for anything, then you should buy this book right now.” —Dale Peck, author of What We Lost and Time To Say GoodbyeA selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series. Two boys lie on a bed, one of them is already dead; they listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach and talk about suicide and love. A lonely narrator mourns the end of a relationship and the disappearance of a mysterious object as a frustrated artist jumps out of a moving car on his birthday and runs for the last streetlamp in the universe. Awkward parents and angsty teens negotiate a dark suburban landscape, searching for something they can’t name, spelling out balletic sentences of failure and shame. Helicopters menace the night sky, a horse is murdered in a kitchen, victims go missing in swamps of ambiguity, and everybody waits for what the construction of a new road into town will bring: the end of the world or something worse.The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a radical map of shortcomings in our daily experiences in the form of a debut story collection, presents thematically related windows into serious emotional trouble and monstrous love. Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar with an unyielding imagination in the lovely-ugly architecture of his stories.
Hadriana in All My Dreams: A Novel
by René DepestreLegendary Haitian author Depestre combines magic, fantasy, eroticism, and delirious humor to explore universal questions of race and sexuality.“One-of-a-kind . . . [A] ribald, free-wheeling magical-realist novel, first published in 1988 and newly, engagingly translated by Glover . . . An icon of Haitian literature serves up a hotblooded, rib-ticking, warmhearted mélange of ghost story, cultural inquiry, folk art, and véritable l’amour.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review“An exceptional novel . . . Depestre’s masterpiece and one of the greatest examples of Haitian literature.” —New York Journal of BooksHadriana in All My Dreams, winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, takes place primarily during Carnival in 1938 in the Haitian village of Jacmel. A beautiful young French woman, Hadriana, is about to marry a Haitian boy from a prominent family. But on the morning of the wedding, Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion and collapses at the altar. Transformed into a zombie, her wedding becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town, revived by an evil sorcerer, then disappears into popular legend.Set against a backdrop of magic and eroticism, and recounted with delirious humor, the novel raises universal questions about race and sexuality. The reader comes away enchanted by the marvelous reality of Haiti’s Vodou culture and convinced of Depestre’s lusty claim that all beings—even the undead ones—have a right to happiness and true love.
Got: A Novel (Seven Weapon Arsenal #0)
by DThe first title from The Armory, a new high-quality urban noir imprint edited by Kenji Jasper.“There’s a new player stepping into the street-lit spotlight, and he’s one to watch . . . Urban libraries have to get Got.” —Library Journal, Starred ReviewThere’s a young man living in the infamous Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He is an orphaned college student trying to get through his sophomore year at age twenty-three, years behind the traditional undergraduates. His two best friends, Will and Chief, are an ex-drug dealer and a computer hacker. And his boss, Tony Star, is the most dangerous man in Brooklyn, an arch-criminal with enterprises legal and illegal across New York City and beyond.Our young man’s job is to pick up the weekly take from Star’s establishments and deliver it to him at the end of a night. It’s one day’s work a week for the kind of pay the fortunate get in a year. The money covers his tuition and the small apartment he rents in Crown Heights. Life is simple. And simple means good.Then, everything falls out of balance. Someone decides to rob him for the week’s take, and leave him for dead. His boss, being generous, gives him until the end of the night to recover what’s been stolen. But as the night moves forward and people start dying, this young man begins to learn the hard way that his chosen way of life is nothing but an illusion.
Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others (Bk Life. Ser.)
by Connie Burk Laura van Dernoot LipskyThis beloved bestseller—over 180,000 copies sold—has helped caregivers worldwide keep themselves emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and physically healthy in the face of the sometimes overwhelming traumas they confront every day.A longtime trauma worker, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky offers a deep and empathetic survey of the often-unrecognized toll taken on those working to make the world a better place. We may feel tired, cynical, or numb or like we can never do enough. These, and other symptoms, affect us individually and collectively, sapping the energy and effectiveness we so desperately need if we are to benefit humankind, other living things, and the planet itself. In Trauma Stewardship, we are called to meet these challenges in an intentional way. Lipsky offers a variety of simple and profound practices, drawn from modern psychology and a range of spiritual traditions, that enable us to look carefully at our reactions and motivations and discover new sources of energy and renewal. She includes interviews with successful trauma stewards from different walks of life and even uses New Yorker cartoons to illustrate her points."We can do meaningful work in a way that works for us and for those we serve," Lipsky writes. "Taking care of ourselves while taking care of others allows us to contribute to our societies with such impact that we will leave a legacy informed by our deepest wisdom and greatest gifts instead of burdened by our struggles and despair."