Bøger udgivet af W W NORTON & CO

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law?In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today.Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.

Bears have long held a central place in our collective memory, from Greek mythology and Indigenous folklore to medieval fairytales and the modern toy shop. But as humans and bears come into ever-closer contact, our relationship nears a tipping point. Today, only eight bear species remain, some icons of the natural world (such as the panda bear and the polar bear), others obscure (such as the spectacled bear and the sloth bear). From the cloud forests of the Andes to the ice floes of the Arctic, the jungles of India to the woods of the Rocky Mountains, journalist Gloria Dickie explores each bear's story, meeting figures on the front lines of conservation efforts and explaining the unparalleled challenges bears face. Weaving together ecology, history, and mythology, Eight Bears reveals our volatile relationship with these magnificent mammals-and warns us what we risk losing if we don't learn to live alongside them.

The Rules is an essential part of every cyclist's kit-whether you're riding to work or training to be the next Bradley Wiggins or Victoria Pendleton. Winning awards and gaining millions of viewers, Velominati.com has become an online cycling mecca. In 92 canonical rules, these masters of the peloton share tips on gear, tell stories from cycling's legendary hardmen, and enforce the etiquette of the road-with a healthy, often sinister sense of humor. Practical and motivating (Rule #12: the correct number of bikes to own is N + 1, where N is the number of bikes currently owned), unflinching and authoritative (Rule #9: If you're out riding in bad weather, it means you are a badass. Period.), The Rules will help readers find their cycling passion, whether it's in high alpine passes or tight velodrome races, in the garage before the ride or in the bar afterward. Vive la Vie Velominatus.

"Harsh and ingenious! "High Rise" is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind."--Martin Amis, "New Statesman."

Loneliness, boredom, emptiness: These are the complaints that Rollo May encountered over and over from his patients. In response, he probes the hidden layers of personality to reveal the core of man's integration--a basic and inborn sense of value. Man's Search for Himself is an illuminating view of our predicament in an age of overwhelming anxieties and gives guidance on how to choose, judge, and act during such times.

Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians." Yet Churchill was an exception, and the war in the east has long been seen as a sideshow to the brutal combat on the Western Front. Finally, with The Eastern Front-the first major history of that arena in fifty years-the acclaimed historian Nick Lloyd corrects the record.Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front was a vast theater of war that brought about the collapse of three empires and produced almost endless suffering. As many as sixteen million soldiers and two million civilians were killed or wounded in enormous battles that took place across as much as one hundred kilometers. Unlike in the west, where stalemate ruled the day, the war in the east was fluid, with armies embarking on penetrating advances. Lloyd narrates the repeated invasions of Serbia as well as the great battles between Russian, German, and Austrian forces at Tannenberg, Komarów, Gorlice-Tarnów, and the Masurian Lakes. All along, he takes us into the strategy of the generals who decided the war's course, from the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the Austro-Hungarian chief, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to the brilliant Russian Brusilov.Perhaps the most radical aspect of the struggle in the east was that the violence was not confined to combatants. The Eastern Front witnessed calculated attacks against civilians that ripped the ethnic and religious fabric of numerous societies, paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust. Lloyd's magisterial, definitive account of the war in the east will fundamentally alter our understanding of the cataclysmic events that reshaped Europe and the world.

As the unofficial "gratitude correspondent" for the Atlantic, James Parker has written countless odes of appreciation on subjects from the seemingly minor ("Ode to Naps") to the unexpected ("Ode to Giving People Money") to the seemingly minor, unexpected and hyper-specific ("Ode to Running in Movies"). Finally collecting Parker's beloved and much-lauded odes in one place, this volume demonstrates the profound power of the form. Each ode celebrates the permanent susceptibility of everyday humdrum life to dazzling saturations of divine light: the squirrel in the street, the crying baby, the misplaced cup of tea. Parker's odes are songs of praise but with a decent amount of complaining in there, too: a human ratio of moans. Our politics are broken; our world is melting. Parker's odes offer respite but also a glimmer of hope. They represent encounters with whatever might get us through the next five minutes of the impossible, beautiful, overwhelming thing we call living.

Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection. Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what's by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers-John Milton's visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust-to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.

In poems of graceful lyricism and penetrating observation, award-winning poet Linda Pastan sheds new light on the complexities of ordinary life and the rising tide of mortality. Drawing from Pastan's five most recent volumes and including over thirty new poems, Almost an Elegy reflects on beauty, old age, and the probability of loss.With signature precision and quiet power, selections from The Last Uncle (2002) and Queen of a Rainy Country (2006) explore childhood, love, landscape, and the many pleasures of the imagination. Poems from Insomnia (2015) and Traveling Light (2011) chime with similar themes of aging, memory, and language. The new poems offer a profound portrait of a poet contemplating her life and the endurance of art, amidst the fleeting beauty of nature and the everyday losses that accompany old age. In "The Collected Poems," Pastan writes, "For years I wrestled / with syllables, with silence." Now, after a long and celebrated career, the poet rests "in a hammock of words, waiting / for the sun to rise again / over the horizon of the page."Whether in a lush evocation of an impressionist painting or a wry and wistful ode to a car key, Pastan finds lucid meaning in the passage of time.

Western philosophers have long claimed that God, if such a being exists, is a personal force capable of reason and that the path to a good human life is also the path to a happy one. But what if these claims prove false or at least deeply misleading? The Aztecs of central Mexico had a rich philosophical tradition, recorded in Latin script by Spanish clergymen and passed down for centuries in the native Nahuatl language-one of the earliest transcripts being the Huehuetlatolli, or Discourses of the Elders, compiled by Friar Andrés de Olmos circa 1535.Novel in its form, the Discourses consists of short conversations between elders and young people on how to achieve a meaningful and morally sound life. The Aztecs had a metaphysical tradition but no concept of "being". They considered the mind an embodied force, present not just in the brain but throughout the body. Their core values relied on collective responsibility and group wisdom, not individual thought and action, orienting life around one's actions in this realm rather than an afterlife, distinctly opposed to the Christian beliefs that permeate Europe and America.Sebastian Purcell's fluency in his grandmother's native Nahuatl brings to light the Aztec ethical landscape in brilliant clarity. Never before translated into English in its entirety, and one of the earliest post-contact texts ever recorded, Discourses of the Elders reflects the wisdom communicated by oral tradition and proves that philosophy can be active, communal and grounded not in a "pursuit of happiness" but rather the pursuit of a meaningful life.

Vienna-June 1804. At the glittering debut of Beethoven's Third Symphony, a Spanish diplomat meets with Captain Thomas Grey, agent of His Majesty's Secret Service. In exchange for a gigantic bribe, the Spaniard discloses Spain's darkest secret the actual terms of the Treaty of San Ildefonso with France.Spain's neutrality in Napoleon's war on Britain is only a ruse to keep the British navy from attacking the great treasure-armada now gathering in South America. Spanish warships will depart Montevideo, Uruguay, carrying 2,000 tons of gold; when the gold is safely in Madrid, Spain will declare war on Britain and ally with France to divide the British Empire between them. Britain's only hope is to sink or capture the treasure fleet, and the responsibility of delivering that blow falls to Grey. As Jack Aubrey would have said in such a crisis, "There is not a moment to be lost!"

Kelly McMasters found herself in her midthirties living her fantasy: she'd moved with her husband, a painter, from New York City to rural Pennsylvania, where their children roamed idyllic acres in rainboots and diapers. The pastoral landscape and the bookshop they opened were restorative at first, for her and her marriage. But soon, she was quietly plotting her escape.In The Leaving Season, McMasters chronicles the heady rush of falling in love and carving out a life in the city, the slow dissolution of her relationship in an isolated farmhouse, and the complexities of making a new home for herself and her children as a single parent. She delves into the tricky and often devastating balance between seeing and being seen; loss and longing; desire and doubt; and the paradox of leaving what you love in order to survive.Whether considering masculinity in the countryside through the life of a freemartin calf, the vulnerability of new motherhood in the wake of a car crash, or the power of community pulsing through an independent bookshop, The Leaving Season finds in every ending a new beginning.

In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They're soon joined by Husha's ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio.Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother's house. When she, Arthur and Nellie begin to read it together, they learn that her mother's last missive was a short story collection, crawling with unsettling imagery and terrifying transformations. As the stories bleed into their cloistered life in the cabin, they must each reckon with loss, longing and what it means to truly know another person. Incantatory and atmospheric, Cicada Summer is a dazzlingly original novel about how we grieve and care for one another.

In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over the course of a year, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl's careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.

Seventeen-year-old Bucky Yi knows nothing about his birth country of South Korea or his bio-dad's disappearance; he can't even pronounce his Korean name correctly. Running through the woods of rural Washington State with a tire tied to his waist, his sights are set on one all-American goal: to become a college football player.So when a misadventure with his adoptive family leads the U.S. government to deport him to South Korea, he's forced to navigate an entirely foreign version of his life. One mishap leads to another, and as an outsider, Bucky has to fall back on not just his raw physical strength, but resources of character and attitude he didn't know he had. In an expat bar in Seoul, in the bleak barracks of his Korean military, on a remote island where an erratic sergeant fights a shadow-war with North Korean spies, and in the remote town where he seeks out his drunken, indebted biological father, Bucky has to assemble the building blocks of a new language and stubbornly rebuild himself from scratch. That means managing his ego, insecurities, sexual desires, family legacies, and allegiances in order to make it back home-wherever that might be-and determine who he is to himself, who he is to others, and what kind of man he wants to become.

Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilization. From the Neolithic revolution to the twenty-first century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols, the Mughals and the development of the Silk Road, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the empires created by the power of human cities.Exploring the evolutionary biology and psychology of restlessness that makes us human, Anthony Sattin's sweeping history charts the power of nomadism from before the Bible to its decline in the present day. Connecting us to mythology and the records of antiquity, Nomads explains why we leave home, and why we like to return again. This is the history of civilization as told through its outsiders.

Phosphorus has played a critical role in some of the most lethal substances on earth: firebombs, rat poison, nerve gas. But it's also the key component of one of the most vital: fertilizer, which has sustained life for billions of people. In this major work of explanatory science and environmental journalism, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dan Egan investigates the past, present, and future of what has been called "the oil of our time."The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. First discovered in a seventeenth-century alchemy lab in Hamburg, it soon became a highly sought-after resource. The race to mine phosphorus took people from the battlefields of Waterloo, which were looted for the bones of fallen soldiers, to the fabled guano islands off Peru, the Bone Valley of Florida, and the sand dunes of the Western Sahara. Over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, as Egan harrowingly reports, our overreliance on this vital crop nutrient is today causing toxic algae blooms and "dead zones" in waterways from the coasts of Florida to the Mississippi River basin to the Great Lakes and beyond. Egan also explores the alarming reality that diminishing access to phosphorus poses a threat to the food system worldwide-which risks rising conflict and even war.With The Devil's Element, Egan has written an essential and eye-opening account that urges us to pay attention to one of the most perilous but little-known environmental issues of our time.

Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman's signature "clarity and ability to engage" (David Kirby, New York Times), Husbandry is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth.Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children's dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents' failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work-repetitive, exhausting, and sublime-of sustaining three lives.With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet's hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself.

"I was living in a high-maintenance loneliness", Alice Fulton writes of a devastating accident, and her poems express both reverence and impatience as they search for a brightness palpable as the dark. The result is a brilliant coloratura on the senses. Fulton evokes phantom aromas of vanished perfumes, flowers fragrant only at night, and the ozone scent of snow; marvels at velvet paintings and chimerical colours outside the spectrum; and riffs on a mixtape of ambient sounds: applause, clinking glasses, spectral voices on the radio and the whispers of a mother to her children.Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems extends these tactile mysteries to existential questions of invisible miracles, connection, and faith in the face of silence: "By praying you, I create you", the poet informs an elusive God. Revelling in the stunning possibilities of language, Fulton seeks joy to counteract trauma and grief, empathises with the silent pathos of animals, and finds solace in art, friendship and the mysterious power of gifts. Without denying suffering, this enthralling volume extends a fervent prayer for gratitude and healing.

Tinged with melancholy but rooted in resiliency, the exquisite stories of Bernard MacLaverty's Blank Pages display the perseverance of the human spirit. In "A Love Picture," a middle-aged woman, already no stranger to loss, consults a World War II newsreel to determine the fate of her son. "Blackthorns" tells of a poor, out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely savior. The harrowing but transcendent "The End of Days" imagines life in another pandemic as artist Egon Schiele and his wife, both stricken with the Spanish flu, spend their final days together. And in the poignant title story, an elderly writer takes stock of what remains after losing his life partner.Blank Pages elegantly probes MacLaverty's signature themes-domestic love, Catholicism, the Troubles, aging-with compassion and insight. A consummately gifted storyteller, MacLaverty uncovers the turbulent undertones of seemingly ordinary human interactions and explores endings of all kinds with tenderness, affection, and wry humor.Acclaimed for his extraordinary emotional range and "telescopic observational powers" (Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal), MacLaverty captures the joys and sorrows of everyday existence in crystalline, precise prose. Each resonant story in Blank Pages reminds us again why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers.

Hailed as "indispensable" (David Wojahn), poet Stephen Dunn masterfully shifts between the metaphysical and the ironic, never wavering in his essential honesty. His graceful poems confront our contradictions with tenderness and wit, enliven the ordinary with penetrating observation and alert us to the haunting wonders and relationships that surround us.The Not Yet Fallen World draws from all nineteen of Stephen Dunn's crystalline volumes, including his most recent, Pagan Virtues (2019); the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Loosestrife (1996); and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Different Hours (2000). By turns sardonic and profound, Dunn examines the disguises we don to hide from ourselves and reveals sublime beauty hidden within seemingly mundane interactions. Nine new poems extend the poet's inquiry into the paradoxes of contemporary life; as he writes in "Love Poem Near the End of the World", "Something keeps me holding on / to a future I didn't think possible".Arranged to further Dunn's signature themes-mortality, morality and the roles we play in the essential human comedy of getting through each day-this final collection captures the breadth of an acclaimed poet's achievement. His legacy is a poetic expanse suffused with fearless generosity and perceptive wisdom.

In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean and the colonies that became US states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland and New YorkAfrican Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass and country, its deepest history forgotten.

Inflammation is the body's ancestral response to its greatest threats, the first line of defense it deploys against injury and foreign pathogens. But as the threats we face have evolved, new science is uncovering how inflammation may also turn against us, simmering underneath the surface of leading killers from heart disease and cancer to depression, aging, and mysterious autoimmune conditions.In A Silent Fire, gastroenterologist Shilpa Ravella investigates hidden inflammation's emerging role as a common root of modern disease-and how we can control it. We meet the visionary nineteenth-century pathologist who laid the foundation for our modern understanding of inflammation, the eccentric Russian zoologist who discovered one of the cells central to our immune system, and the dedicated researchers advancing the frontiers of medical and nutritional science today. With fascinating case studies, Ravella reveals how we can reform our relationships with food and our microbiomes to benefit our own health and the planet's.Synthesizing medical history, cutting-edge research, and innovative clinical practice, Ravella unveils inflammation as one potential basis for a unifying theory of disease. A paradigm-shifting understanding of one of the most mysterious, buzzed-about topics in medicine and nutrition, A Silent Fire shows us how to live not only long but well.

With deadpan humor and a keen eye for the strangeness of our days, Negative Space follows a week in the life of an English teacher at a New York private school. At home, her two children, increasingly restless, ask constant questions about mortality and find hidden wisdom in the cartoons they watch on television. Her husband tends to his plants and offers occasional counsel between Zoom calls to Hong Kong and Australia. And at school, as she navigates the currents between wealthy, increasingly disconnected students and bewildered faculty, she accidentally witnesses an ambiguous, possibly inappropriate interaction between a teacher and a student.... She feels compelled to say something, but how can she be sure of what she saw?Precisely rendered and filled with sly observations about our off-kilter days, Negative Space is a witty and resonant portrait of a woman caught between the pressures of home and work, parenting and teaching, what's normal and what isn't. Writing with an acute sense of dread and delight, Gillian Linden has crafted a stunning debut that examines what we owe the people who depend on us in a fractured and indifferent world.

Born in Korea, raised in the American South and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, a scholar and a daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations-especially within the Asian diaspora in the West-as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. For readers of Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings and Claudia Rankine's Citizen, This Part Is Silent introduces a fierce new voice to our most urgent contemporary conversations.