Books
A Memoir: The Inventors
A Memoir
"A superb work of memory that unfolds like a great suspense novel." —Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan SontagFall, 1970. At the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher who'd arrived from Oxford in Frye boots, with long hair, and a passion for his students that was intense and unorthodox. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin with a burning need to feel unique.
The teacher supplied that need. They spent hours in the teacher's cottage, discussing books, playing chess, drinking tea, and wrestling. They were inseparable, until the teacher “resigned.” Over the next decade they met occasionally and corresponded constantly, their last meeting a disaster. Only after he died did Peter learn that the teacher had completely fabricated his past.
As for Peter's father, the British-accented genius inventor, he turned out to be the son of prominent Italian Jews. Paul Selgin and the teacher were both “self-inventors,” enigmatic men whose lies and denials betrayed the boy who idolized them.
The Inventors is the story of how these men shaped the author"s journey to manhood, a story of promises fulfilled and broken as he uncovers the truth about both men, and about himself.
For like them—like all of us—Peter Selgin, too, is his own inventor.
A Headcase: Dora
A Headcase
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATERThe female Fight Club: With shotgun blasts of playful dark humor, this ballsy coming-of-age story is based on Freud's famous case study, but retold and revamped through our young protagonist’s point of view
Ida needs a shrink; or so her philandering father thinks, and he sends her to a Seattle psychiatrist. Immediately wise to the head games of her new therapist, who she nicknames Siggy or Sig, Ida begins a coming-of-age journey. At the beginning of her therapy, Ida, whose alter ego is Dora, and her small posse of pals—Little Teena, Ave Maria, and Obsidian-engage in what they call "art attacks" for teen fun and mayhem.
But Ida has a secret: she is in love with Obsidian. What's more, whenever she gets close to intimacy or a crisis of deep emotions, Ida faints or loses her voice. Ida and her friends hatch a plan to secretly record and film Siggy, and Ida intends to make an experimental art film as a tribute. As Sig becomes the target of her teen rage and angst, something goes terribly wrong at a crucial moment—Ida's father suffers an acute heart attack. Her voice lost, a rough cut of her experimental film goes underground viral and unethical media agents are trying to hunt her down to buy the material. Suddenly, everyone wants what Ida's got—but she's not willing to give it up so easily.
A Memoir: The Chronology of Water
A Memoir
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY KRISTEN STEWARTFrom the debris of a troubled early life comes an astonishing tale of survival, a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire—for men and women—and the exhilaration of swimming
THIS IS NOT YOUR MOTHER’S MEMOIR. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful, escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose.
What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, as Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.
"I've read Ms. Yuknavitch's book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times . . . The book is extraordinary." —Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club