Bøger udgivet af Melville House Publishing

In the tradition of Jon Ronson and Tim Wu,  an absorbing and revelatory  journey into the American Way of Defying Death . . . As longevity medicine revolutionizes the lives of many older people,  the quest to take the next step—to live as long as we choose—has spurred a scientific arms race in search of the elixir of life, funded by Big Tech and Silicon Valley.    Once the stuff of Mesopotamian mythology and episodes of Star Trek, the effort to make humans immortal is becoming increasingly credible as the pace of technological progress quickens. It has also empowered a wild-eyed fringe of pseudo-scientists, tech visionaries, scam-artists, and religious fanatics who have given their lives over to the pursuit of immortality.   Starting off at the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida and exploring the feuding subcultures around the cryonics industry, Peter Ward immerses himself into an eccentric world of startups, scam artists, scientific institutions, and tech billionaires to deliver this deeply reported, nuanced, and sometimes very funny exploration of the race for immortality — and the potentially devastating consequences should humanity realize its ultimate dream.

"I clamor for the next installment of Richard O'Rawe's rollicking series of heist novels featuring James 'Ructions' O'Hare." - Sarah Weinman, The New York Times Book Review "Mr. O'Rawe ... has written the most riotous caper novel since his own 'Northern Heist,' and with luck, there will be more adventures ahead. "-Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal Ructions O'Hare returns in a thriller - based on one of history's greatest unsolved heists - pitting him against the IRA, Interpol, and neo-Nazis . . . When WWII ended, the allies discovered that a huge amount of gold bullion plundered by Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering had gone missing. Some believed the gold had been hidden in a train box car in Poland. Others that it was secreted in Lake Toplitz in the Austrian Alps. And a few thought it was buried in the Republic of Ireland, which was neutral during the war. When ex-IRA soldier Ructions O'Hare stumbles on a piece of Nazi memorabilia once owned by Goering, he begins to think that those who suspect the gold was in Ireland just might be on to something. But for Ructions to return to Ireland is easier said than done. For a start, the IRA is after him for not paying them a cut from a huge bank robbery he carried out in Belfast. And then there's the Neo-Nazis, who believe that Goering's gold rightfully belongs to them, and who are happy to kill anyone who gets in their way. And as Ructions gathers clues to the gold's location and, as his many adversaries realize he's getting closer, it's as if a noose is tightening around his neck...

A Washington Post Best Fiction Book of 2022 From the son of acclaimed author James Agee, a haunting novel depicting an American boy’s childhood in Mexico, ensconced in a world comprised of communist European exiles, local union activists, street children, and avant-garde artists like Frida Kahlo.   Joel Agee’s hallucinatory first novel begins in a house with a large garden in an unnamed Mexican town in the late 1940s, where six-and-a-half-year-old Peter reads, dreams, and plays with his friends. He is a nascent explorer, artist, philosopher, mystic, and scientist. His world is still new, not yet papered over with received knowledge.   And the actual world around him is a unique one in history: a community of leftist emigrés who have found refuge in Mexico from the Nazi and fascist regimes of Europe, rubbing shoulders with Mexican labor activists and leftists such as Frida Kahlo.     But the emigrés long for home — including Peter’s step-father, who wants to return to his native Germany. Going back to Europe may not be safe for any of them yet, however, which gives rise to anguished arguments among Peter’s parents’s and their tight group of friends.   And slowly, Peter begins to comprehend that his world may be turned upside down – that he might be forced to take leave of everyone he knows: his best friend, Arón; his father’s friend Sándor, who talks about revolution and performs magic tricks; and Zita, the family’s live-in-maid, who has taught him the consoling mysteries of prayer . . .   Steeped in the magic and myths of childhood — yet haunted by a harsh adult world bedeviled by instability and political turmoil — Joel Agee’s The Stone World is an unforgettable portrait of a family that will inevitably invite comparison with another classic family story, that of his father James Agee’s A Death in the Family.

“The Marauders is a blistering book, a hard-ass stare into the voracious mouth of the US-Mexico border. Patrick Strickland has done a fine piece of reporting from places we don’t dare to tread.” — Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil''s Highway This real-life Western tells the story of how citizens in a small Arizona border town stood up to anti-immigrant militias and vigilantes. The Marauders uncovers the riveting nonfiction saga of far-right militias terrorizing the border towns of southern Arizona. In one of the towns profiled, Arivaca, rogue militia members killed a man and his nine-year-old daughter in 2009. In response, the residents organized and spent two years trying to push  the new militias out through boycotts and by urging local businesses to  ban  them. The militias and vigilante groups again raised the stakes, spreading Pizzagate-style conspiracy theories alleging that town residents were complicit in child sex trafficking, prompting fears of vigilante violence.   The Marauders flips the standard formula most often applied to stories about immigration and the far right. Too often those stories are told from the perspective of the ones committing the violence. While Strickland doesn''t shy away from exploring those dark themes, the far right are not the protagonists of the book. Rather, the people targeted by hate groups, and the individuals who rose up to stop them in their tracks, are the heroes of this dramatic story.

The past decade has seen major political upheaval in Latin America--from Brazil to Chile to Venezuela to Bolivia--but to understand what happened, ask first where your quinoa and lithium batteries came from...The 21st century began optimistically in Latin America. Left-leaning leaders armed with programs to reduce poverty and reclaim national wealth were seeing results-but as the aughts gave way to the teens, they began to fall like dominos. Where did the dreams of this "pink tide" go? Look no further than the original culprits of Latin American disenfranchisement: resource-rich land and unscrupulous extraction. Recounting the story commodity by commodity, Andy Robinson reveals what oxen have to do with the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, how quinoa explains the mob that descended on Evo Morales, and why oil is the culprit behind the protracted coup in Venezuela. In addition to the usual suspects like gold and bananas which underscored the original plunder of the Americas, Robinson also shows how a new generation of valuable resources-like coltan for smartphones, lithium for electric cars, and niobium for SpaceX rockets-have become important players in the fate of Latin America and geopolitical tensions in the decades to come. In Gold, Oil, and Avocados, Robinson takes readers from the salt plains of Chile to the depths of the Amazonian jungle to stitch together the story of Latin America's last decade, showing how the imperial plunder of the past carries on today under a new name.

Featuring interviews of civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis at almost every stage of his career, this collection illustrates why Lewis has become a human rights icon and remains an inspiration to activists today.

UPDATED AND REVISED EDITION THE LITTLE-KNOWN STORY OF POOR AND WORKING-CLASS WHITES, URBAN ETHNIC GROUPS AND BLACK PANTHERS ORGANIZING SIDE BY SIDE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE 1960S AND '70SSome of the most important and little-known activists of the 1960s were poor and working-class radicals. Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, they started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and into the 1970s. Historians of the period have traditionally emphasized the work of white college activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have often been painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. But authors James Tracy and Amy Sonnie disprove that narrative. Through over ten years of research, interviewing activists along with unprecedented access to their personal archives, Tracy and Sonnie tell a crucial, untold story of the New Left. Their deeply sourced narrative history shows how poor and working-class individuals from diverse ethnic, rural and urban backgrounds cooperated and drew strength from one another. The groups they founded redefined community organizing, and transformed the lives and communities they touched. Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power is an important contribution to our understanding of a pivotal moment in U.S. history. Among the groups in the book: + JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .   +  The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .   + In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .   + In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor.

Fred Rogers's gentle spirit and passion for children's television takes center stage in this collection of interviews spanning his nearly forty-year careerNearly twenty years after his death, Fred Rogers remains a source of comfort and fond memories for generations who grew up watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Over the course of his career, Rogers revolutionized children's television and changed the way experts thought about the educational power of media. But perhaps his most lasting legacy was demonstrating the power of simply being nice to other people. In this collection of interviews including his firey (for him) 1969 senate testimony that saved PBS and his final interview with Diane Rehm, Rogers's gentle spirit and compassionate approach to life continues to be an inspiration.

From the last major metropolitan newspaper reporter stationed in the Eastern Kentucky mountains, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work there, comes the story of how a convergence of events at the start of the new millennium continues to impact life in the region and the soul of the nation."Most people who live in Louisville have never been to Eastern Kentucky and have no idea what's happening there. We would want you to cover the area like a foreign correspondent would." That's what Alan Maimon's editor at the the Louisville Courier-Journal told him in a job interview in the early days of the 21st century. When Maimon took the job and arrived in Hazard, Kentucky as the Journal's regional bureau chief, he realized that he was reporting on a much bigger story than the county's otherness. It was a region in the grip of ecological devastation, a man-made prescription pill epidemic, and where the aftermath of September 11th was taking an outsize toll. He witnessed first hand the enchroaching structural forces that would keep the region in poverty for decades to follow, even as many of those forces remain unacknowledged today. Through the stories he covered then, and follows up on today, Maimon--now forever linked to the region having married into a coal mining family--offers a broader view of the region than we've had in recent portrayals. With the bureau he ran now shuttered, he offers a unique perspective in an age when media outlets have cut back or eliminated coverage of the most distressed regions of the country.

A supposedly long lost collection of fable-like stories supposedly written by the little-known middle European writer Maxim Guyavitch ... with a helpful intro and afterword making it hilariously clear that the keyword is "supposedly."In the novel WHO'S WHO WHEN EVERYONE IS SOMEONE ELSE, the character "C.D. Rose" (not to be confused with the author C.D. Rose) searches an unnamed middle-European city for the long-lost manuscript of a little-known writer named Maxim Guyavitch. That search was fruitless, but in THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST, "C.D. Rose" has found the manuscript--nine sparkling, fable-like short stories--and he presents them here with an (hilarious) introduction explaining the discovery, and an afterword providing (hilarious) critical commentary on the stories, and what they might reveal about the mysterious Guyavitch. THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST is another masterful book of world-making by the real C.D. Rose, absorbing in its mix of intelligence and light-heartedness, and its ultimate celebration of literature itself. It is the third novel in the series about "C.D. Rose," although the reader does not need to have read the previous two books. (The first in the series was THE BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF LITERARY FAILURE, containing portraits of dunsuccessful writers; the second was WHO'S WHO WHEN EVERYONE IS SOMEONE ELSE, in which the author of the DICTIONARY, "C.D. Rose," searches for the manuscript of his favorite dead writer, Maxim Guyavitch, while on a book tour for the DICTIONARY.) Like those books, THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST can be read both as a simple but wonderful collection of quirky stories, and as comedy--or as a beautiful and moving elegy on the nobility of writers wanting to be read.

“Knowledge is what’s important, you know?  Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.” — TONI MORRISON   In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews — including her first and last — Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama called a “national treasure”) details not only her writing life, but also her other careers as a teacher, and as a publisher, as well as the gripping story of her family. In fact, Morrison reveals here that her Nobel Prize-winning novels, such as Beloved and Song of Solomon, were born out of her family’s stories — such as those of her great-grandmother, born a slave, or her father, escaping the lynch mobs of the South. With an introduction by her close friend, poet Nikki Giovani, Morrison hereby weaves yet another fascinating and inspiring narrative — that of herself.

Gun violence is a problem with many faces, but seemingly no solution. From mass shootings to deadly domestic abuse to police officers opening fire, it permeates American life. And yet it feels impossible to address. That''s why it''s time to look at the issue differently. In this revelatory collection, gun violence in America is addressed from three angles: how gun violence affects us today, how we have gotten to this juncture legally and socially, and finally, what we can do to reduce and end gun violence in America.

"I''m so many people. They shock me sometimes. I wish I was just me!" --Marilyn MonroeNearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains an icon whom everyone loves but no one really knows. The conversations gathered here--spanning her emergence on the Hollywood scene to just days before her death at age 36--show Monroe at her sharpest and most insightful on the thorny topics of ambition, fame, femininity, desire, and more. Together with an introduction by Sady Doyle, these pieces reveal yet another Marilyn: not the tragic heroine she''s become in the popular imagination, but a righteously and justifiably angry figure breaking free of the limitations the world forced on her.

A Booklist "Top 10 History Book of 2022" The first true people''s history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world''s largest democracy and second most populous country. It is also the site of the world''s biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its people--especially those living in disputed border regions.Suchitra Vijayan traveled India''s vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries. In this stunning work of narrative reportage--featuring over 40 original photographs--we hear from those whose stories are never told: from children playing a cricket match in no-man''s-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India.With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country we''ve long been missing.

"A searching memoir . . . A subtle, expertly written repudiation of the American dream in favor of something more inclusive and more realistic."—Kirkus, starred review  There are many Pedros living in many Americas . . . One Pedro goes to a school where they take away his language. Another disappears in the desert, leaving behind only a backpack. A cousin Pedro comes to visit, awakening feelings that others are afraid to make plain. A rumored Pedro goes missing so completely it''s as if he were never there. In Pedro''s Theory Marcos Gonsalez explores the lives of these many Pedros, real and imagined. Several are the author himself, while others are strangers, lovers, archetypes, and the men he might have been in other circumstances. All are journeying to some sort of Promised Land, or hoping to discover an America of their own. With sparkling prose and cutting insights, this brilliant literary debut closes the gap between who the world sees in us and who we see in ourselves. Deeply personal yet inspiringly political, it also brings to life those selves that never get the chance to be seen at all.

“All I can say is that I’m a shaker-upper. That’s exactly what I am.” —Shirley ChisholmWhen Shirley Chisholm announced her candidacy for the democratic presidential nomination in 1972, she became the first Black candidate for a major party''s nomination—just four years after she had become the first ever Black woman in Congress. In this collection of interviews stretching from her first major profile to her final interview, this icon of iron will and unshakeable political principle reveals how her disciplined and demanding childhood and the expectations placed on her by the public shaped her into a force of nature and the ultimate people’s politician—tirelessly advocating in the halls of government for the poorest and most disadvantaged of the nation.

Frida Kahlo's legacy continues to grow in the public imagination in the nearly fifty years since her "discovery" in the 1970s. This collection of conversations over the course of her brief career allows a peek at the woman behind the hype. And allows us to see the image of herself she carefully crafted for the public.Frida Kahlo is now an icon. In the decades since her death, Kahlo has been celebrated as a proto-feminist, a misunderstood genius, and a leftist hero, but during her lifetime most knew her as ... Diego Rivera's wife. Featuring conversations with American scholar and Marxist, Bertram D. Wolfe, and art critic Raquel Tibol, this collection shows an artist undervalued, but also a woman in control of her image. From her timid beginnings after her first solo show, to a woman who confidently states that she is her only influence, the many faces of Kahlo presented here clearly show us the woman behind the "Fridamania" we know today.

Michael Bible's tragic and sublime third novel tells the story of a massacre in a small Southern town and expands into a heart-breaking meditation on guilt, trauma and redemption.In Harmony, North Carolina, the earth is soaked in blood. Lynchings and hangings; mobs and vigilante justice. But all of that is just whispers of history, lost to time. The summer of 2000 was different. Iggy in the Baptist church. Twenty-five people dead. This, Harmony couldn't forget.Told in a kaleidescope of timelines and voices, Michael Bible takes the reader through all of the dimensions of one tragedy. The victims and witnesses, perpetrators and condemned comingle and evolve as the passage of time works its way through their lives. A fable of the American South that calls to mind William Faulkner and Carson McCullers, this is Bible's finest and most complex work yet. His broken and striving characters call out to the reader from the page and the moral stakes have never been higher or more finely wrought.

From the story of being a "miracle baby" of undocumented immigrants to a NICU nurse who gave birth to two preemies, this anthology represents the diversity of experience with preemies and will be a welcome resource for many who need these words.Every year, 400,000 families in the United States have a premature baby. Ten percent of babies in the US are preemies. There are textbooks, medical-ish guidebooks, and the occasional memoir to turn to ... but no personal essay collections from the many types of people who have parented, cared for, or been preemies themselves. In What We Didn't Expect, Melody Schreiber brings together acclaimed writers and thinkers to share their diverse stories of having or being premature babies, including Representative Pramila Jayapal, Tyrese Coleman, Anne Thériault, Sarah DiGregorio, Dan Koboldt, and many more.