Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

Author: Tahir Hamut Izgil

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 24, 2024

Deal ends: August 24, 2024

Description:

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, awarded to the best first book of the yearNamed one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • THE ECONOMIST • TIMEA poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocideOne by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China's establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China’s internment camps for Muslim minorities.Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labor camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government’s radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. Was the first sign when Tahir was interrogated for hours after a phone call with a fellow poet in the Netherlands? Or when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison simply for calling for Uyghurs' legal rights to be enforced? Perhaps it was when the police seized Uyghurs’ radios and installed jamming equipment to cut them off from the outside world.Once Tahir noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbors had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. One night, after Tahir’s daughters were asleep, he placed by his door a sturdy pair of shoes, a sweater, and a coat so that he could stay warm if the police came for him in the middle of the night. It was clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family's only hope. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

The Tooth Fairy

Author: Clifford Chase

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $15.26

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: August 22, 2024

Deal ends: August 22, 2024

Description:

In shimmering prose that weaves among intimate confessions, deadpan asides, and piercing observations on the fear and turmoil that defined the long decade after 9/11, Clifford Chase tells the stories that have shaped his adulthood. There are his aging parents, whose disagreements sharpen as their health declines; and his beloved brother, lost tragically to AIDS; and his long-term boyfriend—always present, but always kept at a distance. There is also the revelatory, joyful music of the B-52s, Chase’s sexual confusion in his twenties, and more recently, the mysterious appearance in his luggage of weird objects from Iran the year his mother died. In the midst of all this is Chase’s singular voice—incisive, wry, confiding, by turns cool or emotional, always engaging. The way this book is written—in pitch-perfect fragments—is crucial to Chase’s deeper message: that we experience and remember in short bursts of insight, terror, comedy, and love. As ambitious in its form as it is in its radical candor, The Tooth Fairy is the rare memoir that can truly claim to rethink the genre.

Identical Strangers

Author: Paula Bernstein

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 22, 2024

Deal ends: August 22, 2024

Description:

As seen in the hit documentary Three Identical Strangers • “[A] poignant memoir of twin sisters who were split up as infants, became part of a secret scientific study, then found each other as adults.”—Reader’s Digest (Editors’ Choice) WINNER OF A BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD Elyse Schein had always known she was adopted, but it wasn’t until her mid-thirties while living in Paris that she searched for her biological mother. What she found instead was shocking: She had an identical twin sister. What’s more, after being separated as infants, she and her sister had been, for a time, part of a secret study on separated twins. Paula Bernstein, a married writer and mother living in New York, also knew she was adopted, but had no inclination to find her birth mother. When she answered a call from her adoption agency one spring afternoon, Paula’s life suddenly divided into two starkly different periods: the time before and the time after she learned the truth.  As they reunite, taking their tentative first steps from strangers to sisters, Paula and Elyse are left with haunting questions surrounding their origins and their separation. And when they investigate their birth mother’s past, the sisters move closer toward solving the puzzle of their lives. Praise for Identical Strangers “Remarkable . . . powerful . . . [an] extraordinary experience . . . The reader is left to marvel at the reworking of individual identities required by one discovery and then another.”—Boston Sunday Globe “Absorbing.”—Wired“[A] fascinating memoir . . . Weaving studies about twin science into their personal reflections . . . Schein and Bernstein provide an intelligent exploration of how identity intersects with bloodlines. A must-read for anyone interested in what it means to be a family.”—Bust “Identical Strangers has all the heart-stopping drama you’d expect. But it has so much more—the authors’ emotional honesty and clear-eyed insights turn this unique story into a universal one. As you accompany the twins on their search for the truth of their birth, you witness another kind of birth—the germination and flowering of sisterly love.”—Deborah Tannen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of You Just Don’t Understand “A transfixing memoir.”—Publishers Weekly

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Author: Oliver Sacks

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 22, 2024

Deal ends: August 22, 2024

Description:

In his most extraordinary book, the bestselling author of Awakenings and "poet laureate of medicine” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients inhabiting the compelling world of neurological disorders, from those who are no longer able to recognize common objects to those who gain extraordinary new skills.“Oliver Sacks has become the world's best-known neurologist. His case studies of broken minds offer brilliant insight into the mysteries of consciousness.”—The GuardianFeaturing a new preface, Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with perceptual and intellectual disorders: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; whose limbs seem alien to them; who lack some skills yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. In Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, his patients are deeply human and his tales are studies of struggles against incredible adversity. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine’s ultimate responsibility: “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”

Maybe We’ll Have You Back

Author: Fred Stoller

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $12.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 21, 2024

Deal ends: August 21, 2024

Description:

?I don’t know why Fred was never a regular on a show. Maybe because he’s annoying . . . just kidding!” ?Ray RomanoFred Stoller has played the annoying schnook in just about every sitcom you’ve seen on TV?Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, Scrubs, Hannah Montana, My Name Is Earl?and was even a staff writer for Seinfeld, but he’s never found a solid gig. When it comes to Hollywood, it’s a case of always the bridesmaid and never the bride, except in his case he’s always the snarky waiter, the mopey cousin, or Man #2.This hilarious and bittersweet rags to rags story of the hardest-working guy in showbiz follows Fred, who started his career as a stand-up comic, from set to set as he tries to find a permanent home for his oddball character. With candor, Fred shares stories of his great adventures pounding the Hollywood pavement, including a humiliating encounter with Billy Crystal, a disastrous one-night stand with Kathy Griffin, and plenty of awkward run-ins at craft service tables. And he always shares his ups and downs with his skeptical, yet loving, mother waiting by the phone in Brooklyn.Everyone can relate to searching for a dream job or waiting for the next big break, and will root for Fred as he weaves his way through the cutthroat world of Tinseltown.

American Rose

Author: Karen Abbott

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.99

Deal price: $4.99

Deal starts: August 21, 2024

Deal ends: August 21, 2024

Description:

NEW YORK TIMES

BESTSELLER

America was flying high in the Roaring Twenties. Then, almost overnight, the Great Depression brought it crashing down. When the dust settled, people were primed for a star who could distract them from reality. Enter Gypsy Rose Lee, a strutting, bawdy, erudite stripper who possessed a gift for delivering exactly what America needed. With her superb narrative skills and eye for detail, Karen Abbott brings to life an era of ambition, glamour, struggle, and survival. Using exclusive interviews and never-before-published material, she vividly delves into Gypsy’s world, including her intense triangle relationship with her sister, actress June Havoc, and their formidable mother, Rose, a petite but ferocious woman who literally killed to get her daughters on the stage. Weaving in the compelling saga of the Minskys—four scrappy brothers from New York City who would pave the way for Gypsy Rose Lee’s brand of burlesque and transform the entertainment landscape—Karen Abbott creates a rich account of a legend whose sensational tale of tragedy and triumph embodies the American Dream.