After a humiliating scandal, a young writer flees to the West Coast, where she is drawn into the morally ambiguous orbit of a charismatic filmmaker and the teenage girls who are her next subjects. FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “A blistering story about the costs of creating art.”—O: The Oprah Magazine Not too long ago, Cass was a promising young playwright in New York, hailed as “a fierce new voice” and “queer, feminist, and ready to spill the tea.” But at the height of all this attention, Cass finds herself at the center of a searing public shaming, and flees to Los Angeles to escape—and reinvent herself. There she meets her next-door neighbor Caroline, a magnetic filmmaker on the rise, as well as the pack of teenage girls who hang around her house. They are the subjects of Caroline’s next semidocumentary movie, which follows the girls’ clandestine activity: a Fight Club inspired by the violent classic. As Cass is drawn into the film’s orbit, she is awed by Caroline’s ambition and confidence. But over time, she becomes troubled by how deeply Caroline is manipulating the teens in the name of art—especially as the consequences become increasingly disturbing. With her past proving hard to shake and her future one she’s no longer sure she wants, Cass is forced to reckon with her own ambitions and confront what she has come to believe about the steep price of success.
I hadn't minded that, but now the sight of Russell's mother reaching into the pumpkin was beginning to upset my stomach, send saliva into my mouth. I swallowed hard and stopped looking through the window. I was standing on one branch, ...
Raised by her Irish immigrant parents in a 1940s Queens apartment where alcohol and company combine in mercurial ways, Eileen marries an unambitious scientist with whom she endures an increasingly psychologically dark family life.
Playing Ourselves explores this major shift in representation, using detailed observations of five historic sites in the U.S. and Canada to both discuss the theoretical aspects of Native cultural performance and advise interpreters and ...
In 1959 Virginia, Sarah, a black student who is one of the first to attend a newly integrated school, forces Linda, a white integration opponent's daughter, to confront harsh truths when they work together on a school project.
Follows four young dreamers and outcasts through time and space, from 1453 Constantinople to the future, as they discover resourcefulness and hope amidst peril.
A definitive compilation of essays and nonfiction writings spanning more than forty years includes the author's reflections on politics, lifestyle, place, and cultural figures, including her studies of Haight-Ashbury, the Manson family, the ...
Praise for The Island Dwellers “These stories, in any case, are irresistible, delivering a portrait of contemporary relationships that . . . is shot through with veins of real connection.”—The New York Times Book Review “The eleven ...
Leavened by the brilliance of O'Toole's insights and wit.” —Claire Messud, Harper’s Winner • 2021 An Post Irish Book Award — Nonfiction Book of the Year • from the judges: “The most remarkable Irish nonfiction book I’ve read ...
In Collective Rage, the lives of five very different New York women named Betty collide at the intersection of anger, sex and “theat-ah.” As they meet, fall in love, rehearse, revel and rage, they realise that they've been stuck reading ...
Dalloway copes with the inexorability of midlife disappointment to Ruth's embodiment of adolescent rebellion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. “So beautiful ... a fantastic book.” —Zadie Smith, best-selling author of White Teeth ...