This spellbinding novel narrates the many-layered recollections of a hallucinating man in devastated Beirut. The desolate, almost surreal, urban landscape is enriched by the unfolding of the family sagas of Niqula Mitri and his beloved Shamsa, the Kurdish maid. Mitri reminisces about his Egyptian mother and his father who came back to settle in Beirut after a long stay in Egypt. Both Mitri and his father are textile merchants and see the world through the code of cloth, from the intimacy of linen, velvet, and silk to the most impersonal of synthetics. Shamsa in turn relates her story, the myriad adventures of her parents and grandparents who moved from Iraqi Kurdistan to Beirut. Haunting scenes of pastoral Kurds are juxtaposed against the sedentary decadence of metropolitan residents. Barakat weaves into her sophisticated narrative shreds of scientific discourse about herbal plants and textile crafts, customs and manners of Arabs, Armenians, and Kurds, mythological figures from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, and Arabia, the theosophy of the African Dogons and the medieval Byzantines, and historical accounts of the Crusades in the Holy Land and the silk route to China.

Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.

From the co-founder of Plated, the home delivery food service, an inspirational business title that is a call-to-arms and investigation into the industrial American food complex. In early 2012, Nick Taranto was twenty-seven years old, recently married, and fresh out of the Marine Corps. He moved back to New York City, started working on Wall Street, and put on twenty pounds in under six months. He was pasty, overweight, and depressed – and he knew there had to be a better way to eat (and live). The Evolved Eater chronicles his quest to change how we eat, and what this means for the future of food. As the co-founder of Plated, which has delivered tens of millions of meals across the country in its first five years, Taranto cares about the food we eat. As Evolved Eaters, we strive to continually improve and evolve as we grow through life. And eating – and being close to the food you cook and consume – is an inseparable part of this evolution. Americans throw away over 300 billion pounds of food each year, while millions of children are food insecure or poorly nourished. How did the most food abundant nation in history get this vital issue so wrong? Taranto provides eye-opening facts about how we acquire and eat food and easy and practical things that you can do to improve the way you eat (and live) starting today. Eating doesn’t need to be complicated or painful or over-thought. We’re starting The Evolved Eater revolution right here, right now.

Webster College: an elite New England campus and a world of learning where creativity and inclusiveness are the presiding principles. Naomi Roth, a feminist scholar, is named to the coveted position of Webster's president. When a student protest materializes, Naomi initially supports the movement, feeling proud and protective of the protesters, her own daughter Hannah among them. But the protest begins to fester, attracting students from other institutions and media. Attention begins to focus on one charismatic student, a Palestinian immigrant named Omar, and both the tension on campus and the essential conflicts in Naomi's personal life begin to overwhelm her until she finds herself facing an impossible and ultimately tragic conflict.The Devil and Webster is shot through with caustic comedy, and yet the Faustian notes are a persistent reminder that the possibility of corruption - personal or institutional - remains our persistent companion, however good our intentions might be.

From the best-selling author of How To Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee's award-winning debut is "One of the great queer novels . . . of our time."—Brandon Taylor, GQ Twelve-year-old Fee is a shy Korean-American boy growing up in Maine whose powerful soprano voice wins him a place as section leader of the first sopranos in his local boys choir. But when, on a retreat, Fee discovers how the director treats the boys he makes section leader, he is so ashamed, he says nothing of the abuse, not even when Peter, Fee’s best friend, is in line to be next. The director is eventually arrested, and Fee tries to forgive himself for his silence. But when Peter takes his own life, Fee blames only himself. Years later, after he has carefully pieced a new life together, Fee takes a job at a private school near his hometown. There he meets a young student, Arden, who, to his shock, is the picture of Peter—and the son of his old choir director. Told with “the force of a dream and the heft of a life” (Annie Dillard), this is a haunting, lyrically written debut novel that marked Chee “as a major talent whose career will bear watching” (Publisher’s Weekly).