Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Mary Cappello[’s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed.” —MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems “A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.” —SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys—from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text—to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.

No One Is Safe from Awkward! Ending a first date that falls flat. Drunk-texting your boss. Walking in when your roommate is getting it on. Running into the person you just dumped . . . in the grocery store, an hour after it went down. Awkward bombs can drop anytime, anywhere, and with anyone—people you don’t know, people you see occasionally, and people you see every day. They can sneak up on you and explode in the most unexpected of places, so they’re basically impossible to avoid. The vast majority of us don’t have the wherewithal to gracefully handle the truly and totally awkward as it unfolds. We only realize what we should have said after the fact—when the damage has already been done and we’re a hot mess of embarrassment, red ears, and nervous sweat stains. But author Sam Scholfield has survived more than two decades of embarrassing encounters—and now, in an act of extreme generosity, has set down a wealth of witty comebacks, surefire distraction techniques, and suave evasion strategies so that future generations may take heed and dodge the Awkward Monster before it strikes! So how do you avoid the epic cluster of drama that can result when awkward situations are handled badly? You read this book.

This book introduces the editors’ new concept of “Awkward Powers”. By undertaking a critical re-examination of the state of International Relations theorising on the changing nature of the global power hierarchy, it draws attention to a number of countries that fit awkwardly into existing but outdated categories such as “great power” and “middle power”. It argues that conceptual categories pertaining to the apex of the international hierarchy have become increasingly unsatisfactory, and that new approaches focusing on such “Awkward Powers” can both rectify shortcomings on power theorising whilst shining a much-needed theoretical spotlight on significant but understudied states. The book’s contributors examine a broad range of empirical case studies, including both established and rising powers across a global scale to illustrate our conceptual claims. Through such a novel process, we argue that a better appreciation of the de facto international power hierarchy in the 21st century can be achieved.

Awkwardness offers an overview of the psychology and philosophy of awkwardness, addressing questions like, Why do social interactions become awkward, and why does it matter? What can awkwardness teach us about the gaps in our understanding of the world and of each other? Drawing on the psychology of emotion and social norms, Alexandra Plakias posits a theory of awkwardness and explains how it differs from other self-conscious emotions like embarassment. Plakias explores the reasons why we find awkwardness so unpleasant, and shows how our desire to avoid it leads to negative moral and social consequences. Along the way, this book touches on topics like awkward pauses, cringe comedy, and the question of whether some people are more awkward than others.

Argues that the awkwardness of our age is a key to understanding human experience.

Harken Headers presents to you a quick guide on how to be Intriguingly Awkward and good at it. No more shy, timid and well...awkward moments after you read this step by step guide book on gaining confidence with your quirky side.

'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book pairs medieval texts with twenty-first century films or television programmes to explore what the resonance between them can tell us about living together in an awkward age. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. This book's hypothesis is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England explains that these authors have a great deal in common with other fifteenth-century authors, who generated embodied experiences of social discomfort in a range of genres by adopting and adapting literary techniques used by their predecessors and successors in slightly different ways. Like the twenty-first century texts with which they are paired, the late-medieval texts that feature in this book use the relationship between laughter and awkwardness to ask what it means to live with each other and how we can learn to live with ourselves.