This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar E´douard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father. Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at the minimum—of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe:“You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that. But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.

A daughter of Cambodia remembers. Soon to be a Netflix original movie directed by Angelina Jolie. Until age five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of an educated, high-ranking government official. When the Khmer Rouge stormed the city in 1975, the young girl and her family fled from village to village. Fighting to hide their identity, the Ungs eventually were forced to separate to survive. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans. As half her family died in labour camps by execution, starvation, and disease, Loung herself grew increasingly resilient and determined - armed with indomitable will, she miraculously managed to outlast the Khmer Rouge and survive the killing fields. FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER is her astonishing story, a memorable human drama of courage and survival against all odds.

A visionary investigation that will change the way we think about health care: how and why it is failing, why expanding coverage will actually make things worse, and how our health care can be transformed into a transparent, affordable, successful system. In 2007, David Goldhill’s father died from infections acquired in a hospital, one of more than two hundred thousand avoidable deaths per year caused by medical error. The bill was enormous—and Medicare paid it. These circumstances left Goldhill angry and determined to understand how world-class technology and personnel could coexist with such carelessness—and how a business that failed so miserably could be paid in full. Catastrophic Care is the eye-opening result. Blending personal anecdotes and extensive research, Goldhill presents us with cogent, biting analysis that challenges the basic preconceptions that have shaped our thinking for decades. Contrasting the Island of health care with the Mainland of our economy, he demonstrates that high costs, excess medicine, terrible service, and medical error are the inevitable consequences of our insurance-based system. He explains why policy efforts to fix these problems have invariably produced perverse results, and how the new Affordable Care Act is more likely to deepen than to solve these issues. Goldhill steps outside the incremental and wonkish debates to question the conventional wisdom blinding us to more fundamental issues. He proposes a comprehensive new way, where the customer (the patient) is first—a system focused on health and maintaining it, a system strong and vibrant enough for our future. If you think health care is interesting only to institutes and politicians, think again: Catastrophic Care is surprising, engaging, and brimming with insights born of questions nobody has thought to ask. Above all it is a book of new ideas that can transform the way we understand a subject we often take for granted.

The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction. Neil Gaiman, “Orange” Aimee Bender, “The Color Master” Joyce Carol Oates, “Blue-bearded Lover” Michael Cunningham, “The Wild Swans” These and more than thirty other stories by Francine Prose, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, and many other extraordinary writers make up this thrilling celebration of fairy tales—the ultimate literary costume party. Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl” to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” to the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin” to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico. Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.

Daily writings of a young girl who lost her father. How she rationalizes the death, how her day-to-day life after the passing of her father goes. Ultimately how she killed her father.

A brother and sister cope with loss and trauma—and fight to keep what’s left of their family together—in a “compelling” novel by a Newbery Honor Medal winner. Jenna and Jeremy knew their parents’ marriage was in trouble. That was pretty obvious. But no one who knew the family could have predicted what would come next. One afternoon, Jenna and Jeremy are pulled from class and given horrifying news: their father, a college psychologist, has just shot their mother to death on a public street. Now, Mom is dead, Dad is in jail, and a fifth-grade boy and his fourteen-year-old sister have a lot to reconcile. Not only grief, anger, confusion, and guilt—but their dad’s motive, the secrets in their mother’s diary, and shifting loyalties that are driving Jenna and Jeremy even further apart. With their fragile new lives in free fall, and their father about to stand trial, they’re now going to have to confront the unimaginable. From an author who has been a finalist for the National Book Award, among numerous other honors, this is “a compelling story suffused with raw and honest emotion” (Kirkus Reviews) and “a taut psychological mystery” (Publishers Weekly).

"Originally published in French in 2016 by Seuil, France, as Historie de la violence"--Title page verso.

A historic memoir by the noted Alpine climber and journalist who undertakes an epic climb of The Eiger in Switzerland—the very same mountain that not only made his father “Eiger John” famous, but killed him in 1966. In the 1960s an American named John Harlin II changed the face of Alpine climbing. Gutsy and gorgeous—he was known as “the blond god”—Harlin successfully summitted some of the most treacherous mountains in Europe. But it was the north face of the Eiger that became Harlin’s obsession. Living with his wife and two children in Leysin, Switzerland, he spent countless hours planning to climb, waiting to climb, and attempting to climb the massive vertical face. It was the Eiger direct—the direttissima—with which John Harlin was particularly obsessed. He wanted to be the first to complete it, and everyone in the Alpine world knew it. John Harlin III was nine years old when his father made another attempt on a direct ascent of the notorious Eiger. Harlin had put together a terrific team, and, despite unending storms, he was poised for the summit dash. It was the moment he had long waited for. When Harlin’s rope broke, 2,000 feet from the summit, he plummeted 4,000 feet to his death. In the shadow of tragedy, young John Harlin III came of age possessed with the very same passion for risk that drove his father. But he had also promised his mother, a beautiful and brilliant young widow, that he would not be an Alpine climber. Harlin moved from Europe to America, and, with an insatiable sense of wanderlust, he reveled in downhill skiing and rock-climbing. For years he successfully denied the clarion call of the mountain that killed his father. But in 2005, John Harlin could resist no longer. With his nine-year-old daughter, Siena—his very age at the time of his father’s death—and with an IMAX Theatre filmmaking crew watching, Harlin set off to slay the Eiger. This is an unforgettable story about fathers and sons, climbers and mountains, and dreamers who dare to challenge the earth.

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy. “Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different—“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men. Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result—a critical and popular triumph—has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.