A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A “furious and addictive new novel” (The New York Times) about mothers and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning as she flees her suburban life. “Exhilarating ... reads like a burning fever dream. A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.” —The New York Times Book Review Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into "the Mids"—that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation. When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life—and her family—as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams. Dana Spiotta's Wayward is a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird times, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.

From the hugely respected journalist Miranda Sawyer, a very modern look at the midlife crisis - delving into the truth, and lies, of the experience and how to survive it, with thoughtfulness, insight and humour.

The woman in this book is not famous. The events of her life are not tragic. The setting is not exotic. This is an ordinary story. Which makes it an extraordinary memoir. Miji Campbell grew up in a close-knit family in the 1960s and '70s. The youngest of three girls, she was raised under her parents' watchful eye, in a middle-class Calgary suburb called Kingsland. Her life proceeds in an orderly fashion: coming-of-age, university, first job, first apartment-and then suddenly, inexplicably, it begins to unravel. Night after night, Miji wrestles with insomnia and increasing anxiousness. Despite her independent spirit, she yearns for her mother's presence and feels overcome by homesickness. These anxious feelings will haunt her through career, marriage, and the birth of her children. It's not until middle age that Miji learns she has an anxiety disorder and finds ways to quiet her mind and body. Through acts of courage and grace, she learns to stand-tentatively, hopefully-on her own. Beautifully written, insightful and funny,ÿSeparation Anxietyÿchronicles the pivotal moments in a woman's life where she lets go of her childhood beliefs about happily ever after, and discovers her true self. "Anyone who has struggled with anxiety and depression will be consoled by the author's fearless, vivid portrait of breakdown and recovery." -Marni Jackson, author ofÿThe Mother Zone. "An honest and courageous memoir. The narrator's voice sparkles with intelligence, with a sharply observant eye, and with a quirky, wry sense of humour. She charts the ties that bind, sometimes far too tightly, the bond of love between mother and daughter." -Wendy Donawa, co-author ofÿReading Canada.

"Act your age! From her mother's admonition in childhood, a middle ages, twice-married mother of four and a product of the deep south of the seventies makes her way though a meandering inner journey towards a quiet epiphany revealing what her mother's words really mean. This rite of passage at the ungainly age of fifty unfolds through twelve memoir-like narratives that will evoke both laughter and tears. Each chapter is an independent reflection on the dozens of daily anecdotes all of us live each day in the course of growing up and growing older. Reading the narratives may be like going through a shoe box of old photographs you find in the attic, not arrange in any seeming order, but, in total, creating a logic of their own. Memorable characters like Papa, Aunt Norma, Harrison Augustus Turnbull, and Artemesia rise from the narrator's southern Gothic roots. The narrator, nameless Every Woman, prides herself in being an introspective and competent adult, but her naiveté demonstrates that being an adult a really a state of mind, and finding truth is like entertaining company with chipped china. Coping with life's poignant struggles, like disease, old age, suicide, and murder, and its ordinary ones, like child-raising, teaching, pets, and church-going, she seeks sense in the nonsense with humor and with love"--Page 4 of cover.

Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality. Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage. Coming of Age in the Other America illuminates the profound effects of neighborhoods on impoverished families. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and fieldwork with 150 young adults, and found that those who had been able to move to better neighborhoods—either as part of the Moving to Opportunity program or by other means—achieved much higher rates of high school completion and college enrollment than their parents. About half the youth surveyed reported being motivated by an “identity project”—or a strong passion such as music, art, or a dream job—to finish school and build a career. Yet the authors also found troubling evidence that some of the most promising young adults often fell short of their goals and remained mired in poverty. Factors such as neighborhood violence and family trauma put these youth on expedited paths to adulthood, forcing them to shorten or end their schooling and find jobs much earlier than their middle-class counterparts. Weak labor markets and subpar postsecondary educational institutions, including exploitative for-profit trade schools and under-funded community colleges, saddle some young adults with debt and trap them in low-wage jobs. A third of the youth surveyed—particularly those who had not developed identity projects—were neither employed nor in school. To address these barriers to success, the authors recommend initiatives that help transform poor neighborhoods and provide institutional support for the identity projects that motivate youth to stay in school. They propose increased regulation of for-profit schools and increased college resources for low-income high school students. Coming of Age in the Other America presents a sensitive, nuanced account of how a generation of ambitious but underprivileged young Baltimoreans has struggled to succeed. It both challenges long-held myths about inner-city youth and shows how the process of “social reproduction”—where children end up stuck in the same place as their parents—is far from inevitable.

The essays in this volume examine China's medievalism from the viewpoint of cultural history, philosophy and comparative literature. Contributors discuss the lingering effects of the Middle Ages on Chinese thought and industry, and assess how these attitudes affect China's relations with the West.

From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the unmissable final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography'. 'A beautifully crafted and thought-provoking snapshot of a life' The Evening Standard _________________________________ 'I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.' Following the critical acclaim of Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. _________________________________ 'Real Estate is a book to dive into. Come on in, the water's lovely' The Daily Telegraph 'Her reflections on domesticity, freedom and romance are so beautiful, I found myself underlining multiple sentences a page. Wry, warm and uplifting, it's a book I'll return to again and again' Stylist '[Levy's living autobiography series is] a glittering triple echo of books that are as much philosophical discourse as a manifesto for living and writing' Financial Times

What causes a generation of intellectuals to switch its political allegiances--in particular, to move from the opposition to the mainstream? In U.S. history, it is the experience of the "Old Left" intellectuals, who swung from avowal of socialism or Communism in the 1930s to apology for American liberalism in the 1950s, that raises this question pointedly. In this highly original and broadsweeping study, Howard Brick focuses on the career of Daniel Bell as an illustrative case of political transformation, combining intellectual history, biography, and the history of sociology to explain Bell's emerging thought in terms of the tensions between socialists and sociological theory. The resulting work will be of compelling interest to Marxists and American intellectual historians, to sociologists, and to all students of twentieth-century American thought and culture. Daniel Bell's route to political reconciliation was a tortuous one. While it is common wisdom to cite World War II as the force that welded national unity and brought Depression-era radicals to an appreciation of democratic institutions, the war actually turned the young Bell to the left. Opposing the centralized power of American business and military elites at war's end, Bell shared the "new radicalism" that infused Dwight MacDonald's Politics Magazine and motivated C. Wright Mills' early work. Nonetheless, by the early 1950s, Bell had declared the demise of American socialism and endorsed the welfare reforms of the Fair Deal. Brick's study finds, however, that the "new radicalism" of the mid-1940s helped to shape Bell's mature perspective, giving it a richness and critical edge often unrecognized. Brick finds that the heritage of modernism, as manifested in social theory, knit together the process of political transformation, combining disdain for the false promises of liberal progress, estrangement from society at large, and reconciliation with a reality perceived to be full of unconquerable tensions. Brick locates the foundations of Bell's mature social theory in the historical context of his early work--particularly in the political concessions made by the social-democratic movement, in the face of the Cold War, to the reconstruction of capitalist order in the West. The crucial turning point, in World politics as in Bell's thinking, can be located in the years 1947-49. After that point, the different strands of Bell's thinking came together to represent the contradictions in the perspective of a social democrat trapped by the "iron cage" of capitalism, who saw in his political accommodation both the road to progress and the rupture of his hopes. This peculiar paradigm, shaped by the experiences of deradicalization, lies at the heart of Daniel Bell's social theory, Brick finds. At the present critical point in American history, as a new generation of leftist intellectuals undergoes a process similar to that of Bell's generation, Brick's work will be especially important in understanding the historical phenomenon of deradicalization.

As the definitive study of the universal problem of growing old, The Coming of Age is "a brilliant achievement" (Marc Slonin, New York Times).