Que raconte White, première expérience de « non-fiction » pour Bret Easton Ellis ? Tout et rien. « Tout dire sur rien et ne rien dire surtout » pourrait être la formule impossible, à la Warhol, susceptible de condenser ce livre, d'en exprimer les contradictions, d'en camoufler les intentions. White est aussi ironique que Moins que zéro, aussi glaçant qu'American Psycho, aussi menaçant que Glamorama, aussi labyrinthique que Lunar Park, aussi implacable que Suite(s) impériale(s). Loin des clichés toujours mieux partagés, plus masqué que jamais, Bret Easton Ellis poursuit son analyse décapante des États-Unis d'Amérique, d'une façon, comme il le dit lui-même, « ludique et provocatrice, réelle et fausse, facile à lire et difficile à déchiffrer, et, chose tout à fait importante, à ne pas prendre trop au sérieux ».
Que raconte White en ayant l'air à la fois de toucher à tout et de ne rien dire ? Peut-être que le fil à suivre est celui du curieux destin d'American Psycho, roman d'horreur en 1991 métamorphosé en comédie musicale à Broadway vingt-cinq ans plus tard. Ellis a dit autrefois : « Patrick Bateman, c'est moi. » Il ne le dit plus. Et si Patrick Bateman était devenu président ?
P.G.
Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time From the critically acclaimed author of Feel Free, Swing Time, White Teeth and many more 'There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those. What I've tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are, above all, personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity. Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table - I was in need of practical assistance. I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book, but I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.' Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.
En 2008, la crise des subprimes a durement frappé des individus et des familles entières, jetés à la rue. Ils auraient pu rester sur place, en attendant que le vent tourne à nouveau. Ils ont préféré investir leurs derniers dollars dans l'aménagement d'un van customisé et se mettre en route. Ils sont devenus des migrants dans leur propre pays, à la fois libres d'aller où ils le désirent et victimes désignées pour ceux qui veulent profiter d'une main-d'oeuvre docile et bon marché : entrepôts Amazon, parcs d'attractions, campings...
Pendant trois ans, Jessica Bruder a suivi les pas de ces " hobos " d'un genre nouveau, telle l'incroyable Linda May, 69 ans, qui rêve de bâtir sa propre géonef pour y couler des jours heureux.
*A GUARDIAN ''BOOKS OF 2021'' PICK* ''One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation'' - Olivia Laing So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom''s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept''s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate. Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with-indeed, our inseparability from-others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture-from recent art world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis-is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
Award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge's observation that discussions of racism in Britain were being led by those not affected by it brought her into the centre of the conversation in 2014. These ideas are expanded on in this urgent examination of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Kamala D. Harris is a lifelong public safety and civil rights leader, and is currently serving as a U.S. Senator from California. She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney''s Office, then was elected District Attorney of San Francisco. As California''s Attorney General, Kamala prosecuted transnational gangs, big banks, Big Oil, for-profit colleges and fought against attacks on the Affordable Care Act. Harris also fought to reduce elementary school truancy and pioneered the nation''s first open data initiative to expose racial disparities in the criminal justice system and implemented implicit bias training for police officers. The second black woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, Kamala has worked to reform the American criminal justice system, raise the minimum wage, make higher education tuition free for the majority of Americans, and protect the legal rights of refugees and immigrants.
@00000400@@00000327@THE @00000373@SUNDAY TIMES@00000155@ TOP TEN BESTSELLER@00000133@@00000163@@00000400@@00000327@Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government's system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.@00000133@@00000163@@00000400@In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.@00000163@@00000400@Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, @00000373@Permanent Record @00000155@is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online - a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet's conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, @00000373@Permanent Record @00000155@is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.@00000163@
THE #3 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Discover the shocking gender bias that affects our everyday lives 'A rallying cry to fight back' Sunday Times 'Press this into the hands of everyone you know. It is utterly brilliant!' Helena Kennedy 'A game-changer; an uncompromising blitz of facts, sad, mad, bad and funny, making an unanswerable case and doing so brilliantly...the ambition and scope - and sheer originality - of Invisible Women is huge' The Times Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued.
If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you're a woman.
Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap - a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women's lives.
From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women.
Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew.
A brand new book from the Sunday Times and internationally bestselling author of The Silk Roads 'Masterly mapping out of a new world order' - Evening Standard Revised and updated edition The New Silk Roads takes a fresh look at the relationships being formed along the length and breadth of the ancient trade routes today. The world is changing dramatically and in an age of Brexit and Trump, the themes of isolation and fragmentation permeating the western world stand in sharp contrast to events along the Silk Roads, where ties are being strengthened and mutual cooperation established.
This prescient contemporary history provides a timely reminder that we live in a world that is profoundly interconnected. Following the Silk Roads eastwards from Europe through to China, by way of Russia and the Middle East, Peter Frankopan assesses the global reverberations of continual shifts in the centre of power - all too often absent from headlines in the west.
The New Silk Roads asks us to re-examine who we are and where we stand in the world, illuminating the themes on which all our lives and livelihoods depend.
The Silk Roads , a major reassessment of world history, has sold over 1 million copies worldwide.
For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet-and an unapologetic champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. In lucid, elegant dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster, she pens surging, indispensable essays for a wide public: prescient advisories and dire warnings of what future awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as hopeful glimpses of a far better future. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices. These long-form essays show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one, as well. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of 'perpetual now,' to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of 'climate barbarism,' this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. With reports spanning from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented 'ecological conversion,' Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis. An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.
Major new book from Penguin Random House publishing in November 2022.
The must-read, pocket-sized Big Think book of 2020 It feels like the world is falling apart. So how do we keep hold of our optimism? How do we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, trust and believe in something better? And how can we stay sane in this world of division? In this beautifully written and illuminating polemic, Booker Prize nominee Elif Shafak reflects on our age of pessimism, when emotions guide and misguide our politics, and misinformation and fear are the norm. A tender, uplifting plea for optimism, Shafak draws on her own memories and delves into the power of stories to reveal how writing can nurture democracy, tolerance and progress. And in the process, she answers one of the most urgent questions of our time.
THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.' - Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo , The Shock Doctrine , This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us. The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future? Shoshana Zuboff shows that we are at a crossroads. We still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in, and what we decide now will shape the rest of the century. Our choices: allow technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it and distribute its benefits. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. Most critically, it shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers - a guide to what everybody is talking about today '' Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing'' JIA TOLENTINO ''I believe Amia Srinivasan''s work will change the world'' KATHERINE RUNDELL ''Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year '' PANDORA SYKES ------------------------- How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.
Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity - its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power - we need to move beyond ''yes and no'', wanted and unwanted.
We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon.
Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.>
Exposes the shock doctors and offers information and connections that show how the shock doctors' beliefs dominate our world - and how this domination has been achieved. This book tells the tale of how a few are making a killing while more are getting killed.
BOB WOODWARDS NEW BOOK, RAGE, IS AN UNPRECEDENTED AND INTIMATE TOUR DE FORCE OF NEW REPORTING ON THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY FACING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC, ECONOMIC DISASTER AND RACIAL UNREST. Woodward, the No 1 international bestselling author of Fear: Trump in the White House , has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes readers i nto the Oval Office as Trumps head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 675,000 Americans. In 17 on-the-record interviews with Woodward over seven volatile months - an utterly vivid window into Trumps mind - the president provides a self-portrait that is part denial and part combative interchange mixed with surprising moments of doubt as he glimpses the perils in the presidency and what he calls the ''dynamite behind every door''. At key decision points, Rage shows how Trumps responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president. Revisiting the earliest days of the Trump presidency, Rage reveals how Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats struggled to keep the country safe as the president dismantled any semblance of collegial national security decision making. Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with first-hand witnesses as well as participants notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents. Woodward obtained 25 never-seen personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un , who describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a ''fantasy film''. Trump insists to Woodward he will triumph over Covid-19 and the economic calamity. ''Dont worry about it, Bob. Okay?'' Trump told the author in July. ''Dont worry about it. Well get to do another book. Youll find I was right.''
Picturing a future of accelerated conflict between civilizations threatening to dominate world politics, this classic study of the post-Cold War situation argues that an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war.
For its historical depth, analytical vigour and mobilizational potential, this book is unparalleled ... every page is an urgent invitation to resist'' David Lammy MPbr>br> ''History is a reminder that we are never far from the risk of living under fascism. Mason tells that history with passion and sincerity, framing it perfectly against the present'' Angela Saini, author of Superior: The Return of Race Sciencebr>br> The bestselling author of PostCapitalism offers a guide to resisting the far rightbr>The far right is on the rise across the world. From Modi''s India to Bolsonaro''s Brazil and Erdogan''s Turkey, fascism is not a horror that we have left in the past; it is a recurring nightmare that is happening again - and we need to find a better way to fight it.br>br>In How to Stop Fascism, Paul Mason offers a radical, hopeful blueprint for resisting and defeating the new far right. The book is both a chilling portrait of contemporary fascism, and a compelling history of the fascist phenomenon: its psychological roots, political theories and genocidal logic. Fascism, Mason powerfully argues, is a symptom of capitalist failure, and it has haunted us throughout the twentieth century.br>br>History shows us the conditions that breed fascism, and how it can be successfully overcome. But it is up to us in the present to challenge it, and time is running out. From the ashes of COVID-19, we have an opportunity to create a fairer, more equal society. To do so, we must ask ourselves: what kind of world do we want to live in? And what are we going to do about it?>
''Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace ... He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told.'' Sebastian Barry Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohn''s essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as ''our most irresistible literary critic'' (New York Times). This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn - a classicist by training - uses the classics as a lens to think about urgent contemporary debates. There is much to surprise here. Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer''s epics to help explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the ''bad boy of Athens'') about a wayward husband whose wife returns from the dead. There are essays on Sappho''s sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil''s Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor''s final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaard''s autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Noel Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the author''s boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a writer. In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles with erudition, emotion and tart wit while his essays dance across eras, cultures and genres. This is a provocative collection which sees today''s master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.