Available June 6th, 2023 - Pre-order a Signed Edition, click here!
Full of intimate stories, from chasing down secret love affairs to battling body image and struggling with familial strife, Pageboy is a love letter to the power of being seen. With this evocative and lyrical debut, Oscar-nominated star Elliot Page captures the universal human experience of searching for ourselves and our place in this complicated world.
“Can I kiss you?” It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he’d carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back.
With Juno’s massive success, Elliot became one of the world’s most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him. He was forced to play the part of the glossy young starlet, a role that made his skin crawl, on and off set. The career that had been an escape out of his reality and into a world of imagination was suddenly a nightmare.
As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels, and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent, unsure of what to do. Until enough was enough.
The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his story in a groundbreaking and inspiring memoir about love, family, fame — and stepping into who we truly are with strength, joy and connection.
The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl--and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi--will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
I was totally mesmerized by Norman Rush’s spectacular novel Mating, winner of the 1991 National Book Award, but seeing a big surge in popularity now over 30 years later, even though its basic plot points seem like it could be a tough sell—the narrator, an unnamed female anthropologist adrift in Botswana pursues another anthropologist, Nelson Denoon, rumored to be setting up a utopian, matriarchal community in a remote Kalahari desert village. Smart, provocative, and brilliantly written, reading it now in 2023 is still an exhilarating experience, for there is much to admire here for readers who take the life of the mind seriously—the novel’s big intellectual sweep, its stimulating ideas on feminism, love, politics, race, language and anthropology, a proto-feminist novel written by a man that deals with the rituals of courtship and “mating” that expand beyond societal norms, a novel of ideas I’ve seen described as a “funny, smart love story about two people trying to discover what love between intellectual equals might look like.” Unafraid to tackle big ideas like the geopolitics of poverty, political utopianism, apartheid South Africa circa 1980, or the pitfalls of socialism, Mating uses extended dialogue and dense sentences (and a whole laundry list of obscure words which is quite fun!) to thrillingly explore the pitfalls and possibilities of both love and politics. In Mating Norman Rush has produced a truly great book that deserves to be read and admired. Ed loved and highly recommends!
