Bücher veröffentlicht von Catapult

With heart, humor, and razor-sharp observation, this intimate and incisive memoir traces the journey of a Black, queer woman as she searches the world for a place of security and acceptance to call homeI’ve never seen home as a permanent concept; it is an image crafted from untempered glass that threatens to shatter with lack of care.Jennifer Neal was born in the United States to a family that moved continuously for their own survival and well-being—from the Great Migration to the twenty-first century. As an adult, she has continued to travel the world as a Black queer woman, across two decades and four countries—from Japan to the US and then Australia to Germany, where she has settled for now.Throughout her moves, Neal threads her personal story of immigration with local Black histories and racial politics to provide context for her own experiences. The result is both a crucial examination of how racism plays a foundational role in modern-day immigration systems and a tender tribute to immigrants and their stories.An unwavering interrogation of colonialism and policy, love and loss, hypocrisy and resistance, My Pisces Heart demands meaningful conversation about not only the ways in which we live with our histories, but also how they live through us—urging an honest dialogue on why the West continues to grapple with its past and visualize its future.

"Fifteen-year-old Dimkpa dreams of the day his father will be made village head. He will return to school and maybe even go on to university; his mother will no longer have to break her back foraging wild food to sell at market; they will have the money to build a fine tomb for his aunt Okike; and his family s status as ohu ma, the lowest Igbo caste, won t matter anymore. But when his father is passed over for a younger man, breaking tradition, Dimkpa realizes that he must make his own fate. Journeying from his small village in rural Nigeria, to Lagos, Awka, and home again, Dimkpa learns that no money is easy money, that superstition runs deep, that knowledge is power, and that sometimes it is better to live in the present than to always be chasing a future just out of reach. The Liquid Eye of a Moon is by turns hilarious and poignant, capturing all the messiness of adolescence, and the difficulty of making your own way in a world that seeks to oppress you."--Publisher description.

Developed from the Hope Collective, a popular punk venue in Dublin, Ireland, this unique cookbook links healthy eating with the punk rock community and subculture. With over 120 vegan recipes and personal anecdotes collected from bands who performed at the club, Please Feed Me presents tasty offerings such as Fugazi Chocolate Cake, Bikini Kill Chili non Carne, and Neurosis and Pincer Martin Tomato and Orange Soup. Also included are thoughts on punk rock culture as a vital underground network, and insider stories of well-known U.S. and international bands.

A thought-provoking and dramatic account two families who hope to start a new life in the boglands of New Jersey only to discover, much too late, that their new living environment was riddled with radiation and toxic waste.Two immigrant families drawn together from wildly different parts of the world, Italy on one side and Barbados on the other, pursued their vision of the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey, where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries on hot afternoons and spent lazy days rowing dinghies down creeks. But the gooseberry patch was near a nuclear power plant that released record levels of radiation, and the creeks were invisibly ruined by illegally dumped toxic waste. One by one, family members found their bodies mirroring the compromised landscape of the Barrens: infertile and damaged by inexplicable growths. Soon the area parents were being asked to donate their children's baby teeth to be tested for radiation.Body Toxic is an environmental memoir--merging the personal and familial with the political and environmental, fusing fact with meditation. Intensely intimate and starkly contemporary, it is a story of bravery and resignation, of great hope and great loss. This book presents American families in the midst of the wreckage of the American dream.

In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitants—animal, plant, and human—with the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so even–handed in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw as well as by environmentalists. As he writes, 'My sympathies lie with the people and the woods, but not with the companies that have used them both with equal disregard.In his vivid portrayal of the land, plants, people and animals of the Willapa Hills of Washington State, Bob Pyle makes the modest patch of land he writes about a metaphor for the world.

This anthology of short stories marks the fifteenth anniversary of The Story Prize and includes one story from each of the annual winning collections, beginning with Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker and concluding with Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible

Victoria Patterson, whose writing Vanity Fair has called "brutal, deeply empathetic, and emotionally wrenching,"" returns with a new collection of stories that contains echoes of Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver, along with the emotional depth and density of Elena Ferrante.There's a pitch–perfect blend of linguistic dexterity, emotional wisdom, and wry observation in The Secret Habit of Sorrow. The characters in these stories feel like people you know, their struggles real. Victoria Patterson's prose has a Denis–Johnson refiltered–through–Raymond–Carver–vibe, along with the emotional depth and density of Elena Ferrante. Whether it be the ties between women and their own and each other's infants, the struggles of parenthood, or the trials that come with excessive drinking and drug abuse, Patterson has an amazing ability to convey relationships and how our bonds can both save and destroy us. Her previous collection of stories, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Story Prize, and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle.

This "undeniably moving and emotionally true" debut novel offers the emotional complexity and narrative scope of A Visit from the Goon Squad and resonates with the strong mystical nature of Swamplandia (Publishers Weekly, starred review).Most of us have experienced what it’s like to know what someone is going to say right before they say it. Or perhaps you have been shocked by the irrefutable phenomena of coincidence, when your life intersects with another’s in the most unlikely way. In gripping prose marked by stark simplicity, Another Place You’ve Never Been by debut novelist Rebecca Kauffman explores the intersection of human experience amidst the minutiae of everyday life.In her mid-thirties and still living in her hometown Buffalo, NY, Tracy spends most days at the restaurant where she works as a hostess, despite her aspirations of a career that would make use of her creative talents. Tracy’s life is explored not only though her own personal point of view, but also through the viewpoints of other characters, wherein Tracy may only make a peripheral appearance or even emerge at different periods in her life.At its core, Another Place You've Never Been is a broad investigation of such bold ideas as the possibility that any person, at any time, in any place, could find themselves shivering in the presence of great and ancient forces; and the notion that love is perhaps "far less voluntary" than we might believe it to be.

“[This Is What We Do] is...Atlas Shrugged jammed in reverse and with the tires smoked. It's Ayn Rand for people with a brain. And a gun. It's a kick. Read it.” —Sean Beaudoin, author of You Killed Wesley Payne and The InfectsJames Nethery is at the end of his rope. Unable to find meaning in his comfortable life, he has cut himself off from everyone and fled to Paris. His mission; to rid himself of a lifetime of baggage, erase the past, and start over. He wanders Paris aimlessly until he meets Lily, a Ukrainian model and hooker. They form a unique bond, and together take the first steps toward writing new stories of their lives. Soon, Lily’s past catches up with her and they are forced to go on the lam in a strange country. Together they must decide between justice and vengeance, and, when forced to take action, between what is too much—and not enough.This Is What We Do is part neo–noir thriller, part love story, and part cautionary tale of the perils of trying to write a new life from nothing—and the stories that will be written for you by others if you find yourself in the public eye.

“Bernadette Murphy’s luminous book shows us how to take risks that make us fierce and vulnerable, knowing that true strength is about being generous as much as it is about not giving in.” —Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World and Poster ChildWhat happens when women in midlife step out of what's predictable? For Bernadette Murphy, learning to ride a motorcycle at forty–eight becomes the catalyst that transforms her from a settled wife and professor with three teenage children into a woman on her own. The confidence she gained from mastering a new skill and conquering her fears gave her the courage to face deeper issues in her own life and start taking risks. It is a fact that men and women alike become more risk averse in our later years —which according to psychologists and neuroscience is exactly what we should not do. And Murphy stresses that while hers is a story of transformation using a physical risk, emotional and educational risks can serve the same beneficial purpose for other women. Murphy uses her own story to explore the larger idea of how risk changes our brain chemistry, how certain personality types embrace dangerous behavior and why it energizes them, and why women's expectations change once estrogen levels drop after the childbearing years. She also explores the idea of women and risk in pop culture—why there are so few stories of the conquering heroine (instead of hero). Surely Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff should not be our only pop culture reference for women finding true freedom.  With scientific research and journalistic interviews weaving through a page–turning, road trip narrative, Harley and Me is a compelling look at how one woman changed her life and found deeper meaning out on the open road.

An insider's look at the rough and tumble workers throughout America who are risking their lives--and losing them at an alarmingly high rate--all in the name of connectivity.What is the price of staying connected, of that phone in your hand or that watch on your wrist?Recent TV shows would have you believe that the most dangerous job in America is a crab fisherman, or maybe even an ice road trucker. But what U.S. Department of Labor unequivocally recognizes as the most dangerous job in America belongs to the tower dog, the men and women who work on cell towers across the country, building the networks that keep us all connected.In Tower Dog: Life Inside the Deadliest Job in America, Douglas Scott Delaney, a tower dog for more than fifteen years, draws readers into this dark and high-stakes world that most don't even know exists, yet rely on every minute of every day. This risk-laden profession has been covered by NBC Dateline, Frontline, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, but none of these reports have provided the real, inside story of these men and women who have always lived on the edge of society; a fascinating mix of construction crews and thrill-seekers. Delaney is a brash and illuminating guide, and Tower Dog gives us the real experience of what it's like for the workers balanced precariously above the clouds.

Best known as a novelist, Nicholas Christopher began publishing poems in The New Yorker in his twenties, and has published eight collections, praised over the years by poets and critics as being among America's most important poets. Reviewing his selected poems, Crossing the Equator, published eight years ago, The Washington Post said, "To read his richly honed and sensuous work, which has so much tensile strength, is to visit other worlds and then to return to our own disturbed by time, but also refreshed and reawakened."On Jupiter Place is his first book since that collection, and it contains material that is perhaps his most personal, autobiographical and intimate work yet. Beautifully made and carefully constructed, one might be reminded of Keats thinking that his poems were "little machines" of feeling. And everywhere in this book are moments of disorientation, where the wonder of the poem transcends understanding and leads its readers back into themselves slightly startled and richer for the effort. As Merwin has written, "his poems are vibrant with light and the surprise of recognition. He shows us again and again the luminous nature of the familiar."The Washington Post, reviewing his Crossing the Equator: New & Selected Poems, reported that "Nicholas Christopher is a fabulist...His fiction often puts me in mind of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, two time–travelers who are his great precursors. His poetry tends to build on the work of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. Like them, he has a taste for the exotic, the faraway, the displaced, the imaginary.

“These stories were my kind of stories--a little weird and magical and bittersweet.” --Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and HungerA middle-aged masochist in love with a comatose man. A gay birthday clown lamenting the loss of his beloved dog. An amateur veterinarian keeping watch over his suicidal daughter. And a bikini model with a barnacle stuck to her butt cheek. These are just a few of the characters who populate the quirky, offbeat world of If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home a world that feels at once alien and strangely familiar.In these twenty-one brief, funny stories, John Jodzio documents his characters disappointment, frustration, and longing for a home that seems forever out of reach. By turns bleak and hopeful, cruel and tender, this is an exciting literary debut by a writer to watch, a writer with a unique and compelling voice.“John Jodzio is the best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new.” —Chuck Klosterman, New York Times bestselling author

Your wife is having an affair with my husband. It has caused some trouble in my marriage and I thought you should know.One phone call in December 2005 begins the compelling, unpredictable story of Fake Missed Connections. A child of divorce with an already fragile sense of trust, Lauer unravels at the betrayal, begins divorce proceedings, and moves back to Brooklyn where he spends too much time alone, fixated on the idea that a murderer from 1898 might be haunting his apartment. Eventually, as he starts to peruse online dating profiles, he becomes obsessed with "missed connections" precisely because they provide what online dating doesn't: a story.He begins writing phony missed connections to post on Craigslist and, though he feels a stab of guilt when he posts them, he is hopelessly intrigued by the responses he receives. Real documents illuminate Brett's dating adventures, from love (and hate) letters and instant message conversations to Brett's online dating profile and wedding announcement. Fake Missed Connections is an unconventional yet deeply moving look at the modern search for love, the ways in which we fail to communicate, and the quest for a genuine moment of connection.

Liza Monroy’s new book is collection of deeply personal essays that tackle the universal themes of romantic and familial love, fate and chance, all told in a humorous and intelligent manner that keeps the reader yearning for more. Created in the wake of Liza's popular essays– including her piece for the Modern Love column in the New York Times — Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire chronicles Liza's many misadventures in her quest for love. These misadventures span a variety of countries and a variety of men, all bound together under the watchful eye of her eccentric, single mother, a profiler for the U.S. State Department, who is soon using her professional aptitude to weed out the men in her daughter’s path.Filled with quirky details and archetypal characters from our everyday lives, with stories that are both wildly hilarious and deeply heartfelt, Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire is both a vulnerably open testament to Liza's personal experiences and an intriguing work that confronts the odds of finding love and intimacy in the increasingly depersonalized world of technology.

The conventional narrative concerning religious terrorism inside the United States says that the first salvo occurred in 1993, with the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. This narrative has motivated more than a decade of wars, and re-prioritized Americas domestic security and law enforcement agenda. But the conventional narrative is wrong.A different group of jihadists exists within US borders. This group has a long but hidden history, is outside the purview of public officials and has an agenda as apocalyptic as anything Al Qaeda has to offer. Radical sects of Christianity have inspired some of the most grotesque acts of violence in American history: the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing that killed four young girls; the Mississippi Burning murders of three civil rights workers in 1964; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 1970s; and the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.America's Secret Jihad uses these crimes to tell a story that has not been told before.Expanding upon the authors ground-breaking work on the Martin Luther King, Jr. murder, and through the use of extensive documentation, never-before-released interviews, and a re-interpretation of major events, America's Secret Jihad paints a picture of Christian extremism and domestic terrorism as it has never before been portrayed.

Described as "a writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and other self–educated seers" by the San Francisco Chronicle, David Rains Wallace turns his attention to one of the most distinctive corners of California: the San Francisco Bay Area. Weaving a complex and engaging story of the Bay Area from personal, historical, and environmental threads, Wallace's exploration of the natural world takes readers on a fascinating tour through the region: from Point Reyes National Park, where an abandoned campfire and an invasion of Douglas fir trees combusted into a dangerous wildfire, to Oakland's Lake Merritt, a surprising site amid skyscrapers for some of the best local bird–watching; from the majestic Diablo Range near San Jose, where conservationists fight against land developers to preserve species like mountain lions and golden eagles, to the Golden Gate itself, the iconic bridge that—geologically speaking—leads not to gold but to serpentine. Each essay explores a different place throughout the four corners of the Bay Area, uncovering the flora and fauna that make each so extraordinary.With a naturalist's eye, a penchant for local history, and an obvious passion for the subject, Wallace's new collection is among the first nature writing dedicated entirely to the Bay Area. Informative, engrossing, and exquisitely described, Mountains and Marshes affords unexpected yet familiar views of a beloved region that, even amidst centuries of growth and change, is as dynamic as it is timeless.