Washoe County Library System

"From the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both: a breathtakingly inventive new novel--about aging, time, love, and stories themselves--that launches an extraordinary quartet of books called Seasonal. Readers love Ali Smith's novels for their peerless innovation and their joyful celebration of language and life. Her newest, Autumn, has all of these qualities in spades, and--good news for fans!--is the first installment...

"Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. And yet today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, andwider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are-gasp-fully fledged human beings. How...

Ted Cohen was an original and captivating essayist known for his inquisitive intelligence, wit, charm, and a deeply humane feel for life. For Cohen, writing was a way of discovering, and also celebrating, the depth and complexity of things overlooked by most professional philosophers and aestheticians?but not by most people. Whether writing about the rules of baseball, of driving, or of Kant?s Third Critique; about Hitchcock, ceramics, or jokes, Cohen...

"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music. In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification...

"In the tradition of "Bringing up Bebe" and "French Toast," Cathy Yandell's "The French Art of Living Well" is a delightful look at French culture, from literature to cuisine to humor and more, showing how the French have captured that magic elixir knownas joie de vivre. What is joie de vivre, and why is it a fundamentally French concept? In search of those ineffable qualities that make up the joy of living, this lively book takes readers on a voyage...

"TACKY is about the power of pop culture -- like any art, low or high -- to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These fifteen essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we've learned to hate to love -- frosted tips and glosses, Sex and the City, The Cheesecake Factory -- into kinder and sharper perspective. Each essay...

The cultural critic questions how modern people understand the concept of villainy, describing how his youthful idealism gave way to an adult sympathy with notorious cultural figures to offer insight into the appeal of anti-heroes.