August 1, 2021
In I Came All This Way To Meet You, New York Times best-selling author Attenberg explains that as the daughter of a traveling salesman she came by her wanderlust naturally and shows how reflecting on her early years during her travels led her to writing--and particularly her theme of troubled families (75,000-copy first printing). Award-winning actress and Food Network star Bertinelli follows up her No. 1 New York Times best-selling memoir Losing It with inspiration as she turns 60 in Enough Already (100,000-copy first printing). In High-Risk Homosexual, a memoir ranging from funny (a baby speaking an ancient Jesuit language) to heartbreaking (the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando), Gomez explains how he came to embrace his gay, Latinx identity within a culture of machismo. In This Boy We Made, Harris relates her efforts to determine what is suddenly wrong with her bouncy 22-month-old boy in a system frequently inhospitable to Black mothers and her discovery when meeting with a geneticist that she has medical issues of her own. In Admissions, James relates the complications of being a diversity recruiter for select, largely white prep schools after attending The Taft School as its first Black legacy student. Attorney, podcaster, and Extra correspondent Lindsay discusses growing up in Dallas, TX; her career in law; and why she chose to be the first Black Bachelorette on The Bachelor in Miss Me with That. Miller reveals how he made the Jump, taking Nike's Jordan Brand from a relatively modest $150 million sneaker producer to a $4.5 billion worldwide footwear and apparel phenomenon while also recalling his teenage jailtime and the nightmares from which he still suffers and arguing for criminal justice reform and greater educational opportunities for the currently or formerly imprisoned. After her mother, actress Roseanne Barr, moved the family to celebrity-soaked Hollywood from working-class Denver, using personal details from their lives there for her sitcom's storylines, the teenaged Pentland endured anxiety and eating issues and various 1980s-sanctioned self-help interventions while muttering to herself This Will Be Funny Later (evidently proved here). In Lost & Found, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker staffer Schulz explores the bittersweet reality of meeting the woman she would marry just 18 months before losing her father. Readers Rise with Vonn as she earns 82 World Cup wins, 20 World Cup titles, seven World Championship medals, and three Olympic medals to become one of the top women ski racers of all time. Raised in Albania, the last Communist country in Europe, where the final tumble of Stalin's and Hoxha's statues soon led to economic chaos, political violence, and the flight of the disillusioned, Ypi has earned the right more than most to ponder what it means to be Free.
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Starred review from October 4, 2021
In this crackling debut, Gomez recounts his coming-of-age as a queer man, passionately exploring what it means to celebrate one’s identities and to make space for joy in the most unlikely places. “In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold on to pride for survival,” he writes, “but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others.” In essays packed with dry wit and searing cultural insight, Gomez blows open this paradox as he contends with the difficulties and traumas of compulsory heterosexuality that were forced upon him growing up in his Nicaraguan family. He brings readers on an exhilarating trip through his teens in Central America, where bloody cockfights at his uncle’s bar pulsated with machismo; reflects on meeting a group of encouraging trans sex workers, whose simple freedom both terrified and enticed him as a young gay person; recounts his awkward attempts to navigate hookup culture in his early 20s in Florida; and reflects on how taking PrEP instantly labeled him medically as a “high-risk homosexual.” The result transcends a simple coming-out story to instead offer a brilliant and provocative interrogation of sex, gender, race, and love. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic.
November 1, 2021
A Florida-born writer's account of how he learned to embrace and celebrate his identity as a gay Latinx man. As an adolescent growing up in Orlando, Gomez fantasized he could live in a "rom-com" world like the one that Jennifer Lopez, his idol and beautiful Latina "damsel in distress," often inhabited on screen. But an "artsy asexual" facade hid the queerness that his machista Latinx culture denigrated. In high school, a gay friend took him to clubs to revel in drag queen culture, and college brought with it the opportunity to move out and further define his sexuality on his own terms. However, Gomez quickly found himself forced into a binary existence. "It was obvious," he writes, "that I could experiment with my appearance or I could have sex, but I couldn't have both." At the same time, the author also discovered a desire to engage in anonymous, multipartner gay club sex, and he joined a gay burlesque troop, where he learned, gradually, to be comfortable in his own skin. Leaving Orlando for graduate school after the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre gave rise to other important personal revelations. "I don't have sympathy for the man who murdered forty-nine people I used to dance with. I promise you I don't," writes the author. "But I do for the child he'd been, despite knowing how this story ends, because he reminds me so much of myself." Contending with the pervasive fear of contracting HIV, the author slowly began to learn to cautiously explore his desires while also continuing to "play the game. The game is hope." Poignant, vivid, and often hilarious, this coming-of-age memoir fearlessly explores intersectional identity and shows what it means to live and love authentically as a gay man today. An engagingly candid memoir from a promising young writer.
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