A Place in the World

March 1, 2022

With Animal Joy, poet/psychoanalyst Alsadir, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for the collection Fourth Person Singular, gets serious about studying the importance of laughter (30,000-copy first printing). Long-listed for the National Book Award and a Granta Best of Young American Novelists, Ball was inspired by French writer/artist �douard Lev�'s memoir (written at age 39) to offer his own frank Autoportrait in his 39th year. In 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse was a model, muse, and friend to cultural greats and an artist, cabaret star, and driving force in her own right, as Braude (The Invisible Emperor) highlights in Kiki Man Ray. With Eliot After "The Waste Land," award-winning scholar/poet Crawford follows up his highly regarded Young Eliot (10,000-copy first printing). Standing as both memoir and memorial, Black Folk Could Fly is a first selection of personal nonfiction from the late author/mentor Kenan, whose award-winning works powerfully communicate his experience of being Black, gay, and Southern. Lowell's Memoirs collects the complete autobiographical prose of the great poet, including unpublished early work (10,000-copy first printing). What is home but A Place in the World, and Tuscany celebrant Mayes's new book explores what home really means in all its variations. As Morris explains in her first book of nonfiction, she came to the writing career launched with the multi-million-copy best-selling The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Listening Well (50,000-copy first printing). Composer of the Tony-nominated musical Once Upon a Mattress, author of the novel Freaky Friday and the follow-up screenplay, and chair of the Juilliard School, Rodgers has a lot more to discuss in Shy than being the daughter of Richard Rodgers (25,000-copy first printing). Addressed to Wohl's brother Bobby, who died in 1965, As It Turns Out reconstructs the life of their sister, the iconic actress/model Edie Sedgwick made famous by Andy Warhol (30,000-copy first printing).

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Starred review from May 30, 2022
Novelist Mayes (See You in the Piazza) delivers a soulful meditation on “what home means, how it hooks the past and pushes into the future” in her spellbinding latest. She examines the question through an evocative tour of her homes: there’s Chatwood, with its demanding yet rewarding rose garden in Hillsborough, N.C. (“As much as you own an old house and garden,” she ruefully muses, “it owns you”); Bramasole, the Tuscan villa in Cortona, Italy, immortalized in her hit 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun; and her childhood Georgia home, a place that conjures memories of her mother’s cooking (the mouthwatering recipes for which are sprinkled throughout). Elsewhere, temporary dwellings induce reflections on life changes: cooking lessons at Simone Beck’s “honey-colored house” in Provence, for example, inspired Mayes to enroll in graduate school and begin a career as a teacher and writer. As she meanders through her memories, poignant takes on transience and mortality mingle with tributes to the people who bring her homes their vitality: friends, family, and Italian neighbors who drop off gifts of fresh ricotta, wine, eggs, zinnias, and tomatoes. “For my part,” Mayes writes, “these gifts give me a chance to feel at home in the world.” This rich testament to the pleasures of wanderlust and permanence is a gift as well.

Starred review from July 1, 2022
The bestselling author returns with another lush account of family and place. In her international bestselling book Under the Tuscan Sun, Mayes chronicled the challenges that she and her husband, Ed, encountered while renovating an abandoned Tuscan villa called Bramasole. In her latest exploration of "the meaning of home," she focuses primarily on her own homes, including Bramasole, her childhood home in the town of Fitzgerald, Georgia, and Chatwood, the house she purchased and remodeled near Hillsborough, North Carolina, a place "with an intense sense of community." After living in San Francisco for many decades, Mayes decided to return to the South "after a long quarrel with the place," instigated by "racism, sexist zeitgeist, anti-intellectualism, self-satisfaction. Men who refer to 'my bride' after forty years of marriage." Of course, "those still hover, but [Hillsborough], intolerant of such stupidity, is aspirational." While living in California, Mayes missed the Southern floral scents of magnolia, gardenia, honeysuckle, and jasmine, and she frequently discusses how foods and accents can signal a feeling of home. Regarding Bramasole, she muses that the hospitality she has experienced at the Italian table is similar to her Southern traditions. Mayes also explores temporary residences that she has occupied, including homes of friends and vacation homes in various locations, including Capri, Provence, and San Miguel de Allende. Despite her feelings of wanderlust, the author asserts that she seeks "home" wherever she travels, and her feelings are "visceral." When she feels it the most, she revels in "an immediate, illogical bonding." As she explored in her previous books, she is "always looking for what shapes the people of a particular spot on Earth" and "how the land, history, and climate act to form the people into who they are." The writing is characteristically intimate, as if she is sharing her thoughts and feelings with a dear friend, and she employs eloquent and detailed descriptions, creating a wonderful sense of place. A can't-miss hit for Mayes fans.

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