Memoirs and Misinformation. A Novel.
Jim Carrey
The author is an insanely successful movie star – but he’s also lonely. He’s tried diets, gurus, and cuddling with his military-grade Israeli guard dogs, but nothing seems to lift the cloud of emptiness and ennui. But then Jim meets Georgie: ruthless ingénue, love of his life. And with the help of auteur screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, he has a role to play in a boundary-pushing new picture that may help him uncover a whole new side to himself–finally, his Oscar vehicle! Things are looking up! Memoirs and Misinformation is a semi-autobiographical satirical novel. In it, Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon have fashioned a story about acting, Hollywood, agents, celebrity, privilege, friendship, romance, addiction to relevance, fear of personal erasure, our “one big soul,” Canada, and a cataclysmic ending of the world – apocalypses within and without.
Knopf, May 2020
The Future Earth. A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming
Eric Holthaus
The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face.
HarperOne, June 2020
Desert Notebooks. Journals for the End of Time
Ben Ehrenreich
The author, a columnist for The Nation, describes the natural landscape of Joshua Tree National Park and the artificial desert of Las Vegas, where he spends time writing. First, he keeps a journal while living in a cabin in Joshua Tree, only to move to a lonely apartment in Vegas on a six-months scholarship. In Joshua Tree, he is riveted by the vastness of the land and the sky and nurtures his love of owls – real and imagined. Nature writing, mythology, environmental science and his own inner and outer adventures fill his days and pages. Another dimension awaits him when he moves to the city of neon lights where he also finds beauty and plenty of occasions to pursue his thoughts about the Anthropocene and the changing fate of the earth and its inhabitants, including the unstable political climate. (sgs)
Counterpoint, July 2020
Utopia Avenue
David Mitchell
This rock novel plays in the psychedelic sixties, where we witness a British band rising, peaking and sinking. They resemble the British folk rock band Fairport Convention and their unforgettable lead singer, Sandy Deny, and are managed by a strange beatnik called Levon Frankland. Band members Elf Holloway (vocals), Jasper de Zoet (guitar), Dean Moss (base) and Griff (drums) move from provincial venues to big cities, including the Apple. Their trials and tribulations are a rollercoaster ride of elation and sorrow but there is one constant: their music. We also gain deep insights into the proponents’ characters, introspection being what you practiced when you were on heroic doses of drugs in those days. This is the author’s eighth novel, and it is a smash hit already because this man knows how to tell a story. (sgs)
Hodder and Stoughton, July 2020
Remain in Love. Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina
Chris Frantz
Chris Frantz met David Byrne at the Rhode Island School of Art & Design in the early 1970s. Together – and soon with Frantz’s future wife, Tina Weymouth – they formed Talking Heads and took up residence in the grimy environs of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where their neighbours were Patti Smith, William Burroughs and a host of proto-punk artists who now have legendary status. Building an early audience and reputation with many performances at CBGB alongside the Ramones, Television and Blondie, Talking Heads found themselves feted by Warhol (who famously referred to them as ‘Talking Horses’) and Lou Reed. A band whose sensibility was both a part of, and apart from, punk, their early albums quickly became classics; until the Brian Eno produced masterpiece Remain in Light, saw them explode…
Orion, July 2020