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In Gad we trust : a tell-some / by Gad, Josh,1981-author.;
Josh Gad is an award-winning actor, singer, and comedian. He is known for voicing Olaf in the Frozen franchise, playing Elder Arnold Cunningham in the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon , and LeFou in the live-action adaptation of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. For the first and possibly last time, Josh Gad dives into a wide array of personal topics: the lasting impact of his parents divorce; how he struggled with weight and self-image; his first big break; how everyone was sure his most successful ventures (both on the big screen and the stage) would fail; his take on fatherhood, and so much more. This trip down the rabbit hole of overly personal stories will distract readers from climate change, the downward descent of democracy in Western civilization, and the existential threat that AI poses to Drake's music with never-before-seen photos and few-to-no spelling errors. Whether you know him from Disney or Broadway, YouTube, the silver screen, or not at all, one fact remains: Josh's work never fails to bring people together (as long as they're alive.) His delightful debut, written in the tradition of Amy Poehler, Jim Gaffigan, and Mindy Kaling, reminds us to keep going, even when the chips and doubters are stacked against you.
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Gad, Josh, 1981-; Actors; Comedians; Motion picture actors and actresses; Voice actors and actresses;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Spent [graphic novel] : a comic novel / by Bechdel, Alison,1960-author,illustrator.; Chad, Jon,illustrator.; Taylor, Holly Rae,1967-colourist.;
"In Alison Bechdel's hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war. She wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about her own greed and privilege? Meanwhile, Alison's first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It's a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel's beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For). As the TV show Death and Taxidermy racks up Emmy after Emmy--and when Alison's Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral--Alison's own envy spirals. Why couldn't she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show ... like Queer Eye ... showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?!!"--
Subjects: Graphic novels.; Humorous comics.; Lesbian comics.; Political comics.; Queer comics.; Social issue comics.; Bechdel, Alison, 1960-; Cartoonists; Farm life; Lesbians; Political activists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Nexus : a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI / by Harari, Yuval N.,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI-a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity."--
Subjects: Information behavior; Information networks; Information technology;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Coexistence : stories / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray.Short stories.Selections.;
"A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from a Giller-longlisted author and one of contemporary literature's most boundless minds. Across the prairies and Canada's west coast, on reservations and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They're learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment. An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school -- a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal. Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt's mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers."--
Subjects: Short stories.; Indigenous peoples; Interpersonal relations; Loneliness; Love;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Lucky seed / by Huang, Justinian,author.;
The billionaire Sun Clan of Greater Los Angeles is your typical American family, with power-struggling aunties, emasculated uncles, scheming cousins, scandalous secrets and a fortune teller on retainer. But at the end of each combative day, the Suns are chained together with golden handcuffs, whether they like it or not. Yet strange storms are a-brewing. Their matriarch, Roses Sun, is grappling with an existential crisis: she must produce a male heir that bears the clan's surname. She fears that if her generation is the one in which their esteemed lineage ends, they will be punished as "hungry ghosts" in the afterlife--an ancient but very real Asian superstition. Faced with this terrifying fate, Roses summons her favorite nephew, Wayward. Believing him to possess the "lucky seed," Roses presents Wayward with a mandatory suggestion: to father a baby boy who will inherit everything. When the other members of the Sun Clan catch wind of Roses's plot, all hells break loose. Wayward's family will now clash like never before in an epic war over the future of the Suns ... if there is a future at all. Yet through the chaos, Wayward sees opportunity. What if he can leverage all the conflict into a solution for his problematic family? What if he can reunite the Sun Clan by healing them? And what if the tumultuous Suns can finally learn how to love each other for the first time?
Subjects: Queer fiction.; Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Asian Americans; Asian American families; Families; Gay men; Heirs; Intergenerational relations;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Discontent : a novel / by Serrano, Beatriz,1989-author.; translation of:Serrano, Beatriz,1989-Descontento.English.; Lethem, Mara,translator.;
"On the surface, Marisa's life looks enviable. She lives in a beautiful apartment in the center of Madrid, she has a hot neighbor who is always around to sleep with her, and she's rapidly risen through the ranks at her advertising agency. And yet she's drowning in a dark hole of existential dread induced by the expectations of corporate life. Marisa hates her job and everyone at it. She spends her working hours locked in her office hiding from her coworkers, bingeing YouTube videos, and taking Valium. When she has the time, she escapes to her favorite museum where she contemplates the meaning of human life while staring at Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or trying to get hit by a car so she can go on disability. But Marisa's success, which is largely built on lies and work she's stolen from other people, is in danger of being revealed when she's forced to go on her company's annual team-building retreat. Isolated in the Spanish mountains, surrounded by a psychopathic boss, overly enthusiastic co-workers who revel in their exploitation, a flirty retreat staff, and haunted by a deeply-buried memory about a past coworker, Marisa is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral. A darkly funny, provocative, and incisive tale of our modern times, Discontent explores the unease we bury eight hours a day, and how explosive it is when it rises to the surface"--
Subjects: Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Anxiety in women; Women; Work environment;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Denial / by Raymond, Jonathan,author.;
"A futuristic thriller about climate change by the acclaimed screenwriter of First Cow, Meek's Cutoff, and HBO's Mildred Pierce. The year is 2052. Climate change has had a predictably devastating effect: Venice submerged, cyclones in Oklahoma, megafires in South America. Yet it could be much worse. Two decades earlier, the global protest movement known as the Upheavals helped break the planet's fossil fuel dependency, and the subsequent Nuremberg-like Toronto Trials convicted the most powerful oil executives and lobbyists for crimes against the environment. Not all of them. A few executives escaped arrest and went into hiding, including pipeline mastermind Robert Cave. Now, a Pacific Northwest journalist named Jack Henry who works for a struggling media company has received a tip that Cave is living in Mexico. Hoping the story will save his job, he travels south and, using a fake identity, makes contact with the fugitive. The two men strike up an unexpected friendship, leaving Jack torn about exposing Cave--an uncertainty further compounded by the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and a new romance with an old acquaintance. Who will really benefit from the unmasking? What is the nature of justice and punishment? How does one contend with mortality when the planet itself is dying? Denial is both a page-turning speculative suspense novel and a powerful existential inquisition about the perilous moment in which we currently live."--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Dystopian fiction.; Political fiction.; Novels.; Climatic changes; Fugitives from justice; Interpersonal relations; Journalists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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In my time of dying : how i came face to face with the idea of an afterlife / by Junger, Sebastian,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. "It's okay," his father said. "There's nothing to be scared of. I'll take care of you." That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger -- a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical -- to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions? In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Junger, Sebastian.; Death.; Future life.; Near-death experiences.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Binge : 60 stories to make your brain feel different / by Coupland, Douglas,author.;
"The first new work of fiction since 2013, from one of Canada's most successful, idiosyncratic and world-defining writers, Douglas Coupland. He's called it Binge because it's impossible to read just one. Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every moment of the day! Maybe that's how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there's no sliding scale of life. You're either alive, or you're not. Or you're dead or you're not. Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with Generation X: Tales for an Accelarated Culture, he is back with Binge, 61 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living: the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny. Here the narrators vary from story to story as Doug catches what he calls "the voice of the people," inspired by the way people write about themselves and their experiences in online forums. The characters, of course, are Doug's own: crackpots, cranks and sweetie-pies. People in the grip of unconscionable urges; lonely people; dying people; silly people. If you love Doug's fiction, this collection is like rain on the desert."--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Humorous fiction.; Short stories.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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In my time of dying [sound recording] : how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife / by Junger, Sebastian,author,narrator.; Simon & Schuster Audio (Firm),publisher.;
Read by the author."For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. "It's okay," his father said. "There's nothing to be scared of. I'll take care of you." That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger -- a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical -- to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions? In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery."--
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Junger, Sebastian.; Death.; Future life.; Near-death experiences.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Results 41 to 50 of 79 | « previous |