Dora A Headcase

Ida has a secret: she is in love with her best friend. But any time she gets close to intimacy, Ida faints or loses her voice. She needs a shrink. Or so her philandering father thinks. Immediately wise to the head games of her new shrink, Siggy, Ida - and alter-ego Dora - hatch a plan to secretly film him. But when the film goes viral, Ida finds herself targeted by unethical hackers. Dora: A Headcase is a contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud's famous case study, retold and revamped through Dora's point-of-view. Yuknavitch's Dora is radical and unapologetic - you won't have met a character quite like her before.

Dora: A Headcase is a contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud’s famous case study—retold and revamped through Dora's point of view, with shotgun blasts of dark humor and sexual play. Ida needs a shrink . . . or so her philandering father thinks, and he sends her to a Seattle psychiatrist. Immediately wise to the head games of her new shrink, whom she nicknames Siggy, Ida begins a coming-of-age journey. At the beginning of her therapy, Ida, whose alter ego is Dora, and her small posse of pals engage in "art attacks." Ida’s in love with her friend Obsidian, but when she gets close to intimacy, she faints or loses her voice. Ida and her friends hatch a plan to secretly film Siggy and make an experimental art film. But something goes wrong at a crucial moment—at a nearby hospital Ida finds her father suffering a heart attack. While Ida loses her voice, a rough cut of her experimental film has gone viral, and unethical media agents are hunting her down. A chase ensues in which everyone wants what Ida has.

LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Bustle and Lit Hub A fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction. Lidia Yuknavitch is a writer of rare insight into the jagged boundaries between pain and survival. Her characters are scarred by the unchecked hungers of others and themselves, yet determined to find salvation within lives that can feel beyond their control. In novels such as The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan, she has captivated readers with stories of visceral power. Now, in Verge, she offers a shard-sharp mosaic portrait of human resilience on the margins. The landscape of Verge is peopled with characters who are innocent and imperfect, wise and endangered: an eight-year-old black-market medical courier, a restless lover haunted by memories of his mother, a teenage girl gazing out her attic window at a nearby prison, all of them wounded but grasping toward transcendence. Clear-eyed yet inspiring, Verge challenges us with moments of uncomfortable truth, even as it urges us to place our faith not in the flimsy guardrails of society but in the memories held—and told—by our own individual bodies.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER THRUST IS: “Epic.” –The New York Times “A triumph.” —Elle “Stunningly beautiful.” —The Daily Beast “Both of the moment and utterly timeless.” —Chicago Review of Books “A book to take in wide-eyed.” —Rebecca Makkai NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST As rising waters—and an encroaching police state—endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a "carrier" travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins—vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisvė, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series of characters from the past two centuries: a French sculptor; a woman of the American underworld; a dictator's daughter; an accused murderer; and a squad of laborers at work on a national monument. Through intricately braided storylines, Laisvė must dodge enforcement raids and find her way to the present day, and then, finally, to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a connection that might save their lives—and their shared dream of freedom. A dazzling novel of body, spirit, and survival, Thrust will leave no reader unchanged.

THE RESISTANCE STARTS NOW A group of rebels have united to save a world ravaged by war, violence and greed. Joan is their leader. Jean de Men is their foe. The future of humanity is being rewritten . . . Lidia Yuknavitch’s mesmerising novel sees Joan of Arc’s story reborn for the near future. It is a genre-defying masterpiece that may very well rewire your brain. 100 Notable Books of 2017, New York Times 25 Most Anticipated Books by Women for 2017, ELLE 32 Most Exciting Books Coming Out in 2017, BuzzFeed 15 Best Books of 2017, Esquire 33 New Books to Read in 2017, Huffington Post New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

National Bestseller A masterful literary talent explores the treacherous, often violent borders between war and sex, love and art. With the flash of a camera, one girl’s life is shattered, and a host of others altered forever. . . In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions—and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own. As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless bisexual poet and an ingenuous performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds—east and west, real and virtual—collide? A fierce, provocative, and deeply affecting novel of both ideas and action that blends the tight construction of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending with the emotional power of Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.

The author explores the status of being a misfit as something to be embraced, and social misfits as being individuals of value who have a place in society, in a work that encourages people who have had difficulty finding their way to pursue their goals.

This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose. What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, and Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and a teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.