Every True Pleasure

Some of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume—featuring writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight—are stories and essays that view the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens. These writers, all native or connected to North Carolina, show the multifaceted challenges and joys of LGBTQ life, including young love and gay panic, the minefield of religion, military service, having children with a surrogate, family rejection, finding one's true gender, finding sex, and finding love. One of the only anthologies of its kind, Every True Pleasure speaks with insight and compassion about living LGBTQ in North Carolina and beyond. Contributors include Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Brian Blanchfield, Belle Boggs, Emily Chavez, Garrard Conley, John Pierre Craig, Diane Daniel, Allan Gurganus, Minrose Gwin, Aaron Gwyn, Wayne Johns, Randall Kenan, Kelly Link, Zelda Lockhart, Toni Newman, Michael Parker, Penelope Robbins, David Sedaris, Eric Tran, and Alyssa Wong.

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'The Pursuit of Happiness' by Daniel G. Brinton is a classic book that offers valuable insights into the pursuit of happiness. It explores the definition of happiness and the desirability of learning how to become happy, as well as pleasure and pain, the hierarchy of enjoyments, and the distribution of happiness. It provides principles for self-education and the promotion of personal happiness, as well as insights into how our happiness depends on nature, fate, others, and ultimately, ourselves.

Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

In The Pursuit of Happiness, the latest addition to the Brookings FOCUS series, Carol Graham explores what we know about the determinants of happiness, acrossand within countries at different stages of development. She then takes a look at just what we can do with that new knowledge and clearly presents both the promise and thepotential pitfalls of injecting the "economics of happiness" into public policymaking.This burgeoning field, largely a product of collaboration between economists and psychologists, is gaining great currency worldwide. One of a handful of pioneers to studythis topic a mere decade ago, Graham is understandably excited about how far the concept has come and its possible utility in the future. The British, French, and Braziliangovernments already have introduced happiness metrics into their benchmarks of national progress, and the U.S. government could follow suit. But "happiness" as a yardstick to help measure a nation's well-being is still a relatively new approach, and many questions remain unanswered.The Pursuit of Happiness spotlights the innovative contributions of happiness research to the dismal science. But it also raises a cautionary note about the issues that stillneed to be addressed before policymakers can make best use of them. An effective definition of well-being that goes beyond measuring income-the Gross National Productapproach-could very well lead to improved understanding of poverty and economic welfare. But the question remains: how best to measure and quantify happiness? While scholars have developed rigorous measures of well-being that can be included in our statistics-as the British are already doing-to what degree should we use such metrics to shape and evaluate policy, particularly in assessing development outcomes?Graham considers a number of unanswered questions, such as whether policy should be more concerned with increasing day-to-day contentment or with providing greater opportunity to build a fulfilling life. Other issues include whether we care more about the happiness of today's citizens or that of future generations. Policies such as reducing our fiscal deficits or reforming our health care system, for example, typically require sacrificing current consumption and immediate well-being for better long-run outcomes. Another is whether policy should focus on reducing misery or raising general levels ofwell-being beyond their relatively high levels, in the same way that reducing poverty is only one choice among many objectives in our macroeconomic policy.Employing the new metrics without attention to these questions could produce mistakes that might undermine the long-term prospects for a truly meaningful economics of well-being. Despite this cautionary note, Graham points out that it is surely a positive development that some of our public attention is going to better understanding and enhancing the well-being of our citizens, rather than emphasizing the rootsof their divide.

Ian Crombie’s impressive volumes provide a comprehensive interpretation of Plato’s doctrines. Volume 1 contains topics of more general interest and is mainly concerned with what Plato has to say in the fields of moral philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion.

Plato is perhaps the best known and most widely studied of all the ancient Greek philosophers. A pupil of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, his ideas have inspired and influenced scholars of nearly every era. His famous series of dialogues have become a standard part of the western philosophical canon – from the Euthyphro and Gorgias of his early period, the Republic, Phaedrus and Symposium of his middle period, to the Theaetetus and Laws of his late period.The Routledge Library Edition makes available in a single set an outstanding range of scholarship devoted to Plato’s philosophical work. Routledge Library Editions:Plato makes available in a single set an outstanding range of scholarship devoted to Plato’s philosophical work. The 21 volumes provide detailed analysis of his writings and philosophical ideas. From the classic works of Francis Cornford, G. C. Field and A.E. Taylor to more recent approaches and interpretations, this set provides libraries and scholars with a century of outstanding scholarship on this key philosopher.