Love And Other Acts Of Violence

"There is a war coming.... A war that will last for a hundred years.... I think it is already here. I think we've been fighting it a long time" A young Jewish physicist and an activist poet meet at a party and fall in love. As society splinters around them, the couple's struggle to survive erupts into violence. Cordelia Lynn's new play Love and Other Acts of Violence is a subversive and intimate love story about inheritance and the cycles of politics and history. It is premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in October 2021.

'There is a war coming... A war that will last for a hundred years... I think it is already here. I think we've been fighting it a long time.' A young Jewish physicist and an activist poet meet at a party and fall in love. As society splinters around them, the couple's struggle to survive erupts into violence. Cordelia Lynn's play Love and Other Acts of Violence is a subversive and intimate love story about inheritance and the cycles of politics and history. It premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in October 2021, directed by Elayce Ismail.

“Doctor Zhivago . . . Anna Karenina . . . A Hero of Our Time . . . The People’s Act of Love will remind you of all these books . . . Magnificent” (The Washington Post Book World). Set in a time of great social upheaval, warfare, and terrorism, and against a stark, lawless Siberia at the end of the Russian Revolution, The People’s Act of Love portrays the fragile coexistence of a beautiful, independent mother raising her son alone, a megalomaniac Czech captain and his restless regiment, and a mystical separatist Christian sect. When a mysterious, charismatic stranger trudges into their snowy village with a frighteningly outlandish story to tell, its balance is shaken to the core. “The narrative drive is amazing. So is the cold clarity of Meek’s imagination.” —Stephen King “Meeks builds multiple narratives to a bloody, satisfying, yet unsettling conclusion. People’s Act of Love stands not only as a keenly observed historical thriller but as a resonant tale of how one man’s moral fervor can turn to horror.” —Entertainment Weekly “Meek expertly renders each man’s devotion to the task of securing paradise on earth, and exposes the unsettling affinity between the devout servant of God and the cold, calculating murderer.” —The New Yorker “Set during the waning days of the Russian revolution, Meek’s utterly absorbing novel captivates with its depiction of human nature in all its wartime extremes.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “This ingenious, intricate novel, a meditation on grand ideas that is also a suspenseful page turner, avoids that too-easy wonder Russia often inspires in its admirers.” —The New York Times Book Review

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year: In a dystopian future New York, a girl’s diary chronicles her life as society begins to crumble around her. Until recently, Lola Hart’s biggest problem was her annoying little sister. Now the twelve-year-old girl’s once comfortable life is slowly falling apart. Her mother is a teacher, but she’s lost her job. Her father is a writer, but no one is buying his scripts. It’s gotten so bad that they can no longer afford their Manhattan apartment or the tuition for Lola’s exclusive private school. They move to a small apartment near Harlem, and Lola enrolls in public school—but the Harts aren’t alone in their troubles. Riots, fires, TB outbreaks, roaming gangs, and civil unrest have become commonplace, threatening the very fabric of life in New York. In the pages of her diary, Lola documents her family’s attempts to adjust as the city and the country spin out of control. Jack Womack, a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, has been compared to both William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut for his vivid prose and unbridled imagination. In this novel, “Womack’s stark vision of the United States’s decline is an uncompromising satire that, perhaps even more than it did in the mid-1990s, forces us to confront a world instantly recognizable as our own” (Los Angeles Review of Books). “A heartrending coming-of-age story. Flecked with black humor, this is speculative fiction at its eerie best.” —Entertainment Weekly

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties. In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--haunted houses, erotica, bildungsroman--in which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations about the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, Star Trek and Disney villains, fairy tales, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

A Literary Hub Best Book of Year • A Crime Reads Best Debut of the Year • A Newsweek 25 Best Fall Books • A Philadelphia Inquirer 10 Big Books for the Fall • An O Magazine.com LGBTQ Books That Are Changing the Literary Landscape in 2020 Selection • An Electric Lit Most Anticipated Debut of the Second Half of 2020 • A Paperback Paris Best New LGBTQ+ Books To Read This Year Selection • A Passport Best Book of the Month The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel—a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence. When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm. Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him. As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence. Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us.

At the beginning of senior year, Ann was a smiling, straight-A student with friends and a future. Then she met a haunted young man named Connor. Only she can heal his emotional scars; only he could make her feel so loved—and needed. Just one mistake could trigger Connor’s rage, a violent storm damaging everything—and everyone—in its path.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.