Stars Like Us

From the winner of the Ampersand Prize comes this smart, swoony LGBTQ YA novel about a teenage band on the way to the top – so long as they can hold it together. Liliana’s hitting all the wrong notes. She’s a sixteen-year-old exchange student with a secret crush on Carter, her new band’s smoking hot guitarist – but she’s also got a girlfriend back home. So when she writes a song about him and it lands the band a record deal, she quickly realises she’s in hot water. Soon, Liliana will have to choose – between an alluring boy and the girl she left behind, between love and lust, and between the fame that beckons and staying true to the music that’s in her heart. With shades of hit TV series Nashville, the musical passion of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and the band drama of Fleetwood Mac, this brilliant own-voices YA debut is perfect for music lovers everywhere.

“Suspenseful…emotionally compelling. I found myself eagerly following in a way I hadn’t remembered for a long time, impatient for the next twist and turn of the story."—NPR An Afghan American woman returns to Kabul to learn the truth about her family and the tragedy that destroyed their lives in this brilliant and compelling novel from the bestselling author of The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, The House Without Windows, and When the Moon Is Low. Kabul, 1978: The daughter of a prominent family, Sitara Zamani lives a privileged life in Afghanistan’s thriving cosmopolitan capital. The 1970s are a time of remarkable promise under the leadership of people like Sardar Daoud, Afghanistan’s progressive president, and Sitara’s beloved father, his right-hand man. But the ten-year-old Sitara’s world is shattered when communists stage a coup, assassinating the president and Sitara’s entire family. Only she survives. Smuggled out of the palace by a guard named Shair, Sitara finds her way to the home of a female American diplomat, who adopts her and raises her in America. In her new country, Sitara takes on a new name—Aryana Shepherd—and throws herself into her studies, eventually becoming a renowned surgeon. A survivor, Aryana has refused to look back, choosing instead to bury the trauma and devastating loss she endured. New York, 2008: Thirty years after that fatal night in Kabul, Aryana’s world is rocked again when an elderly patient appears in her examination room—a man she never expected to see again. It is Shair, the soldier who saved her, yet may have murdered her entire family. Seeing him awakens Aryana’s fury and desire for answers—and, perhaps, revenge. Realizing that she cannot go on without finding the truth, Aryana embarks on a quest that takes her back to Kabul—a battleground between the corrupt government and the fundamentalist Taliban—and through shadowy memories of the world she loved and lost. Bold, illuminating, heartbreaking, yet hopeful, Sparks Like Stars is a story of home—of America and Afghanistan, tragedy and survival, reinvention and remembrance, told in Nadia Hashimi’s singular voice.

The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues—technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism—have only become more pressing with the passage of time. The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is—you!

With 8 Pages of Black-and-White Photographs In this captivating history of stardom, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr traces our obsession with fame from the dawn of cinema through the age of the Internet. Why do we obsess over the individuals we come to call stars? How has both the image of stardom and our stars' images changed over the past hundred years? What does celebrity mean if people can now become famous simply for being famous? With brilliant insight and entertaining examples, Burr reveals the blessings and the curses of celebrity for the star and the stargazer alike. From Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, to Archie Leach (a.k.a. Cary Grant), Tom Cruise, and Julia Roberts, to such no-cal stars of today as the Kardashians and the new online celebrity, Gods Like Us is a journey through the fame game at its flashiest, most indulgent, occasionally most tragic, and ultimately it's most culturally revealing.

In Just Like Us: Digital Debates on Feminism and Fame, Caitlin E. Lawson examines the rise of celebrity feminism, its intersections with digital culture, and its complicated relationships with race, sexuality, capitalism, and misogyny. Through in-depth analyses of debates across social media and news platforms, Lawson maps the processes by which celebrity culture, digital platforms, and feminism transform one another. As she analyzes celebrity-centered stories ranging from “The Fappening” and the digital attack on actress Leslie Jones to stars’ activism in response to #MeToo, Lawson demonstrates how celebrity culture functions as a hypervisible space in which networked publics confront white feminism, assert the value of productive anger in feminist politics, and seek remedies for women’s vulnerabilities in digital spaces and beyond. Just Like Us asserts that, together, celebrity culture and digital platforms form a crucial discursive arena where postfeminist logics are unsettled, opening up more public, collective modes of holding individuals and groups accountable for their actions.

Debunking the myth of the "Americanization" of Europe, a noted historian presents an authoritative and engrossing cultural history of how America tried to remake Europe in its own image, and how the Europeans successfully retained their identity in the face of American mass culture. Pells provides a new paradigm for understanding the survival of local and national cultures in a global setting.

"Check out that baby bump!" Online and print magazines, television shows, and personal blogs are awash with gossip and speculation about pregnant celebrities. What drives our cultural obsession with celebrity baby bumps? Pregnant with the Stars examines the American fascination with, and judgment of, celebrity pregnancy, and exposes how our seemingly innocent interest in "baby bumps" actually reinforces troubling standards about femininity, race, and class, while increasing the surveillance and regulation of all women in our society. This book charts how the American understanding of pregnancy has evolved by examining pop culture coverage of the pregnant celebrity body. Investigating and comparing the media coverage of pregnant celebrities, including Jennifer Garner, Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé Knowles, Kristen Bell, M.I.A., Jodie Foster, and Mila Kunis, Renée Cramer shows us how women are categorized and defined by their pregnancies. Their stories provide a paparazzi-sized lens through which we can interpret a complex set of social and legal regulations of pregnant women. Cramer exposes how cultural ideas like the "rockin' post-baby body" are not only unattainable; they are a means of social control. Combining cultural and legal analysis, Pregnant with the Stars uncovers a world where pregnant celebrities are governed and controlled alongside the recent, and troubling, proliferation of restrictive laws aimed at women in the realm of reproductive justice and freedom. Cramer asks each reader and cultural consumer to recognize that the seeing, judging, and discussion of the "baby bump" isn't merely frivolous celebrity gossip—it is an act of surveillance, commodification, and control.

29-year-old Paul Donnelly has been many things in his life. Son of addicts, high school dropout, tattooist, the shameless bodyguard to Beckett Cobalt, the “bodyguard camp counselor” to the rookies of SFO, Loren Hale’s nemesis, and Xander’s wise one. But nothing means as much without Luna Hale. The sci-fi-loving writer. A weirdo. Sister to his client. The only one he’s fallen for. To be with Luna, he has to ensure it’s totally, completely, unmistakably safe. That starts with taking care of his family—the family he walked away from as a teenager. He knows he’ll survive. He can survive anything. But this time, he just wants to survive with her. Take an epic cosmic journey with Luna & Donnelly through heartache, hope, darkness, love, and an unceasing light—where the bonds we make are what power us through time.