Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You're the Fucking Worst
by Laura Belgray
Hardcover
What does it take to grow up cool and popular, master adulthood, fast track your success, and always be your best? Laura Belgray wouldn’t know.
Her wildly relatable coming-of-age stories include hate-following her 6th grade bully on social media decades later; moving home post-college to measure her self-worth in hookups with Upper West Side bartenders; dating a sociopathic man-baby; proving herself in the early ‘90s at New York’s coolest magazine (as the world’s worst intern); falling for get-rich-quick schemes on the Internet; and, most of all, saying “tough titties” to the supposed-to’s in life: driving a car, being on time, handing in your paperwork, learning to roast a chicken, and having kids.
Peppered with cutting insights on our confusing, self-helpy culture that calls hair removal “self care” and tells us to give our 110% but also to give zero f*cks, Tough Titties will leave you feeling better about, well, everything. Let’s face it: we’re all tired of shame-spiraling after being told what to do when we know we’re not going to do any of it.
Tough Titties is one big permission slip to be a dork, a sometimes-unspiritual slacker, a late bloomer and, ultimately, 100% yourself. It’ll also have you snort-laughing in public and tapping whoever’s nearby to say, “Lemme read you one more part!” Which is annoying, but tough titties.
Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World
by Christian Cooper
Random House
Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.
In Better Living Through Birding, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.
Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper’s story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper’s journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.
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