Latest news with #Spiegel&Grau
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, Aug. 17
1. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine Books: $30) A story of friendship, love and adversity during the 1980s Space Shuttle program. 2. An Inside Job by Daniel Silva (Harper: $32) An art restorer and legendary spy must solve the perfect crime. 3. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books: $30) The bond between a group of teens 25 years earlier has a powerful effect on a budding artist. 4. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press: $30) An unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. 5. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab (Tor Books: $30) A vampiric tale follows three women across the centuries. 6. Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom: $25) A crew of deactivated robots opens a noodle shop and causes a stir. 7. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau: $30) A suspenseful family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence. 8. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley: $29) Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of an heiress. 9. Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall (Simon & Schuster: $29) A love triangle unearths dangerous secrets. 10. The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar (Ace: $30) The 'Holes' author's debut adult novel centers on forbidden love, a crumbling kingdom and the unexpected magic around us. … 1. A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead Books: $28) The true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea. 2. Tonight in Jungleland by Peter Ames Carlin (Doubleday: $30) Inside the making of Bruce Springsteen's groundbreaking album 'Born to Run.' 3. King of Kings by Scott Anderson (Doubleday: $35) A history of the Iranian Revolution offers insights into today's global unrest. 4. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 5. The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Burgoyne (illustrator) (Scribner: $20) On gratitude, reciprocity and community, and the lessons to take from the natural world. 6. The Little Frog's Guide to Self-Care by Maybell Eequay (Summersdale: $12) Uplifting affirmations and life lessons with illustrations. 7. Medieval Cats by Catherine Nappington (Ten Speed Press: $16) A comical celebration of cats in artwork from medieval times. 8. Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green (Crash Course Books: $28) The deeply human story of the fight against the world's deadliest infectious disease. 9. Are You Mad at Me? by Meg Josephson (Gallery Books: $30) A guide to ending chronic people-pleasing habits. 10. Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Spiegel & Grau: $30) An exploration of the queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful and possible. … 1. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Ballantine: $20) 2. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 3. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $19) 4. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 5. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead Books: $19) 6. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22) 7. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20) 8. Accomplice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Entangled: Red Tower Books: $20) 9. One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune (Berkley: $19) 10. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Penguin: $18) … 1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 2. Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik (Scribner: $20) 3. The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Vintage: $19) 4. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 5. All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley (Simon & Schuster: $19) 6. The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne (Penguin Books: $21) 7. Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch (Tarcher: $20) 8. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 9. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi (Metropolitan Books: $20) 10. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $24)
Indian Express
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Oprah Winfrey's pick and 5 more must-read books on AI
As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes nearly every facet of our lives, from transportation to healthcare to creative work, the literary world has stepped up with compelling explorations, warnings, and provocations. At the center of this summer's AI discourse is Culpability by Bruce Holsinger, a searing novel that has earned iconic television personality Oprah Winfrey's endorsement as her book club pick. The book forces readers to confront the real-world consequences of autonomous machines such as self-driving cars. But Holsinger's is just one voice in a growing literary chorus. From Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun to Ethan Mollick's pragmatic Co-Intelligence, we bring to you six books that approach AI from a wide range of angles: philosophical, political, economic, and personal. Publisher: Spiegel & Grau Pages: 380 Kindle (available in India): ₹2,218 American author Bruce Holsinger's book is Winfrey's book club pick for the month. It received a ringing endorsement from her: 'If you were looking for the summer read, this is it,' Winfrey said. 'I picked it because it is so prescient. It is prescient. It is right now. And it is also the future.' Holsinger's novel explores the urgent issue of artificial intelligence and moral responsibility. It explores the fallout after a self-driving minivan kills an elderly couple. It forces readers, especially those in the USA, where not all states regulate use of autonomous cars, to confront this nightmare scenario, which may happen to anybody. Holsinger interrogates what accountability means in the age of autonomous machines. I leave you with Winfrey's word of caution: 'Do not under any circumstances cut to the end. Because the end is gonna shock you no matter what.' Publisher: Faber & Faber Pages: 320 pages Paperback: Rs 382 From the pen of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun is a poignant exploration of love, sacrifice, and artificial intelligence. Set in a dystopian future United States, the story is told from the perspective of Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend (AF) designed to provide companionship to children. Klara is purchased by a teenager who has been genetically 'lifted' for enhanced intellectual ability, a common but risky procedure in this futuristic society. Isolated and home-schooled, Josie forms a deep bond with Klara. Blending science fiction with moral philosophy, Klara and the Sun raises several unsettling questions about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and whether it can develop an emotional quotient. The novel was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Publisher: Harper Collins Pages: Rs 274 Paperback: Rs 740 The AI Con is a scathing takedown of AI hype and exploitation. Bender and Hanna dismiss the idea that artificial intelligence is an benevolent force. They argue it is a tech bauble enriching a few while replacing real labour with synthetic media machines, which work like plagiarism engines. From LLMs that hallucinate citations to chatbots replacing unionising workers, The AI Con calls out the industry's exploitative underbelly. This is a definitive work in the field of AI as Bender, who has featured in the TIME100 AI list of most influential people in AI, is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her work, including the touchstone 'Stochastic Parrots' paper, brings a linguistic perspective to how large language models work and why the illusion they produce is so compelling. He co-author Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a former senior research scientist on Google's Ethical AI team. Publisher: Bodley Head Pages: 432 Paperback: Rs 638 In his 2005 bestseller, the American computer scientist predicted that computers would reach human-level intelligence by 2029, and that humans would merge with computers and become superhuman around 2045. He called the futuristic phenomenon 'the Singularity'. With AI becoming part and parcel of life, a part of his prophecy has already come true, and so in 2024 he updated his prophecy. A culmination of six decades of work, the book delves into ideas that may seem as radical as the concept of artificial intelligence in the 90s. Some futuristic ideas he explores are rebuilding the world with nanobots (a hypothetical small self-propelled machine that can reproduce), life extension beyond 120 years, and connecting our brains to the cloud to name a few. Publisher: WH Allen Pages: 256 pages Paperback: Rs 671 This book by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick is a practical guide to 'living and working with AI.' Mollick contends that AI should not be treated as a threat, but as a new co-worker. Co-intelligence draws on real-world case studies to show how generative AI tools can be partners in education, creativity, and productivity. Mollick urges readers to master this relationship: to learn with AI, not from it. This should not be mistaken as a how-to manual. The book will guide us on how to reshape our lives to accommodate the tools that are now shaping the world. Publisher: Princeton University Press Pages: 352 Paperback: ₹398 The book cuts through the noise and explains what AI can and cannot do. This is best suited to those who are overwhelmed with the product hype created through AI. Again, two of TIME's most influential voices in AI clarify areas where AI works, where it fails, and where it is dangerously oversold. From education to hiring to criminal justice, AI Snake Oil explains why many AI claims are exaggerated, and how to spot them. The authors draw are attention from the distraction of Aargue we should worry less about AI itself and more about the unaccountable power behind it.
USA Today
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Oprah says July book club pick hooked her 'until the very last shocking sentence'
Oprah Winfrey's latest book club selection is a high-octane family drama swirling with artificial intelligence ethics. 'Culpability' by Bruce Holsinger (out now from Spiegel & Grau) is the July pick for Oprah's Book Club, and the mogul is already dubbing it "the book of the summer." This is Winfrey's 116th book club selection, and Holsinger's novel joins a 2025 roster that includes Ocean Vuong, Wally Lamb and Tina Knowles. 'I appreciated the prescience of this story,' Winfrey said in a statement. 'It's where we are right now in our appreciation and dilemmas surrounding Artificial Intelligence, centered around an American family we can relate to. I was riveted until the very last shocking sentence!' Oprah's Book Club pick for July: 'Culpability' by Bruce Holsinger 'Culpability' is set on a summer rental on the Chesapeake Bay and follows the Cassidy-Shaws – leading AI expert Lorelei, husband Noah, tweens Alice and Izzy and teenager Charlie – whose autonomous minivan collides with another car. Each family member has a secret that implicates them in the accident. Their weeklong stay is an unraveling of moral dilemmas, skeletons in the closet and AI consequences. In an announcement on her Instagram, Winfrey called 'Culpability' 'a book that's perfect for your beach bag.' 'Let me just tell you, Gayle King was so riveted that she was reading this book in the car on the way to the Tonys,' Winfrey said in a video. Holsinger is both a fiction and nonfiction writer, the author of five novels, including 'The Displacements' and 'The Gifted School.' He is also a professor at the University of Virginia. "Oprah Winfrey started her book club the same year I finished graduate school,' Holsinger said in a statement. 'For nearly thirty years, as I've taught great books to college students in the classroom and the lecture hall, she has shared great books with the world. Her phone call was like a thunderbolt, and I'll never forget it. I am deeply honored and profoundly grateful that she found Culpability worthy of her time, praise, and recognition." Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
Asharq Al-Awsat
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Asharq Al-Awsat
The Author of ‘The Help' Wrote a Second Novel. Yes, Following Up Was Daunting.
Fifteen years after her blockbuster novel 'The Help' sparked conversation and criticism for its portrayal of the lives of Black maids in the South, Kathryn Stockett is publishing a new novel. Set in 1933 in Oxford, Miss., 'The Calamity Club' centers on a group of women whose lives intersect as they struggle to get by during the Depression. It will be published in April 2026 by the independent press Spiegel & Grau. Anticipation for a follow-up from Stockett was high. When it was released in 2009, 'The Help' caused a stir with its frank depiction of racial inequality. It went on to sell some 15 million copies, spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list, and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie. In a video interview from her home outside of Natchez, Miss., Stockett admitted that writing a second novel in the long shadow of her debut was daunting. 'The pressure was definitely on,' she said. 'The fear of failure, it really weighs on a writer.' The novel also drew sharp criticism for its portrayal of Black characters and their speech, which some readers and critics found insensitive and offensive. Viola Davis, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the film, later said she regretted participating, adding that she felt the film failed to accurately capture the voices and lives of Black women. In some ways, the debate over 'The Help' foreshadowed the 'own voices' movement in the literary world, which pushed for more diversity in literature from writers drawing on their own cultural backgrounds. Stockett said that 'The Help' would most likely not have found a publisher in today's environment, but that she doesn't regret the way she told the story. 'I doubt that 'The Help' would be published today, for the fact that a white woman was writing in the voice of a Black woman,' she said. 'I did get a lot of criticism but it didn't get under my skin, because it started conversations.' 'The Help' was inspired in part by Stockett's relationship with a woman named Demetrie McLorn, who worked as a maid for her family and died when Stockett was a teenager. The story, which takes place in Mississippi in the early 1960s, has multiple narrators: a Black woman named Aibileen who works as a nanny and housekeeper for white families, Aibileen's outspoken friend Minny, and a young white woman, Skeeter, who is appalled by the racism she witnesses. Stockett's new novel, set in the segregated South, also engages with the issue of race, but not as directly, Stockett said. 'Race is always in the background,' she said. 'It's probably always going to be in the background of any book I write.' Stockett first began working on a novel set in Depression-era Mississippi in 2013. She did extensive research into the era, learning about the Farm Act, child labor laws, the eugenics movement and the forced sterilization of women in prison, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic policies. The story is narrated by two white female characters: an 11-year-old girl who lives in an orphanage and a young woman from the Delta who has come to Oxford in hopes of helping her family through hard times. In 2020, after writing some 800 pages, Stockett felt stuck, and almost abandoned the book. A friend who had read the manuscript connected her with Julie Grau, co-founder of Spiegel & Grau. They worked for years without a contract, and kept the project quiet. A few years later, they signed a deal. With its release next year, the book will be published simultaneously in Britain by Fig Tree and in Canada by Doubleday Canada. 'There's something really precious about giving writers the time and the space to execute that follow up,' Grau said. 'It was really remarkable and ideal to shield her from the glare.' Stockett said she was so stunned by the success of her debut that she's set aside any expectations about how 'The Calamity Club' will be received. 'I can't believe it happened then,' she said, 'and I have no idea what's going to happen this time around either.' The New York Times
Boston Globe
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Melody Beattie, author of a self-help bestseller, dies at 76
'You could call her the mother of the self-help genre,' said Nicole Dewey, publishing director of Spiegel & Grau, which has sold more than 400,000 copies of the book since taking over publication in 2022. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Trysh Travis, author of 'The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement From Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey' (2009), said in an interview that 'Codependent No More' has succeeded because of Ms. Beattie's common-sense approach and 'vernacular charm.' Advertisement Travis added: 'There had been other books and pamphlets published in the recovery space in the early 1980s. Melody made the same arguments, but her voice came across very clearly. It wasn't clinical — and she had a set of ideas that could be applied to many if not all the problems one was having — and it hit the market at the right time.' In 'Codependent No More,' Ms. Beattie cited various definitions of a codependent person. She also introduced one of her own. 'A codependent person,' she wrote, 'is one who has let another person's behavior affect them and who is obsessed with controlling that other person's behavior.' The other person, she wrote, might be a family member, a lover, a client, or a best friend. But the focus of codependency 'lies in ourselves, in the ways we let other people's behaviors affect us, and in the ways we try to affect them' — by actions that include controlling them, obsessively helping them, and caretaking. Advertisement Recalling her difficult marriage to her second husband, David Beattie, who was also a substance abuse counselor, Ms. Beattie described an incident when he was in Las Vegas. She telephoned him in his hotel room, and he sounded as if he had been drinking. She implored him not to break his promise to her that he would not get drunk on this trip. He hung up on her. In desperation, she called the hotel repeatedly into the night, even as she was preparing to host a party for 80 people at their house in Minneapolis the next day. 'I thought if I can just talk to him, I can make him stop drinking," she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1988. But at 11 p.m., she stopped calling. 'Something happened inside of me, and I let go of him,' she said. 'I thought, 'If you want to drink, drink. …' I gave his life back to him, and I started taking my own back.' She said that was the first step in detaching herself from their mutual codependence. They eventually divorced. Detachment, she wrote, 'is not a cold, hostile withdrawal' or a 'Pollyannish, ignorant bliss'; rather, it is releasing 'a person or problem in love.' She asked: When should the release happen? Her list was long. It started: 'When we can't stop thinking, talking about, or worrying about someone or something; when our emotions are churning and boiling; when we feel like we have to do something about someone because we can't stand it another minute.' Melody Lynn Vaillancourt was born May 26, 1948, in Ramsey, Minn., and grew up mainly in St. Paul. Her father, Jean, a firefighter, was an alcoholic who left the family when Melody was 2. Her mother, Izetta (Lee) Vaillancourt, owned a nursing home after her divorce, but, Melody Beattie said, beat her four siblings. (She escaped the punishment herself, she said, because she had a heart condition.) Advertisement Melody was sexually molested by a stranger when she was 5; began drinking whiskey at 12; and started using amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD, and marijuana in high school. By 20, she was shooting heroin. She also robbed pharmacies with a partner and, after being arrested, spent eight months in drug treatment in a state hospital. After being successfully treated, she held secretarial jobs before being hired as a chemical dependency counselor in Minneapolis, assigned to treat the wives of men in treatment. Her patients were uniformly angry and focused so much on their husbands' feelings that she found it nearly impossible to get them to express their own. 'Eight years later, I understood those codependents, those crazy codependents — we didn't call them that, we called them significant others — because I had become one' through her marriage to Beattie, she told the Star Tribune. 'All I could think and talk about was the alcoholic, what he was or wasn't doing.' She was, she said, 'filled with anger and anger because he wouldn't stop drinking.' While treating the women, living on welfare, and writing freelance articles for a local paper, The Stillwater Gazette, she interviewed experts on codependence, hoping to write a book on the subject. She received a $500 advance from the publishing division of the Hazelden Foundation substance abuse recovery center, now called the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. The book was published in 1986 and spent 129 weeks on The New York Times' advice and how-to bestseller list. Advertisement Ms. Beattie went on to write several other books, including 'The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency' (1990), which has sold more than 3 million copies. Writing in Newsweek in 2009, Dr. Drew Pinsky, an addiction medicine specialist and media personality, named 'Codependent No More' one of the four best self-help books of all time. Ms. Beattie heavily revised it for a new edition published in 2022. In addition to her daughter, she leaves two grandsons; a sister, Michelle Vaillancourt; and a son, John Thurik, from her first marriage, to Steven Thurik, which ended in divorce. John was raised by his father and maternal grandmother. Her marriages to Scott Mengshol and Dallas Taylor, who played drums with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, also ended in divorce. Her son Shane Beattie died in a skiing accident in 1991 when he was 12, plunging her into grief. She wrote 'The Lessons of Love: Rediscovering Our Passion for Life When It All Seems Too Hard to Take' (1995) — a personal book, not a self-help guide — to describe her journey from a broken spirit to recovery. Her first step was to write two letters, one of which said: 'God, I'm still mad, not pleased at all. But with this letter, I commit unconditionally to life, to being here and being alive as long as I'm here, whether that's another 10 days or another 30 years. Regardless of any other human being and their presence in my life, and regardless of events that may come to pass. This commitment is between me, life, and you.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
