![]() “It’s hard to tell whether an essay made a fresh incision at the cutting edge and the movement follows or the movement opened up a new nook and an essay is reporting this,” he says. He notes that the essays grew as the movement did. A new language was born.”Ĭlark’s debut offers reflections on that language and the movement behind it, a history of the term Deafblind, and an examination of his writing room, among other topics. Touching became central to communication, and, as Clark writes in the book, “A grammar soon developed to coordinate all that contact. The Protactile movement emerged in 2007 in Seattle, when three Deafblind activists decided to go without interpreters for their meetings. John Lee Clark is a Deafblind poet, essayist, and educator working on Protactile, a language that’s at the heart of his essay collection Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays (Norton, Oct.). “It’s both a fascinating celebration of infrastructure and a very serious, urgent plan for what we need to do next to have our infrastructural systems persist.” “Working on her book has changed the way I see the world,” Young says. “I thought, this is going to be a good fit.” “The first time I met Courtney Young, I asked her what kind of authors she worked with, and her answer was ‘nerds,’ ” Chachra recalls. She and her agent, Lydia Wills, were less interested in shopping the book around and more interested in going with the right editor. “We have the opportunity to actually make these systems amazingly better,” Chachra says. It also considers the social forces behind those projects, how they’re changing, and ways to improve them. How Infrastructure Works covers the mechanics of bridges, highways, reservoirs, and more. Visiting her parents’ hometown in India as a child, however, made “infrastructure much more obvious,” she says, “because you actually see the things you take for granted when you don’t have them.” Growing up in Canada as the country was investing in infrastructure projects such as highways and clean water systems, Chachra was somewhat aware of these developments. ![]() “My dad worked for the local power utility, and I grew up close to our local nuclear station.” “I’ve been interested in infrastructure my entire life,” says engineer Deb Chachra about the genesis of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (Riverhead, Oct.). Garnett was delighted to find that combination in How to Be Multiple, and notes that de Bres is remarkable for her ability to strike a balance in her writing between being humorous and being “the philosophy professor that she is.” “I wanted to see it theorized, but I wanted it to be by someone who has lived the experience and could explore it phenomenologically in a useful way.” “We were just at home in the suburbs, always dreaming up adventures and projects.” Working together in adulthood “felt like a natural mode.”Ĭallie Garnett, de Bres’s editor at Bloomsbury (and an identical twin herself), recalls that for a long time, she’s wanted to read something that depicted twinhood from a specific angle. “When I was 12, I wrote a novel and she drew the pictures,” de Bres says. It also features illustrations by Julia, a longtime collaborator. The book, de Bres’s trade debut, examines selfhood, human connection, and the unique experience of being a twin. Wellesley College philosophy professor Helena de Bres wrote the first full draft of How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins (Bloomsbury, Nov.) during a sabbatical in New Zealand, where she stayed in the bedroom she shared with her twin sister Julia. ![]() “There are some proposals you read and by the time you’re halfway through, you just know you have to publish this book,” he says. ![]() Knopf executive editor Andrew Miller recalls his excitement upon first encountering Eve. She wrote an essay about it for the Georgia Review, where Elyse Cheney, her future agent, read it.Ĭheney praises Bohannon’s writing for its range: “It’s so rich,” she says. In addition to a PhD in the evolution of narrative and cognition, Bohannon has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia and was a self-described “poet gal” in the early aughts, when she “cooked up a gig” for herself as poet-in-residence at a “Warhol-like factory” in Dalian, China, run by the man who invented plastination. ![]() The idea that women’s bodies weren’t getting enough attention became the basis of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution(Knopf, Oct.), which considers humankind’s development from the female perspective. “That’s when I learned that across the biological sciences, there is the male norm,” Bohannon says, referring to the fact that most lab studies are done with male subjects, though their conclusions are applied across the board. Cat Bohannon was a grad student at Columbia when she was having a conversation with a postdoc about his studies on mice. ![]()
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