Most Popular Books by Heidi Julavits

Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, “The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a fortysomething woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition. The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters.

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A sharply observed memoir of motherhood and the self, and a love letter to Maine, by a writer Eula Biss calls “witty, sly, critical, inventive” and whose mind Leslie Jamison calls “electric.” “An absolute stunner: frank, funny, self-aware, constantly surprising.”—George Saunders That night, in his bed, I spread my son’s palm wide and tried to read it. If the hand was a map that led to a future person, was there any changing the destination? One summer Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls “the end times of childhood.” When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming—and what qualifies me to be his guide? The next four years feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where Julavits teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability, as well as education and prevention. She begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he’s about to enter. And what she must learn about herself to responsibly steer him. Looking back to her childhood in Maine, where she and her family often navigated the tricky coastline in a small boat, relying on a decades-old nautical guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy minutiae of family life alongside knottier questions of politics and gender. Through it all, Julavits discovers the beauty and the peril of telling stories as a way to locate ourselves and help others find us. Intimate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental, Directions to Myself cements Julavits’s reputation as one of the most shrewdly innovative nonfiction writers at work today.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations. Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

One Autumn day in 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal vanishes from her Massachusetts prep school. A few weeks later she reappears unharmed and with little memory of what happened to her--or at least little that she is willing to share. Was Mary abducted, or did she fake her disappearance? This question haunts Mary''s family, her psychologist, even Mary herself. Weaving together three narratives, The Uses of Enchantment conjures a spell in which the hallucinatory power of a young woman’s sexuality, and her desire to wield it, has devastating consequences for all involved.

Following her acclaimed debut, The Mineral Palace, Heidi Julavits presents a quirky, compelling novel about two sisters, a bizarre event, and the elusive nature of truth—a New York Times Notable Book. Does Alice really hate her sister, or is that love? Was she really enrolled in grad school, or was that an elaborate hoax? Is this really a hijacking, or is it merely the effect of living backwards? “Heidi Julavits—no stranger to edgy, dark topics—takes liberties with conventional notions of hijacking and hostages, weaving humor in a zingy and brainy spectrum...If you can take successive shots of wit with gulps of moral inquisition, then this fine book is for you.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The year is 1934, and Bena Duse Jonssen, the midwestern wife of a doctor, and young mother of a newborn, has an outwardly comfortable existence unaffected by the Great Depression.

From the acclaimed novelist of The Folded Clock and founding editor of The Believer magazine comes a "sharp-eyed, sardonic, hilarious" novel (The New York Times Book Review) about grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter’s love. Julia Severn is a talented student at an elite institute for psychics. When Julia’s mentor, the legendary Madame Ackerman, grows jealous of her protégée’s talents, she subjects Julia to the painful humiliation of reliving her mother’s suicide . . . and then launches a desperate psychic attack. But Julia’s gifts, though a threat to her teacher, prove an asset to others. Soon she’s recruited to track down a missing person who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew about her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her ability to know the minds of others—including her own—goes far deeper than she ever imagined.

By Heidi Julavits. Photographs by Jenny Gage.

Wat gebeurt er als je ruim zeshonderd vrouwen een enquête laat beantwoorden over kleding? Het antwoord is Vrouwen & kleren; een volstrekt uniek boek, in essentie een gesprek met honderden vrouwen van alle nationaliteiten - beroemd en anoniem, gelovig en ongelovig, getrouwd en single, jong en oud - over kleding en de manier waarop die je leven definieert en vormgeeft. Het begon allemaal met een enquête, opgesteld door Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits en Leanne Shapton. Vijftig vragen die vrouwen moeten aanmoedigen dieper over hun persoonlijke stijl na te denken. De vragen gingen naar meer dan zeshonderd vrouwen toe, onder wie schrijfsters, activistes, actrices en beeldend kunstenaressen als Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Sasha Grey, Lena Dunham en Molly Ringwald. En zij antwoordden met foto''s, interviews, persoonlijke getuigenissen en illustraties. In deze Nederlandse editie zijn bijdragen toegevoegd van onder anderen Neelie Kroes, Isabelle Beernaert, Daphne Deckers, Gerdi Verbeet, Grietje Braaksma, Igone de Jongh en Evi Hanssen. Het resultaat is een prachtig, rijk geïllustreerd en afwisselend boek geworden, een intiem kijkje achter de schermen van de vrouwelijke stijl. Vrouwen & kleren laat zien dat zelfs de meest elementaire kledingkeuze zelfvertrouwen kan geven, het verband tussen uiterlijk en innerlijk laat zien, uiting geeft aan waarden en politieke overtuigingen, de band met de omgeving versterkt en als harnas of vermomming dient. Kleren zijn de instrumenten die we gebruiken om onszelf opnieuw uit te vinden en de blik van anderen te beïnvloeden. Vrouwen & kleren laat de complexiteit van kledingkeuzes zien en openbaart de soms grappige, soms vreemde, maar altijd veelzeggende impulsen achter het dagelijkse aankleedritueel. Een briljante, unieke verkenning van de vragen die we onszelf elke dag bij het aankleden stellen, met antwoorden van meer dan zeshonderd vrouwen.

Named the best magazine of 2022 by Alta. The Believer returns with another action-packed issue.

Emouvant portrait de femme, histoire d''amour tragique portée par une écriture profondément originale, Des anges et des chiens est aussi une fresque sociale sans concession, le tableau sombre et fantasmagorique d''un monde en pleine déliquescence. En 1934, alors que la dépression frappe les Etats-Unis, Bena Jonssen s''installe à Pueblo avec son mari médecin et son fils, Little Ted. Angoissée par l''état de santé du bébé, déçue par son mariage, elle espère s''y construire une vie meilleure. Mais, dans cette ville inhospitalière du Colorado balayée par les tempêtes de sable, Bena l''étrangère reste seule face à sa détresse. Cachée derrière sa fenêtre, elle observe en silence la relation passionnelle qui se noue sous ses yeux entre une jeune prostituée enceinte et un cow-boy brutal, jusqu''au jour où, décidée à affronter ce monde qui l''effraie tant, elle cherche à connaître leur histoire. A mesure qu''elle prend conscience du poids des secrets qui minent la petite communauté de Pueblo, Bena entrevoit alors la terrible vérité sur son fils, sur son mari et sur elle-même...