Kirjahaku

Beth Lisick started out as a homecoming princess with a Crisco-aided tan and a bad perm. And then everything changed. Plunging headlong into America's deepest subcultures, while keeping both feet firmly planted in her parents' Leave It to Beaver values, Lisick makes her adult home on the fringe of mainstream culture and finds it rich with paradox and humor. On the one hand, she lives in "Brokeley" with drug dealers and street gangs; on the other, she drives a station wagon with a baby seat in the back, makes her own chicken stock, and attends ladies' luncheons. How exactly did this suburban girl-next-door end up as one of San Francisco's foremost chroniclers of alternative culture? Lisick explains it all in her hilarious, irreverent, bestselling memoir, Everybody into the Pool.Fans of David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell will relish Lisick's scathingly funny, smart, very real take on the effluvia of daily living. No matter what community she's exposing to the light, Lisick always hits the right chord.

The first step to getting help is admitting you have a problem, but what if your problem is with self-help? Grappling with her lifelong phobia of anything slick, cheesy, or remotely claiming to provide self-empowerment, Beth Lisick wakes up on New Year's Day 2006 with an unprecedented feeling. She is finally able to admit to herself that she's grown tired of embracing the same old set of nagging problems year after year. She has no savings account. Her house feels unorganized and chaotic. She and her husband never hang out together. The last time she exercised regularly was as a member of her high school track team eighteen years ago.Beth consults the multimillion-dollar-earning pros and national experts, not only reading their bestselling books, but also attending their seminars and classes. In Chicago, she gets proactive firsthand with "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". In Atlanta, she tries to get a handle on exactly why 'women are from Venus,' and in a highly comedic bout on the high seas of the Caribbean, she gamely sweats to the oldies on a weeklong Cruise to Lose with Richard Simmons. Throughout this yearlong experiment, Beth tries extremely hard to maintain her wry sense of humor and easygoing nature, even as she starts to fall prey to some of the experts' ideas; ideas she thought she'd spent her whole life rejecting. Beth doesn't think of herself as the typical self-help victim. But is she?

Peering into life's cringe-worthy moments, best-selling author Beth Lisick excavates territory that most would rather ignore. Funny, odd, deeply personal, yet somehow universal, these are the kind of memories that haunt us all, the small awful moments of shame and humiliation that we'd rather forget than relive. Beth Lisick has made a career of opening her life to her readers in all of its messy, smart hilarity, but this type of story doesn't usually find its way into a memoir. With her trademark humor and sly intelligence, writing in short flashes the way these episodes tend to pop up in memory, Lisick recounts her most embarrassing moments with gusto. From a trick she played on a neighbor thirty years ago to what she accidentally blurted out at last night's dinner party, she explores the bad judgments and free-floating regrets that keep her up at night, and the result is a daring, candid, and wickedly funny collection of embarrassment embraced, the triumph of humor and perspective over everyday mortification. Writer, performer, and independent film actress Beth Lisick is the author of the New York Times best-selling comic memoir Everybody Into the Pool and the gonzo self-help manifesto Helping Me Help Myself. Praise for Yokohama Threeway: "The ultimate joyride for those of us who enjoy cringe-worthy embarrassment, genuine pathos, and an overdosing amount of schadenfreude."--Michael Ian Black "This book is fucking great."--Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill and The Julie Ruin "A strangely touching and engaging portrait of the artist as a young screwup."--Booklist "Yokohama Threeway blends the funny and the painful into an elixir more closely resembling cough medicine than soda pop--a little bitter, made up of strange ingredients, not real pretty, but necessary if you want to get better. In the end, you are happy you took it, even if it leaves a funky aftertaste."--World Literature Today "Speaking as someone who hates everything, I love this book."--James Greer, musician & author of The Failure "Hilarious, heartbreaking, compassionate, pitch perfect, utterly original." --Joyce Maynard, author of After Her and Labor Day "A laugh-out-loud series of short, revelatory confessions propelled by curiosity and an acute desire to experience the world. It is not now and perhaps never will be quite in vogue for people to share their shames, but Lisick does it with aplomb and even exuberance."--Evan Karp, SF Weekly "Beth Lisick's new essay collection Yokohama Threeway made me laugh out loud more than anything else I have read all year, she is a master at sharing her life experiences with self-deprecating yet honest humor."--David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy "Beth Lisick, divulges the most embarrassing moments in a series of short essays dripping with wicked humor."--7x7 Magazine

Fiction. California Interest. In late '90s San Francisco, Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city's alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn't changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium's end are long gone. When her mother dies, leaving her Silicon Valley home to Edie, she finds herself mourning her loss in the heart of the Bay Area's tech monoculture, and embarks on a last-ditch quest to hold on to her rebel heart. New York Times bestseller Beth Lisick's first novel EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN chronicles Silicon Valley's rapidly changing culture with biting observational humor, an insider's wisdom, and disarming pathos, while asking, What comes after It?Beth Lisick's EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN really hit my sweet spot: a darkly funny, honest, touching look at what it means to be an adult in the world today--and what happens when you can't quite figure it out. I inhaled this book.--Jami AttenbergBeth Lisick possesses one of the most alive narrative voices I have ever heard, full of humor and truth and pathos and smarts. I heard her read a piece of this novel at its start and I have been haunted by the driving beauty and passion of it.--Michelle TeaBeth Lisick's writing is so vivid, so alert, intelligent and alive you feel ninety-eight percent smarter every moment that you read her--when you're not doubled over in helpless, delighted laughter. If Eve Babitz was living and writing in the Mission District today, this is who she'd be.--Matthew SpecktorBeth Lisick has proven time and time again to be the storytelling voice of our collective adolescence, of our dreaming in vast American suburbs, and our heading into cities, come what may. She's a rare voice in the age of quasi instant gratification like posts and tweets--a writer who waits until the time is right and the words are ready. EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN is somehow both a howl and a murmur, bright and shadowy, funny and heart-worn. Here's that book we're all always hoping to find next, the one that feels like you're hanging out with a new friend--one who finishes telling you a story that leaves you sated but immediately hoping there's another, and another, and another.--Dan Kennedy