Books like Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of “autotheory” offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making. Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and childrearing. Nelson’s insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

In these "urgently relevant essays," the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me "reflects on race, Barack Obama's presidency and its jarring aftermath"*--including the election of Donald Trump

"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately involved with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Olivia Laing explores these questions by travelling deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists, among them Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Edward Hopper, Henry Darger and Klaus Nomi. Part memoir, part biography, part dazzling work of cultural criticism, The Lonely City is not just a map, but a celebration of the state of loneliness. It's a voyage out to a strange and sometimes lovely island, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but visited by many - millions, say - of souls"--

A series of brutal murders push Batman's detective skills to the limit and force him to confront one of Gotham City's oldest evils. In a second story, the corpse of a killer whale shows up on the floor of one of Gotham City's foremost banks. The event begins a strange and deadly mystery that will bring Batman face to face with the new, terrifying faces of organized crime in Gotham.

Before he remade himself as the master spy known as Garbo, Juan Pujol was nothing more than a Barcelona poultry farmer. But as Garbo, he turned in a masterpiece of deception that changed the course of World War II. Posing as the Nazis’ only reliable spy inside England, he created an imaginary million-man army, invented armadas out of thin air, and brought a vast network of fictional subagents to life. The scheme culminated on June 6, 1944, when Garbo convinced the Germans that the Allied forces approaching Normandy were just a feint—the real invasion would come at Calais. Because of his brilliant trickery, the Allies were able to land with much less opposition and eventually push on to Berlin. As incredible as it sounds, everything in Agent Garbo is true, based on years of archival research and interviews with Pujol’s family. This pulse-pounding thriller set in the shadow world of espionage and deception reveals the shocking reality of spycraft that occurs just below the surface of history.

Alexandra Horowitz, author of the bestseller Inside of a Dog, explores what dogs know in even greater depth, following their lead to learn about the dog's spectacular nose and how we mere humans can improve our underused sense of smell. Here Horowitz, a leading researcher in dog cognition, continues to unpack the mystery of a dog's nose-view, in order to more fully understand our companions. She follows the dog's nose--exploring not only its abilities but the incredible ways it is being put to use. Because human noses are so inconsiderable in comparison--we have but six million olfactory receptor cells while dogs have hundreds of millions--we have difficulty conceptualizing what dogs can perceive. To a dog, there is no such thing as "fresh air." Every breath is full of information. Dogs, when trained, can identify drugs of every type, underwater cadavers, cancer, illicit cell phones in prison, bedbugs, smuggled shark's fins, dry rot, land mines, termites, invasive knapweed, underground truffles, and dairy cows in estrus. But they also know about the upcoming weather, earthquakes before they happen, how "afternoon" smells, what you had for breakfast, and whether a cat touched your leg yesterday. And of course, they know the distinctive odor of each spot of sidewalk as they travel home. In fact, what every dog knows about the world comes mostly through his nose. But the mysteries of the nose are not restricted to the dog alone. For Horowitz also delves into the abilities of expert human sniffers--from perfumers to sommeliers to animal trackers who use smell to search out their quarry. She also trains her own nose, smelling the streets of New York City and using the experts' methods to hone the human ability we all have but rarely use to its full extent. By observing everything from her own dogs to working detection dogs and human sniffers, Horowitz takes us along on her quest to make sense of scents, combining a personal journey of smelling with a tour through the cutting-edge science behind the olfactory powers of the dog. Writing with scientific rigor and her trademark wit, Horowitz changes our perspective on dogs forever. Readers will feel that they have smelled into a fourth dimension, literally broken free of human constraints and understood smell as never before; that they have, however fleetingly, been a dog.--Adapted from dust jacket.

Montana Hendrix has found her calling—working with therapy dogs. With a career she loves in a hometown she adores, she's finally ready to look for her own happily ever after. Could one of her dogs help her find Mr. Right - or maybe Dr. Right? Surgeon Simon Bradley prefers the sterility of the hospital to the messiness of real life, especially when real life includes an accident-prone mutt and a woman whose kisses make him want what he knows he can't have. Scarred since childhood, he avoids emotional entanglement by moving from place to place to heal children who need his skillful touch. Can his growing feelings for Montana lead him to find a home in Fool's Gold, or will he walk away, taking her broken heart with him?

The kids learn empathy and what it is like to be a dog when T.D. volunteers to act like a canine for the day and Carolina wakes up to find herself changed into a dog.