Ada Calhoun by Jena Cumbo, 2024
“Ada Calhoun writes with absolute clarity about the giddiest and most destabilizing feeling—the crush. This novel made me feel dizzy and I loved every second. Calhoun can seduce me any day of the week.”
—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
Ada Calhoun’s debut novel mines the literary canon and the heart of middle age and turns up fresh wisdom about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, illuminating new ways to embrace freedom, ambition, and partnership.
Those staggered by Calhoun’s “brave, blistering . . . fierce, dissonant, yet compelling”* nonfiction—her critically acclaimed memoir Also A Poet and her New York Times bestseller Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis—will be delighted to find that Crush takes everything Calhoun absorbed about the lives of women and their relationships through her research and—using the bones of her own postpandemic reckoning as a jumping-off point— delivers, in fiction this time, another book that “makes you feel less crazy.”**
Sharp and revelatory, Crush implores us to savor and hold on to everything it’s possible to love—friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world’s good books, and most of all one’s own deep sense of purpose.
Preorder Crush
“The word ‘crush’ often conjures the innocence of adolescence—a time when your life story isn’t yet written and anything is possible. But what happens when that dormant feeling is awakened in middle age? Ada Calhoun’s Crush is a gripping fever dream of a book leading the reading into the beguiling depths of desire, ecstasy, and obsession.”— Molly Ringwald
⭐ "Suspense is the primary draw for this angsty, metaphysical, literature-besotted love story... Crush (such a charged word) interrogates all that we think we know about love and soul mates, commitment and conviction, while tracking the long struggle to fully become oneself and do right."— Donna Seaman, Booklist
Also A Poet
Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me
A staggering memoir from New York Times bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet
When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.
“Also A Poet covers turf that is delicate, fought-over, and sacred... Let Ada Calhoun be our guide through all, but hold her hand tight—the journey is wild!”
—Tom Hanks
Also a Poet featured on the Today Show
Praise for Also A Poet
Why We Can't Sleep
Women's New Midlife Crisis
One of the Amazon Editors' best nonfiction books of 2020 and an Indie Next Pick, Why We Can’t Sleep was one of the biggest books of the season according to the New York Times, Parade, O magazine, Book Riot, Vogue.com, RealSimple.com, and Forbes.com.
Exploring her cohort's experience as the generation raised to “have it all,” Calhoun found women who were exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed. Instead of their issues being heard, they were told instead to lean in, take “me-time,” or make a chore chart. In Why We Can’t Sleep, Calhoun opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X’s predicament. The result is reassuring, empowering, and essential reading for all middle-aged women, and anyone who hopes to understand them.
Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give
7 Essays on Marriage
A refreshing take on marriage.
One of the top ten memoirs of the year (W magazine), Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give shows that marriage “isn’t a happy ending, but rather an opening scene” (Times Literary Supplement). In these “warm-hearted, Ephron-esque” (Washington Post) essays inspired by her popular Modern Love column, Ada Calhoun offers a “funny” (Today Show), “insightful” (Star, “Hot Book”), “raw and relatable” (Brides) portrait of modern coupledom, “a thoughtful read for the monogamous, non-monogamous, and every relationship iteration in between” (New York). In the New York Times Book Review’s “By the Book,” Tom Hanks said it was the last book to make him laugh: "I mean, underlining and yellow marker bust-out laughs." Molly Ringwald called it “the definitive meditation on marriage in all of its mystery and imperfection."
St. Marks Is Dead
The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street
Ada Calhoun, who grew up on St. Marks Place, interviewed 250 past and present East Villagers for this surprising New York City history, one of the best nonfiction books of 2015 according to Kirkus, The Boston Globe, and the Village Voice.
Organizing the street’s centuries-long history around the moments when people have declared “St. Marks is dead,” this vibrant, idiosyncratic work offers what The Atlantic calls a “timely, provocative, and stylishly written” new take on urban nostalgia.
