Alissa Quart

One of TIME’s Best New Books to Read This Summer “Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class’s fall while also offering solutions and hope.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed Families today are squeezed on every side—from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving. Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.

Why Our Families Can't Afford America

Squeezed

Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream

Bootstrapped

While studies show that children who are superior learners benefit from enriched early education, the intensely competitive lives of America's gifted and talented kids do have risks. The pressure can have long-term effects in adult life, from debilitating perfectionism to performance anxiety and lifelong feelings of failure. Author Quart traveled the country to research the many ways in which the current craze to "produce" gifted kids and prodigies has gone too far. She takes a hard look at the claims about educational toys and baby sign language, elite IQ testing and kid competitions, uncovering the dangers of such heated pressure to excel so early in life. Surveying expert assessments of the necessary role of unstructured play in child development, she warns about the disappearance of recess and the pitfalls of overstuffed schedules. She also profiles the growing divide in opportunities for wealthy kids versus those from middle and lower income families.--From publisher description.

the dilemma of the gifted child

Hothouse kids

David Wallis

Living on the Edge in the World's Richest Country

Going for Broke

“Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class’s fall while also offering solutions and hope.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed Families today are squeezed on every side—from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving. Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezed is an eye-opening audiobook. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make listeners think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.

An investigation into the pressures placed on today's gifted children evaluates the long-term consequences of high demands and competitiveness, revealing the truth about current practices in IQ testing, the pitfalls of the No Child Left Behind Act, and the downside of popular practices in over-scheduling. By the author of Branded. Reprint.

How the Pressure to Succeed Threatens Childhood

Hothouse Kids

The Buying and Selling of Teenagers

Branded

Thoughts and Prayers

“You walk into Thoughts and Prayers like it’s a familiar pop cultural fun house—then you get drawn into one of the mirrors and find you’re actually deep in someplace very real: fleshy, frightening, full of anguished intelligence and bitter fun.” —Mary Gaitskill “Alissa Quart’s poems are nimble and seething, capturing our baroquely scurrilous world. She writes across the holes of what’s been lost, hopeless and strangely optimistic at once.” —Eileen Myles ﻿ “Quart’s poems have impeccable technique and pleasure-giving verve. A book of grit, danger, and paradoxical elegance.” —Wayne Koestenbaum Thoughts and Prayers is a beautiful and startling volume of poetry about our political existence. With both humor and luminosity, it gets at the personal and collective emotional experience of American public life, from the 1970s to the 1990s Democrats, through the collapse of the news industry, to the burlesque Trump era.

Branded (Virginia Tech Common Book Ed)

Generation Y has grown up in an age of the brand, bombarded by name products. In Branded, Alissa Quart illuminates the unsettling new reality of marketing to teenagers, as well as the quieter but no less worrisome forms of teen branding: the teen consultants who work for corporations in exchange for product; the girls obsessed with cosmetic surgery who will do anything to look like women on TV; and those teens simply obsessed with admission into a name-brand college. We also meet the pockets of kids attempting to turn the tables on the cocksure corporations that so cynically strive to manipulate them. Chilling, thought-provoking, even darkly amusing, Branded brings one of the most disturbing and least talked about results of contemporary business and culture to the fore-and ensures that we will never look at today's youth the same way again.

The Buying And Selling Of Teenagers

An investigation into the pressures placed on today's gifted children evaluates the long-term consequences of high demands and competitiveness, revealing the truth about current practices in IQ testing, the pitfalls of the No Child Left Behind Act, and the downside of popular practices in over-scheduling. By the author of Branded. 30,000 first printing.

The Dilemma of the Gifted Child

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA.

Republic of Outsiders is about the growing number of Americans who disrupt the status quo: outsiders who seek to redefine a wide variety of fields, from film and mental health to diplomacy and music, from how we see gender to what we eat. They include professional and amateur filmmakers crowd-sourcing their work, transgender and autistic activists, and Occupy Wall Street’s “alternative bankers.” These people create and package new identities in a practice cultural critic Alissa Quart dubs “identity innovation”: they push the boundaries of who they can be and what they can do, even turning the forces of co-optation to their benefit. In a brilliant and far-reaching account, Quart introduces us to individuals who have created new structures to keep themselves sane, fulfilled, and, on occasion, paid. This deeply reported book shows how and why these groups now gather, organize, and create new communities and economies. Without a middleman, freed of established media, and highly mobile, unusual ideas and cultures are able to spread more quickly and find audiences and allies. Republic of Outsiders is a critical examination of those for whom being rebellious, marginal, or amateur is a source of strength rather than weakness.

The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels

Republic of Outsiders

“Vivid portraits” of individuals and subcultures by a writer who “unmasks the assumptions we make about what counts as normal” (The New York Times). They are outsiders who seek to redefine fields from mental health to diplomacy to music. They push boundaries and transform ideas. They include filmmakers crowdsourcing their work, transgender and autistic activists, and Occupy Wall Street’s “alternative bankers.” These people create and package themselves in a practice cultural critic Alissa Quart dubs “identity innovation.” In this “fascinating” book, Quart introduces us to individuals who have created new structures to keep themselves sane, fulfilled, and, on occasion, paid. This deeply reported book shows how these groups now gather, organize, and create new communities and economies. Without a middleman, freed of established media, and highly mobile, unusual ideas and cultures are able to spread more quickly and find audiences and allies. Republic of Outsiders is a critical examination of those for whom being rebellious, marginal, or amateur is a source of strength (Barbara Ehrenreich). “Even if you don’t consider yourself an outsider or a rebel, Quart’s book has several lessons for creative work, particularly when it comes to making art outside a heavily commercial system.” —Fast Company “One of the smartest cultural interpreters of her generation. In Republic of Outsiders, she mixes sharp-eyed analysis with an empathetic heart. The result is a great read, and a brand-new lens through which to view outsiders, insiders—and ourselves.” —Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Alissa Quart

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