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All the Presidents’ Menus
A Culinary History of the White House$27.99A tour of White House dining, from George Washington’s breakfast habits to Barack Obama’s state dinners, by the renowned creator of the History Chef blog
You might remember that Ronald Regan loved jellybeans, but did you know he ate them as an aid to stop smoking? Did you know John Adams was fond of Green Sea Turtle Soup? All the Presidents’ Menus is a delectable journey through American history, served one dish at a time. Historian and author Suzy Evans uncovers the fascinating intersection of food, politics, and culture, revealing how meals have shaped pivotal moments in the nation’s story. From Thomas Jefferson’s introduction of macaroni and cheese to the White House to John F. Kennedy’s space-age dining innovations, this book is packed with vivid anecdotes, historic recipes, and surprising culinary trivia.
Discover the untold stories behind presidential tables, including Lincoln’s love for gingerbread men, the Potomac “Oyster Wars” that influenced the Constitution, and the scandal of “embalmed beef” that revolutionized food safety laws. With each chapter, Evans serves up a feast of history, personality, and national culture, making All the Presidents’ Menus a must-read for anyone curious about the flavors that have shaped America.
Who knew history could be so delicious?
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Condemned
The Punishment of Black Children and the Evolution of Criminal Injustice in America$29.99A paradigm-shifting argument that two centuries of ruthless punishment of Black children sowed the seeds of mass incarceration, by the award-winning scholar
In 1827, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named James Guild was sentenced to death and hanged in public, becoming one of the youngest known children to be executed in the United States.
Condemned makes the bold and troubling argument that Guild’s execution was not an aberration—and that since the colonial period, in both the North and South, the development of the American criminal justice system has been built atop the punishment of Black children. A brilliantly researched history, and an elegy to lives lost or destroyed, Condemned reconstructs the stories of free, enslaved, and indentured Black children whose rights were denied in America’s courtrooms, as the our legal system evolved. Award-winning historian Crystal Lynn Sheffield, the first scholar to unearth the stories of Black children in key prison registers and court documents, illustrates how these decisions continue to echo in the present day, doing incredible harm to all American children.
With the revelatory impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Monique Couvson’s Pushout, Condemned restores these forgotten children from the recesses of the archives, filling in the gaps in the historical record with compassion—and granting them long-overdue exonerations. Condemned culminates in a call to action urging that real justice for all children can be achieved only by abolishing the criminal justice system as we know it.
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Anti-Monopoly
A Citizen’s Guide$23.99In a movement-defining book, the “godmother of the current moment of dissatisfaction with establishment politics” (The New York Times) tells the story of the rising anti-monopoly movement and charts a course to a democratic future
In a short, sharp political book, The Nation magazine’s “Anti-Monopolist” columnist and “a prophet of the resurgent left” (Franklin Foer) explains the battle between the forces of oligarchy and the rise of the new anti-monopoly movement. Using the stories of modern anti-monopoly heroes including Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan; blueberry farmer Hugh Kent, who turned his battle with Driscoll’s into a farmers’ movement; and Doha Mekki, the daughter of a Sudanese asylum seeker who took on Google and won; Teachout explains how anti-monopoly cuts across traditional political lines and gives real teeth to economic populism.
Teachout, a scholar of the law of democracy and a politician whose run for governor of New York State shocked the political establishment, argues that monopoly is the architecture of private tyranny, and that breaking corporate power is essential to building a new democracy. From AI to agriculture, healthcare to energy, Americans understand that corporate concentration doesn’t just cause inequality; it organizes power. Anti-Monopoly gives that feeling a name, a history, and a way forward.
After a spate of books out of the Abundance movement arguing that we need to remove local democracy and focus on efficiency at scale, this book provides a sharp counterpoint.
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Survivor Genius
A New Vision for Ending Gender-Based Violence$26.99A powerful call to recognize that those who have suffered gender-based violence are essential to ending it, by the co-founder of Healing to Action
In an era in which presidential candidates can be elected despite a court certified finding of sexual assault, where the federal government can deny the identity of transgender people, and state legislatures have sanctioned forced childbirth, the gender justice movement is in a fight for its life. Survivor Genius presents a road map for reinvigorating a part of that movement, arguing that survivors of violence are themselves the bold, resourceful, and creative leaders we need to disrupt stigma surrounding gender-based violence and to develop innovative solutions to end it.
Sheerine Alemzadeh, an attorney and co-director of one of the leading groups in the field, dismantles, one-by-one, arguments that victims are too fragile, broken, or scared to do more than share their stories in a legislative hearing. She offers a sharp analysis of the failures of traditional advocacy models led by “professionals” and argues for a new paradigm in which survivors are leading players in the movement to end gender-based violence.
Through a collection of moving stories of mostly poor and immigrant women, Survivor Genius offers powerful examples of how survivors of violence can both identify better solutions, tailored to their needs, and foster their own healing through collective action. It provides practical advice for field organizations that would allow survivors to participate and lead anti-violence work.
For readers invested in social movements, community empowerment, and public policy, Survivor Genius offers a brilliant reframing capable of transforming both cultural understanding and public policy around an issue too often normalized as inevitable.
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Two by Mingarelli
Four Soldiers and A Meal in Winter$19.99Two timeless novellas about men in combat, from the Prix Médicis award winner whom Ian McEwan calls “remarkable,” combined in one anniversary volume for the first time
From the late, award-winning author Hubert Mingarelli, two of his most powerful novellas, now collected in one volume, plunge readers into the brutal, frozen landscapes of war and the moral chasms it creates. This masterful collection, including a tenth-anniversary edition of A Meal in Winter and a twenty-anniversary edition of Four Soldiers, explores the quiet moments of suffering, conscience, and fragile humanity that unfold amidst the overwhelming violence of history.
In the Prix Médicis award-winning Four Soldiers, a small unit in the Red Army in WWI waits out a brutal winter near the Romanian front. Amid the mundane struggle for food and warmth, they talk, smoke, and wait—for spring, for orders, for the inevitable return of violence, revealing the profound bonds and anxieties that define a soldier’s life between battles. The novella was also longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
In A Meal in Winter, short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and selected by Indies Introduce in the United States, three German soldiers in Poland during WWII are tasked with capturing a Jewish fugitive. What begins as a simple order descends into a tense moral reckoning when a break from the cold in an abandoned house forces each man to confront his own conscience and the humanity of his prisoner.
Mingarelli’s sparse, evocative prose captures the chilling atmosphere of war and the complex inner lives of men pushed to their limits. Two by Mingarelli is a profound and unforgettable exploration of survival, morality, and the search for warmth in the coldest of times.
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The City of Jade Trees
A Family Memoir$31.99An eloquent chronicle of the fortunes of four generations of one family, whose lives intertwine with pivotal moments in U.S. immigration and Chinese American history
“I have made you a fish, now you must find water.&lrdquo; As family lore has it, Margaret Woo’s great-great-grandmother spoke these words to her son before he left for America in the 1880s. She had sold her only water buffalo to pay for the steam ship ticket, knowing that in sending him in search of a better life, she might never see him again. With these words, she set in motion an odyssey spanning four generations.
The City of Jade Trees is Woo’s family’s story, beginning with her great-grandfather, an early “sojourner,” and her grandfather, whose arrival coincided with the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and continuing with her father, a trained navigator in the Flying Tigers, and her mother, the privileged daughter of a member of the infamous Green Gang. By the time Woo stepped foot on American soil at the age of seven to join her family, who now ran a Chinese restaurant, it was during a rare welcoming window of immigration reform.
Illuminating the greater arc of Chinese American history and the history of immigration to the United States, The City of Jade Trees is a powerful, moving story of each generation of a family forced to negotiate their own identity as they leave all that they know behind for a future they cannot yet see.
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When the Well Is Dry
How Water Fuels Violence and Shapes Peace$28.99A comprehensive look at the relationship between water and violence, and how we can move from conflict to cooperation and peace, by one of the world’s leading water experts
The first major water war erupted around 2500 BCE, when the Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma fought for a century over irrigation canals from the Tigris River. A few thousand years later, both Athenians and then Spartans were accused of poisoning the water supply of their enemies, in pursuit of victory. From the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires to the present day, access to and control over freshwater has been entwined with human conflict, violence, and war. As a fundamental resource for survival, ecosystems, and the stability of civilizations, water and its scarcity or intentional manipulation have long played a pivotal role in power struggles and geopolitical tensions.
In When the Well Is Dry, MacArthur Fellow and world-renowned water expert Peter Gleick traces the history of water and violence, weaving together historical accounts, personal reflections, and analysis. Spanning over four thousand years, the book examines how water has shaped conflicts, from ancient civilizations to contemporary crises, such as Syria’s civil war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as detailing the evolution of modern environmental security studies.
When the Well Is Dry highlights the dangers of water-driven violence but also offers comprehensive recommendations for reducing such conflicts, paving a new path toward cooperation over water and strategies for a sustainable future.
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Bounce
Six Balls, Six Sports, and the History of Globalization$29.99An entertaining and original introduction to the debate over globalization through the history of six well-known pieces of sports equipment
Globalization is the central economic issue of our time. It is tied to everything we buy; it impacts who wins elections, and it can lead to the wholesale collapse (or revitalization) of towns, cities, and countries. And yet, for all its significance, globalization is still widely misunderstood—or just not understood at all. What’s been missing is a way in.
In Bounce, William Milberg, a professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, takes the game balls used in six popular sports—golf, baseball, football, soccer, tennis, and basketball—and goes deep into their complex and fascinating history, which is also the history of globalization. Each ball tells us unique and vital things about this evolution: the golf ball, for instance, uncovers the dynamics of the first wave of globalization, with colonial powers seeking rubber in the plantations of Africa, Asia, and South America, and the importance of machine technology and innovation. The football, on the other hand, shows how labor unions provided the “countervailing power” that workers needed against growing industrial corporations, prompting steady growth in pay and economic security for the average worker.
Globalization has been a series of choices, in other words—by individuals, corporations, and governments. In the vein of Simon Kuper’s Soccernomics and Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World, Bounce shows us how the history of these game balls helps us to understand the consequences of those choices and where we want the economy to go.
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A Natural History of the Spirits
On Ecology, Belonging, and the Sublime$26.99From the winner of James Beard, Harriet Tubman, and Whiting Awards, a shimmering and unexpected vision of the world we inhabit together
From the celebrated journalist whose work has been hailed by Tiya Miles as “broad, complex, and unexpected,” and by Publishers Weekly as “informative and compassionate,” award-winning author Jori Lewis’s stunning new book blends scientific research, myth, folklore, and cultural analysis in a lyrical literary work that observes the natural world as an entry point into understanding the traumas of our history and the unexplored dimensions of our spiritual lives.
A Natural History of the Spirits offers profound meditations on the history of colonialism, racism, and social and ecological change, exploring such wide-ranging subjects as the reproduction crisis of the long-lived African baobab tree in the face of climate change; the threatened marine gastropods whose shells have both mystical and monetary meaning; the evolutionary history of the watermelon and how racist stereotypes related to it developed and persist in the United States; the disquieted spirits of the Senegalese island Sangomar in the wake of new oil and gas exploration in the area; and how, by observing the habits of the yellow gardenia, we may more deeply understand how we create home.
For readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, A Natural History of the Spirits grapples with how we have made, and continue to make, meaning of the world by reading the land, the animals, the water, and the skies.
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Side Effects
How Abortion Bans Impact Everyone’s Health$29.99A powerful argument from Politico’s health care reporter that the overturning of Roe compromised healthcare in the U.S. far beyond reproductive rights
In the turbulent aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the United States has been plunged into a new and poorly documented healthcare crisis. Alice Ollstein’s explosive reporting offers an urgent, on-the-ground look at a medical system under siege, in which millions of patients and providers have been caught up in the dragnet of the new abortion restrictions, affecting all aspects of reproductive care generally—and well beyond.
Ollstein, Politico’s health care reporter and one of News Media Alliances “Rising Stars,” exposes the unexpected ways in which the Dobbs decision is disrupting the already fraught experience of pregnancy and birth, causing spikes in maternal and infant mortality, and sepsis and hemorrhage for pregnant women, as physicians withhold or delay medically necessary procedures for fear of being prosecuted. A work of deep reporting and profound humanity, and the winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize, Side Effects also chronicles the experiences of real people experiencing the sudden and dangerous drop-off in all forms of sexual health care, from contraception to STD testing, and the unforeseen spillover effects to medical research, hospital staffing, wait times, access to medications, and more.
Even as she sounds the alarm, Ollstein reveals how patients, physicians, researchers, and pharmacists are fighting back, making the case that it’s not too late to protect our medical system from the side effects caused by the current existential threat to our health, safety, and privacy.
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Our Own Worst Enemies
America in the Age of Violent Populism$32.99The nation’s leading expert on political violence diagnoses the gravest threat to American democracy—and how to overcome it
The January 6th riot, the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the shootings of Minnesota legislators, the two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, attacks on judges, as well as the recent killing of Charlie Kirk—Americans are increasingly embracing political violence. And the call for blood comes from both sides of the aisle.
In Our Own Worst Enemies, Robert A. Pape argues that American democracy is at a precarious moment because the principal danger in this new phase will come not from a fringe militia group. Rooting his observations in both historical data and fascinating (and terrifying) original interviews with contemporary political actors, Pape shows that support for political violence against democratic institutions is now as likely to come from “normal” political activists with nice homes and 401(k)s as it is from the Proud Boys and the cast of sometimes-oddball characters who stormed the Capitol. He identifies the precursors to the current moment, explains why the old solutions are not working this time around, and articulates what is needed to safeguard democracy in this new age of “violent populism.”
For over two centuries, American democracy has depended on citizens’ willingness to accept political differences and peaceful transitions of power. Our Own Worst Enemies tells us how we can return to those all-important norms.
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What Has Democracy Done for You Lately?
How to Inspire Working People to Join the Fight to Save America$15.95What happens when the people who keep a democracy running can no longer afford to live in it?
“No one has done more to move forward the rights of food and restaurant workers than Saru Jayaraman. This is the story of the next steps in the movement, as told by the woman who is creating them.” —Mark Bittman, author of The Kitchen Matrix and A Bone to Pick: The Good and Bad News About FoodAcross the United States, millions of Americans work full time—often at two or three jobs—and still fall behind. As wages lag far behind the cost of living, faith in democratic institutions has quietly eroded. For many working people, the question is no longer ideological but painfully practical: What has democracy done for me lately?
In What Has Democracy Done for Me Lately?, Saru Jayaraman and Rayan Semery-Palumbo argue that the crisis of American democracy cannot be separated from the crisis of economic inequality. Drawing on decades of organizing, original research, and vivid stories—from restaurant workers and caregivers to teachers and small-business owners—the authors show how a broken wage system has drained work of dignity and democracy of credibility. They trace how appeals to “ save democracy” ring hollow when work doesn.’t pay, and why symbolic recognition without material improvement leaves millions vulnerable to false populism.
This book offers more than diagnosis. By chronicling the rise of the Living Wage for All movement, it shows how democracy has been rebuilt before—and how it can be rebuilt again—by advancing bold, inclusive campaigns that inspire people and delivering tangible improvements in people.’s lives that prove that democracy is worth saving. At a moment of deep economic anxiety and rising authoritarianism, What Has Democracy Done for Me Lately? makes a clear, urgent case: when work pays, democracy works—and without that promise, it cannot survive.
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A Burning House
My Politics$22.99The late, legendary performer and activist’s candid reflections on American race relations and social movements, based on previously unpublished conversations with the award-winning historian
Harry Belafonte was more than a bestselling folk singer and Hollywood’s first Black matinée idol; he was also the secret weapon of human rights movements for seventy years—a close confidante of Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt; a trusted whisperer to JFK; and a political advisor to African heads of state.
Belafonte simultaneously advised Robert F. Kennedy on how to win the Black vote, openly supported Communist leaders including Fidel Castro, and skillfully avoided being blacklisted by J. Edgar Hoover. He was also a masterful fundraiser, almost singlehandedly bankrolling the civil rights movement from his own earnings as well as donations solicited from Hollywood friends and Vegas mobsters. It was Belafonte’s idea to organize superstar artists to record the hit song, “We Are the World” in 1984 to benefit famine victims in Africa.
In this candid, revelatory book, drawn from a series of conversations with historian Kevin Baker shortly before Belafonte’s death in 2023, the legendary singer of “Day-O” shares his philosophy on racial politics, African colonialism, the emergence of Israel, the shortcomings of Barack Obama, and the rise of Donald Trump. A Burning House offers a primer on celebrity activism at its best—as well as a cautionary tale about the rise of American authoritarianism.
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Erased
True Stories About Racism That You Probably Weren’t Taught in School$27.99For fans of James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, a bold new popular history about how our school textbooks whitewash the topic of race in America
In keeping with a September 2025 Trump administration plan for “patriotic education” that inspires “a love of country,” the teaching of slavery, race, and inequality in America’s schools is being suppressed, and students are increasingly rarely being taught about African/Black influence on American society and culture, or about the contributions of Black innovators, scholars, and leaders.
In a myth-busting account following the tradition of James Loewen’s bestselling Lies My Teacher Told Me, Erased peels back the layers of newly sanitized narratives to reveal the shocking, untold stories of race and racism in the United States—stories that were left out of your textbooks. From the enslaved laborers who built the White House, to the widespread phenomenon of “sundown towns,” and the Black communities destroyed by the building of highways, Erased delivers seventy concise, accessible and eye-opening chapters that challenge the core myths of American history with straightforward, little-known facts. Written by two renowned sociology professors.
Erased bridges the gap between what we were taught and what we need to know.
For students, educators, or concerned citizens, Erased will inform, inspire, and leave readers ready to engage in meaningful conversations about America’s past and its impact on today.
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The Opportunists
The Post-Liberals and the Reinvention of Reactionary Politics$28.99The first biography of the new generation of thinkers shaping the next era of right wing politics, in the U.S. and beyond
Since 2016, the spectacle of Trump has overshadowed the emergence of an equally serious threat to our democracy: a small but influential group of “post-liberal” intellectuals (as they style themselves) who have become key influencers of the New Right.
Taking a ground-breaking deep dive into the world of post-liberalism, The Opportunists immerses the reader in this simmering ideological stew. Historian Hannah Gurman combines intellectual biography and political history, offering incisive profiles of key thinkers including Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Yoram Hazony, Erika Bachiochi, Mary Harrington, Oren Cass, and Sohrab Ahmari. These figures have played a crucial role in legitimizing Trumpism beyond the MAGA base, providing intellectual fuel for the next generation of right-wing leaders who embrace such varied—and poorly understood—intellectual strains as Catholic integralism, neoconservative Zionism, reactionary feminism, and “pro-worker” conservatism. These ideas, and their proponents, are poised to determine the course of America’s future, driving the creation of new think tanks and media outlets, rebranding the agendas of existing conservative organizations, and dramatically reshaping reactionary politics in the United States and beyond.
We ignore the post-liberals, Gurman argues, at our own peril. The Opportunists is a major effort to expose the new ideas shaping our perilous world—and a first step in understanding how to combat them.
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911, What’s Your Emergency?
The Promise and Peril of Crisis Response$29.99A groundbreaking history and critique of a little-explored aspect of American law enforcement: the often deadly 911 emergency response system
The world knows George Floyd as the man whose murder launched a thousand protests. Less discussed is that his death was set in motion by a 911 call that needlessly dispatched the police. While 911 saves countless lives, it also creates devastating risks—almost always to people of color. In this important book full of original research, Rebecca Neusteter, the country’s leading expert on emergency response, uncovers a shockingly unregulated system with deeply racist roots.
Although fire chiefs had called for a universal emergency hotline for years, it wasn’t until 1967—when Newark, Watts, and Detroit exploded in race riots—that Congress finally moved to create a system, one designed to summon the police to put down civil unrest. Neusteter reveals that legacy of racial social control as it continues today, with armed police the default response to 911 calls, whether or not they are well-matched to the need at hand. The book covers all-too-frequent killings of unarmed mentally ill people as well as the “Karen” syndrome, in which white women call 911 to report Black people engaged in harmless activities—endangering their lives in the process.
In her final chapters, Neusteter highlights promising new models of emergency response and other changes needed to improve our 911 system to serve everyone, safely and equitably.
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Having a Wonderful Time
Postcards That Tell a Story$24.99A captivating assortment of original mini-stories, ranging from heart-wrenching to spine-chilling, shared through the unique and timeless medium of postcards.
In this collection of original writing, leading authors including J.G. Ballard, Charles Boyle, Nicci French, and Will Self create compelling narratives that challenge literary structure and strengthen the bond between image and text. Each story is told as though it were written on the back of a postcard, accompanied by images of beautiful buildings, stunning landscapes, and smiling faces. Featuring almost 80 full color postcards, the collection invites readers to journey through a vivid tapestry of stories where words and visuals come together to spark imagination.
Whether the locations are familiar or entirely fictional, the postcards offer glimpses into larger narratives, hints of entire lives unfolding. Having A Wonderful Time is a set of powerful love letters to language, storytelling, and the inspiration that it can spark in our hearts.
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Tripwires
Fifteen Twenty-First-Century Events That Undermined American Democracy—and How to Reclaim It$29.99In a trenchant work of nonfiction, the #1 New York Times bestselling author identifies a series of self-inflicted wounds on our body politic that have led to the current moment, and shows us how we can undo the harm
From regrettable court decisions to wrong-headed policy initiatives and underhanded political maneuvers, the bestselling author makes the case that our descent into authoritarianism was not inevitable. In Tripwires, Richard North Patterson, whose works of fiction have sold over 25 million copies and whose novel on presidential politics, Protect and Defend, was a #1 New York Times bestseller, points to fifteen key moments in the past quarter-century when the country mis-stepped in a way that could have been avoided but instead took us closer to the brink.
Starting with the Supreme Court’s intervention in the presidential election that brought George W. Bush to power, Patterson traces a constellation of often under-appreciated turning points that runs through the accidental accession of John Roberts as Chief Justice and the moment of crisis when the subprime mortgages came due, to Donald Trump’s demand to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Marco Rubio’s sabotage of his own immigration reform bill, and Mitch McConnell’s refusal to convict Trump for his attempted coup, culminating in the Roberts Court establishing presidential autocracy.
Patterson’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of recent U.S. history along with his political acumen and training as a trial lawyer allow him to show cause and effect in a truly synthetic way, building his case for our march to the dark side one wrong turn at a time. His final chapters show the way out of our current morass, offering hope for America’s future.
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Under the Neem Tree
Stories$24.99A exquisitely wrought, deeply personal collection of short stories from a remarkable new voice from Sudan
A young girl grows jealous of her mother’s lemon tree, which may be more sentient than she knows. A college student confronts tragedies past and present when police attack a university protest. A lawyer desperately searches the city for a woman claiming to have been sent from the Hereafter.
In her second collection of stories after Thirteen Months of Sunrise, which was named a finalist for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the unique voice of Sudanese writer and poet Rania Mamoun is on full display. Under the Neem Tree, her first collection to be published in the United States, now in a wonderful translation by Elisabeth Jaquette, is a powerful and intimate collection that blends fiction with memoir to create a rich, multifaceted portrait of Sudanese women—one with a magical edge.
From unexpected love to political defiance, Mamoun brings tenderness and a poetic sensibility to tales of human connection. Grounded in the reality of life and politics in Sudan, while also laced with elements of the surreal and uncanny, these twelve stories will be embraced by fans of Claire Keegan and Marie NDiaye, and by English-language readers eager for emotionally intimate characters, deeply human stories, and a striking, unique voice.
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King of the North
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South$22.99 – $30.99A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book
From the New York Times bestselling author, a radical reframing of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.
“Theoharis shows us through penetrating research and sensitive, scholarly insight that Dr. King not only was keenly aware of the history of antiblack racism in the North, but battled it from the very beginning of his career.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.
In this bold retelling, King emerges as a someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who—despite his flaws—depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.
King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks’s central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King’s life and work—a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present.
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Another World Is Possible
Lessons for America from Around the Globe$22.99 – $35.00A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book
Real-world solutions to America’s thorniest social problems—from housing to retirement to drug addiction—based on original reporting from around the worldA new generation of Americans has declared that another world is possible. And yet, the stubborn problems of inequality, climate change, and declining health seem as intractable as ever. Where might different answers lie?
Intrepid journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata has traveled around the world, from Costa Rica to Uganda, and Estonia to Singapore, uncovering how different countries solve the problems that plague the United States. Through in-depth reporting, including interviews with senior government officials, activists, industry professionals, and the ordinary people affected by their policies, Another World Is Possible examines innovative programs that address public health, social services, climate change, housing, education, addiction, and more.
In each instance Hakimi Zapata provides a clear-eyed assessment of the history, challenges, cost-effectiveness, and real-world impact of these programs. The result is a compelling, frame-shifting account of how we might live differently and create a safer, healthier, more sustainable future.
A work of keen analysis as well as enormous heart and optimism, Another World Is Possible is destined to crack the mold of current debates, and to refresh our sense of what might be possible tomorrow.
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The Education Wars
A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual$19.99 – $24.99A perfectly timed book for the educational resistance—those of us who believe in public schools
Culture wars have engulfed our schools. Extremist groups are seeking to ban books, limit what educators can teach, and threaten the very foundations of public education. What’s behind these efforts? Why are our schools suddenly so vulnerable? And how can the millions of Americans who love their public schools fight back? In this concise, hard-hitting guide, journalist Jennifer C. Berkshire and education scholar Jack Schneider answer these questions and chart a way forward.
The Education Wars explains the sudden obsession with race and gender in schools, as well as the ascendancy of book-banning efforts. It offers a clear analysis of school vouchers and the impact they’ll have on school finances. It deciphers the movement for “parents’ rights,” explaining the rights that students and taxpayers also have. And it reveals how the ostensible pursuit of “religious freedom” opens the door to discrimination against vulnerable children.
Berkshire and Schneider outline the core issues driving the education wars, offering essential information about issues, actors, and potential outcomes. In so doing, they lay out what is at stake for parents, teachers, and students and provide a road map for ensuring that public education survives this present assault.A book that will enrage and enlighten the millions of citizens who believe in their public schools, here is a long-overdue handbook and guide to action.
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Art Works
How Organizers and Artists Are Creating a Better World Together$22.99 – $35.00Named one of The Progressive magazine’s Favorite Books of the Year
An inside look at the organizers and artists on the front lines of political mobilization and social change“Ken [Grossinger] is one of the smartest strategists I know.” —John Sweeney, AFL-CIO president, 1995–2009
An artist’s mural of George Floyd becomes an emblem of a renewed movement for racial equality. A documentary film injects fuel into a popular mobilization to oust a Central American dictator. Freedom songs course through the American civil rights movement.
When artists and organizers combine forces, new forms of political mobilization follow—which shape lasting social change. And yet few people appreciate how much deliberate strategy often propels this vital social change work. Behind the scenes, artists, organizers, political activists, and philanthropists have worked together to hone powerful strategies for achieving the world we want and the world we need.
In Art Works, noted movement leader Ken Grossinger chronicles these efforts for the first time, distilling lessons and insights from grassroots leaders and luminaries such as Ai Weiwei, Courtland Cox, Jackson Browne, Shepard Fairey, Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Alexander, Bill McKibben, JR, Jose Antonio Vargas, and more. Drawing from historical and present-day examples—including Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Legacy Museum, and the Art for Justice Fund—Grossinger offers a rich tapestry of tactics and successes that speak directly to the challenges and needs of today’s activists and of these political times.
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Still Life
A Novel$19.99 – $25.99A New York Times Top Historical Fiction Pick of 2020
A stunningly original new novel exploring race, truth in authorship, and the legacy of past exploitation, from the Windham-Campbell lifetime achievement award winner
When Zoëml; Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, she was hailed by her literary contemporaries and reviewers alike. Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation as being among the most distinguished writers working today and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing.
Wicomb’s majestic new novel Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality as Wicomb tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the “Father of South African Poetry.” In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the specter of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle had once published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son.
At their side is Sir Nicholas Green, a seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando). Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle’s life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.
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Pushout
The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools$18.95 – $49.00The “powerful” (Michelle Alexander) exploration of the harsh and harmful experiences confronting Black girls in schools, and how we can instead orient schools toward their flourishing
On the day fifteen-year-old Diamond from the Bay Area stopped going to school, she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school.
In a work that Lisa Delpit calls “imperative reading,” Monique W. Morris chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose complex lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Painting “a chilling picture of the plight of black girls and women today” (The Atlantic), Morris exposes a world of confined potential and supports the rising movement to challenge the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures.
At a moment when Black girls are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system, Pushout is truly a book “for everyone who cares about children” (Washington Post).
Book cover photograph by Brittsense/brittsense.com.
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October
A Novel$19.99 – $24.99A South African academic returns to her homeland in this novel by the award-winning author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town—“an extraordinary writer” (Toni Morrison).
Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zoë Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers—such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee, among others—and by reviewers as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman).
In October, Wicomb tells the story of Mercia Murray, a South African woman of color in the midst of a difficult homecoming. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-six years, Mercia returns to South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by alcoholism and buried secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her South African roots, Mercia recollects the past and assesses the present with a keen sense of irony. October is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.
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The One That Got Away
Short Stories$17.99 – $24.95These short stories from the award-winning South African author “combine the coolly interrogative gaze of the outsider with an insider’s intimate warmth” (J. M. Coetzee).
Zoë Wicomb’s debut short story collection, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, won critical acclaim across the globe as well as high praise from fellow authors including Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Now, after two novels, Wicomb returns to the genre that first brought her international acclaim.
Set mostly in the South African city of Cape Town, where Wicomb is from, and the Scottish city of Glasgow, where she now lives, this new collection of short stories straddles two worlds. With an array of expertly drawn characters, these twelve tales explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family, and the fraught yet often intimate relations between those who serve and those who are served.
Full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments of startling insight, The One That Got Away showcases this Windham Campbell Award–winning author at the height of her powers.
“An extraordinary writer . . . seductive, brilliant, and precious, her talent glitters.” —Toni Morrison
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Playing in the Light
A Novel$14.99 – $24.95“In her ambitious third novel, Wicomb explores South Africa’s history through a woman’s attempt to answer questions surrounding her past” (The New Yorker).
Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Windham Campbell Prize winner Zoë Wicomb’s celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. As Alison McCulloch noted in the New York Times, “Wicomb deftly explores the ghastly soup of racism in all its unglory—denial, tradition, habit, stupidity, fear—and manages to do so without moralizing or becoming formulaic.”
Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family’s past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society. “Stylistically nuanced and psychologically astute,” Playing in the Light is as powerful in its depiction of Marion’s personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa’s bizarre, brutal history (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
“Post-apartheid South Africa is indeed a new world . . . With this novel, Wicomb proves a keen guide.” —The New York Times
“Delectable . . . Wicomb’s prose is as delightful and satisfying in its culmination as watching the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean.” —The Christian Science Monitor
“[A] thoughtful, poetic novel.” —The Times (London)
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