Stacks - Nonfiction

STACKS

Nonfiction Edition

Fall / Winter 2020

Use the arrows on either

side of the page to flip

through the magazine.

The book covers are

clickable, and will take you

to the book on our website:

ebbooksellers.com

Feel free to download

& share the magazine!

•

Nonfiction is an enormous umbrella term for books. The

result of which is that it earns itself an enormous catalog

-- to the tune of 100+ books!

What you’re going to find in this edition of Stacks is a

representative sample of the sort of nonfiction that

would be staring at you from the shelves or stacked high

on a table. We take a great deal of pride in not

condescending to our customers. You are an intelligent

bunch with incredibly broad tastes, backgrounds, and

curiosities. This edition has been a labor of love for me,

and we hope you love it too.

-- Brad

California & Western

Studies

Spirits of San Francisco (Bloomsbury) - Oct. 20

By Gary Kamiya & Paul Madonna

From two bestselling, prizewinning, and critically acclaimed

contemporary chroniclers of San Francisco comes a rich,

illustrated, idiosyncratic portrait of this great city.

Gary Kamiya's Cool Gray City of Love is a contemporary

classic. Now he joins forces with celebrated, local hero Paul

Madonna to take a fresh look at the East Bay’s frenemy, San

Francisco.

A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

(Univ of California Press) - Oct 6th

By Rachel Brahinsky, Alexander Tarr

Looking beyond the mythologized image of San Francisco to

the places where collective struggle has built the region.

Countering romanticized commercial narratives about the

Bay Area, geographers Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr

highlight the cultural and economic landscape of indigenous

resistance to colonial rule, radical interracial and cross-class

organizing against housing discrimination and police

violence, young people demanding economically and

ecologically sustainable futures, and the often-unrecognized

labor of farmworkers and everyday people.

With over 100 sites that you can visit and learn from, this

book demonstrates critical ways of reading the landscape

itself for clues to these histories. A useful companion for

travelers, educators, or longtime residents, this guide links

multicultural streets and lush hills to suburban cul-de-sacs

and wetlands, stretching from the North Bay to the South

Bay, from the East Bay to San Francisco.

A vivid journey through California's vast rural interior, The

Heart of California weaves the story of historian Frank Latta's

forgotten 1938 boat trip from Bakersfield to San Francisco with

Aaron Gilbreath's trip retracing Latta's route by car during the

2014 drought. Latta embarked on his journey to publicize the

need for dams and levees to improve flood control. Gilbreath

made his own trip to profile Latta and the productive

agricultural world that damming has created in the San

Joaquin Valley, to describe the region's nearly lost indigenous

culture and ecosystems, and to bring this complex yet largely

ignored landscape to life.

Urban Trails East Bay (Mountaineers)

Available Now

By Alexandra Kenin

Urban Trails: East Bay offers 40 routes for walkers, runners,

and hikers, with an emphasis on getting out and getting fit in

your own backyard. Expert local hiking guide Alexandra

Kenin offers a wide range of options, from leg stretchers

overlooking the Bay Area at Tilden Regional Park to an

afternoon stroll through the wineries around Jack London

Square to a 6-mile hike along the slopes of Mount Diablo to

spot seasonal waterfalls. Other features include:

* Trailhead locations, including public transit options

* Rated appeal for walkers, runners, or hikers

* Info for families and dog owners

* Trail distance, elevation gain, high point, amenities

* Sidebars on area history, nature, tips, and sights

* Historic trails, coastal trails, stairways, peak bagging

The Heart of California (Bison Books) - Nov. 1

By Aaron Gilbreath

American Babylon (Princeton Univ. Press) -

Available Now

By Robert O. Self

American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights

and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern

model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights

that began during the World War II years and continued through

the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle

yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar

metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial

segregation.

A foundational contemporary book for understanding Oakland.

Murch’s expert research into the largely hidden history of the

development of the Black Panther Party documents the

contributions of black students and youth who created new forms

of organization, grassroots mobilization, and political literacy. A

strong, important challenge to the all-male story too-commonly

told.

Solutions & Other Problems (Gallery Books)

Available Now

By Allie Brosh

For the first time in seven years, Allie Brosh—beloved author and

artist of the extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller Hyperbole

and a Half—returns with a new collection of comedic,

autobiographical, and illustrated essays.

Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie

Brosh’s childhood; the adventures of her very bad animals; merciless

dissection of her own character flaws; incisive essays on grief,

loneliness, and powerlessness; as well as reflections on the absurdity

of modern life.

God-Level Knowledge Darts (Random House)

Available Now

By Desus & Mero

We’ll let them describe it: “We want to share all we’ve learned,

after years in the Bronx streets, with you: the people. So with a

lifetime spent building up a plethora of information from trials

and tribulations and a handful of misdemeanors, we decided to

write this book—a sequel to the Bible, or maybe to The

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, depending on how big a nerd you

are. Let this book be your North Star.”

Living For the City (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

Available Now

By Donna Jean Murch

Too often prison abolition is construed by its critics as a pie-in-

the-sky idealism. When we’re feeling generous, we consider the

possibility these critics are not arguing from a position of bad bad

faith .. they’ve just never read Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Who suffers and who gains from the carceral state? These are the

guiding questions of Golden Gulag. Whether you come to agree or

not with prison abolition, engaging the idea on Gilmore’s terms

will change how you consider it.

Not new … but indispensable

Golden Gulag (Univ. of California Press)

Available Now

By Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Biography

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative

journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to

interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm

X—all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates,

street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and

cops, and political leaders around the world.

The result is unquestionably one of the great biographies of the

year.

The Dead Are Arising (Liveright) - Oct. 20

By Les Payne, Tamara Payne

The Freezer Door (Semiotext(e)) - Dec. 8

By Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life.

Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in

Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and

persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male

sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban

imagination over city life.

Ferocious and tender, it offers a complex meditation on the

trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world

that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and

social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.

Three Rings (Univ. of Virginia Press)

Available Now

By Daniel Mendelsohn

In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel

Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the

randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we

tell.

Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism,

Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who

turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their

own--works that pondered the nature of narrative itself.

Becoming a Visible Man (Univ. of Vanderbilt Press)

Available Now!

By Jamison Green

First published in 2004, Becoming a Visible Man remains a

beloved resource for trans people and their allies.

Since the first edition's publication, author Jamison Green's

writings and advocacy among business and governmental

organizations around the world have led to major changes in the

fields of law, medicine, and social policy, and his (mostly invisible)

work has had significant effects on trans people globally. This new

edition captures the changes of the last two decades, while also

imparting a message of self-acceptance and health.

Diary of a Detour (Duke Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Lesley Stern

Lesley Stern's memoir of living with chronic lymphocytic

leukemia. She chronicles the fears and daily experience of coming

to grips with an incurable form of cancer by describing the

dramas and delving into the science. Her immediate world is

inhabited with books, movies, politics, and medical reports that

provoke essayistic reflections. As her environment is shared with

friends, chickens, a cat called Elvis, mountain goats, whales,

lions, and microbes the book opens onto a larger than human

world. Intimate and meditative, engrossing and singular, Diary of

a Detour offers new ideas about what it might mean to live and

think with cancer, and with chronic illness more broadly.

The Names of All the Flowers (Feminist Press)

Available Now

By Melissa Valentine

Set in rapidly gentrifying 1990s Oakland, this memoir--"poignant,

painful, and gorgeous" (Alicia Garza)--explores siblinghood,

adolescence, and grief in a family shattered by loss.

The Names of All the Flowers connects one tragic death to a

collective grief for all black people who die too young. A lyrical

recounting of a life lost, Melissa Valentine's debut memoir is an

intimate portrait of a family fractured by the school-to-prison

pipeline and an enduring love letter to an adored older brother. It is

a call for justice amid endless cycles of violence, grief, and trauma.

Cancer Journals (Penguin Classics)

By Audre Lorde

First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a

startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with

breast cancer and mastectomy. Living as a "black, lesbian,

mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on

her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage

to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly

feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women

with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence

into language and action.

Memorial Drive (Ecco) - Available Now

By Nathasha Trethewey

A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a

daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the

hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story

of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy

At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned

upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her

mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the

twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable

trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly

shaped the artist she became.

Wandering in Strange Lands (Harper) -

Available Now

By Morgan Jenkins

Following in the steps of the Great migration, Morgan Jerkins seeks

to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire

group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and

disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos,

and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose

threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace

back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of black people

she met along the way—the tissue of black myths, customs, and

blood that connect the bones of American history.

How We Live Now (Bloomsbury)

Available Now

By Bill Hayes

Bill Hayes offers an ode to our shared humanity--capturing in real

time this strange new world we're now in (for who knows how

long?) with his signature insight and grace. As he wanders the

increasingly empty streets of Manhattan, Hayes meets fellow

New Yorkers and discovers stories to tell, but he also shares the

unexpected moments of gratitude he finds from within his

apartment, where he lives alone and--like everyone else--is

staying home, trying to keep busy and not bored as he adjusts to

enforced solitude with reading, cooking, reconnecting with loved

ones, reflecting on the past--and writing.

Carry (Ballantine) - Available Now

By Toni Jensen

Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot

birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the

NRA. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near

Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry

campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in

this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the

violence enacted on the bodies of indigenous women, on

indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten.

Wintering (Riverhead) - Dec. 1

By Katherine May

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances

like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job

loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and

unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending

school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job.

Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but

embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

Minor Feelings (One World) - Available Now

By Cathy Park Hong

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively

blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh

truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir

and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable,

humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting

pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and

politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think

about our world.

Spirituality / Mythology

Yurei (Chin Music) - Oct. 20

By Zack Davisson

"I lived in a haunted apartment." Davisson opens his book on

Japan's ghosts, or yurei, with a personal tale about the spirit

world. Shifting from anecdotes to deep research to translation of

ancient ghost stories, he explores the persistence of yurei in

modern Japan and their continued popularity throughout the

West. Color images of yurei appear throughout the book.

Zack Davisson is an award-winning translator, writer, and

scholar of Japanese folklore and ghosts.

Popol Vuh (Restless) - Oct. 27

By Ilan Stavans, Gabriela Larios (Illustrator)

An inspired and urgent prose retelling of the Maya myth of

creation by acclaimed Latin American author and scholar

Ilan Stavans, gorgeously illustrated by Salvadoran folk

artist Gabriela Larios and introduced by renowned author,

diplomat, and environmental activist Homero Aridjis.

Popol Vuh: A Retelling is a one-of-a-kind prose rendition of

this sacred text that is as seminal as the Bible and the

Qur'an, the Ramayana and the Odyssey.

A Pre-Columbian Bestiary (Penn State Univ Press)

Nov. 1

By Ilan Stavans, Eko (Illustrator)

An encyclopedic collaboration between award-winning Mexican

American scholar Ilan Stavans and illustrator Eko, A Pre-

Columbian Bestiary features lively and informative descriptions

of forty-six religious, mythical, and imaginary creatures from the

Nahua, Aztec, Maya, Tabasco, Inca, Aymara, and other cultures

of Latin America.

Air Mail (Torrey House) - Available Now

By Amy Irving & Pam Houston

When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in

place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam

Houston and Amy Irvine--who had never met--began a

correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged,

windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on either

side of the Continental Divide. As the numbers of infected and

dead rose and the nation split dangerously over the crisis,

Houston and Irvine found their letters to one another nearly as

necessary as breath. Part tribute to wilderness, part indictment

against tyranny and greed, Air Mail reveals the evolution of a

friendship that galvanizes as it chronicles a strange new world.

The Age of Skin (Open Letter Press) - Nov. 17

By Dubravka Ugresic

These essays are written on the skin of the times. Dubravka

Ugresic, winner of the Neustadt International Prize and one of

Europe's most influential writers, with biting humor and a

multitude of cultural references--from La La Land and Dawn of the

Planet of the Apes, to tattoos and body modification, World Cup

chants, and the preservation of Lenin's corpse--takes on the dreams,

hopes, and fears of modern life. The collapse of Yugoslavia, and the

author's subsequent exile from Croatia, leads to reflections on

nationalism and the intertwining of crime and politics.

Stranger Faces (Transit Books) - Oct. 20

By Namwali Serpell

In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces--

the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the

face of the dead--Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary

mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based

on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.

Belles Lettres / Critical Studies

Against Amazon (Biblioasis) - Nov. 17

By Jorge Carrión

Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader's

History left off, Against Amazon explores the increasing

pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops

and libraries. It is in equal parts a celebration of books and

bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love

letter--and, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive

influence of late capitalism.

Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons

Why I Write (W. W. Norton) -- Oct. 13

By Claire Messud

In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud

reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to

Australia; the complex relationship between her modern

Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt;

and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once

lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary

classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and

Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and

The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s

Museum of Fine Arts. In the title essay, she explores her

drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the

transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.”

An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading

(Univ. of Alberta Press) - Available Now

By Dionne Brand

In this stunning lecture, poet Dionne Brand reflects on her early

reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being

inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist,

and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing

are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of

writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression

and its own consciousness.

Forgetting (Little Island) - Available Now

By Gabriel Josipovici

We cannot understand the phenomenon of remembering without

invoking its opposite, forgetting. Taking his cue from Beckett,

Josipovici uncovers a profound cultural shift from societies that

celebrated ritual remembrance at fixed times and places, to our

own Western world where the lack of such mechanisms leads to a

fear of forgetting, to what Nietzsche diagnosed as an unhealthy

sleeplessness that infects every aspect of our culture.

Being Property Once Myself

(Harvard Univ. Press) - Available Now

By Joshua Bennett

Throughout US history, black people have been configured as

nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself

delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have

emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal

figure--the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark--in the works

of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale

Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden.

Brad: “I had very high expectations for this one, and Bennett exceeded

them so greatly that they rendered them null & void!”

Index Cards (New Directions) - Available Now

By Moyra Davey

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and

filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter—with

a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book—and links that

subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections,

until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While

thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and

artists—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet

Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many

others—in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clear-headed and

personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to

reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

Iceland Zombie (Princeton Univ. Press) - Oct. 13

By Roni Horn

Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at

the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless

expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work.

Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections,

vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie

distills the artist's lifelong experience of Iceland's natural

environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable

exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote,

elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an

island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost

self.

Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan

(City Lights) - Nov. 3

By Jean Daive

An arresting memoir of the final years and tragic suicide of

one of twentieth-century Europe's greatest poets, published

on the centenary of his birth.

Jean Daive illuminates Celan's process of thinking about

poetry, grappling with questions of where it comes from and

what it does: invaluable insights about poetry's relation to

history and ethics, and how poems offer pathways into a

deeper grasp of our past and present.

The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971

(Univ. of Minnesota Press) - Nov. 10

By Allen Ginsberg

An autobiographical journey through America in the turbulent

1960s—the essential backstory to Ginsberg’s National Book

Award–winning volume of poetry

Published in 1974, The Fall of America was Allen Ginsberg’s

magnum opus, a poetic account of his experiences in a nation in

turmoil. What his National Book Award–winning volume

documented he had also recorded, playing a reel-to-reel tape

machine given to him by Bob Dylan as he traveled the nation’s

byways and visited its cities, finding himself again and again in

the midst of history in the making—or unmaking.

Just Us (Graywolf) - Available Now

By Claudia Rankine

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with

no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one

another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us

to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this

divisive and stuck moment in American history.

This arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the

voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding

to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of

her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the

political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside

fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s

own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last

word.

The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours

(Harvard Univ. Press) - Available Now

By Gregory Nagy

Based on the legendary Harvard course that Gregory Nagy has taught

for well over thirty years, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours explores

the roots of Western civilization and offers a masterclass in classical

Greek literature. We meet the epic heroes of Homer's Iliad and

Odyssey, but Nagy also considers the tragedies of Aeschylus,

Sophocles, and Euripides, the songs of Sappho and Pindar, and the

dialogues of Plato.

Not a Novel (New Directions) - Available Now

By Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck’s acclaimed novel Go, Went, Gone launched one of

Germany’s most admired writers into the American spotlight. On

the heels of this literary breakthrough comes a book of personal,

profound, often humorous meditations and reflections.

There are lively essays about her literary influences (Thomas

Bernhard, the Brothers Grimm, Kafka, and Thomas Mann),

unforgettable reflections on the forces at work in her novels

(including history, silence, and time), and scathing commentaries

on the dire situation of America and Europe today.

Angels & Saints (New Directions) -

Now Available

By Eliot Weinberger

Angels have soared through Western culture and consciousness

from Biblical to contemporary times. But what do we really

know about these celestial beings? Where do they come from,

what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive?

The celebrated essayist Eliot Weinberger has mined and

deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology

into an awe-inspiring exploration of the heavenly host.

Threaded throughout are the enigmatic illuminated grid poems

by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus.

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton) -

Available Now

By Audre Lorde, Roxane Gay (Editor)

A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s "intelligent, fierce,

powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible" (Roxane Gay) prose and

poetry, for a new generation of readers.

This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to

intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in

twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and

introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on

race and gender, Roxane Gay.

Some of Us Did Not Die (Civitas Books) -

By June Jordan

The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and

span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an

incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining

committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to

venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture

and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-

ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as

a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.

How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

(Catapult) - Available Now

By Ruby Hamad

Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court

to keep "ownership" of their slaves, through the centuries of

colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the

modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged

story of white women's active participation in campaigns of

oppression.

With rigor and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument

about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialized

within, a reality that we must apprehend in order to fight.

Afropessimism (Liveright) - Available Now

By Frank Wilderson, III

Brad says:

“There is a sort of before-Afropessimism and after-Afropessimism

thinking. The core of Wilderson’s thesis is contentious, and he is not

afraid of the churning waters he creates in his wake. He is not

inclined to tell you what to do with his theory -- only that you should

face it and or own up to it. The quintessence of provocation.”

The Condemnation of Blackness

(Harvard Univ. Press) - Available Now

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad

How did we come to think of race as synonymous with crime? A

brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black

criminality in the making of modern urban America, The

Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this pernicious

myth, rooted in crime statistics, has had on our society and our

sense of self. This is a contemporary classic.

Gender & Race Studies

Not new … but indispensable

A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

(Univ of Minnesota Press) - Available Now

By Kathryn Yusoff

No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color

line of the Anthropocene, Yusoff xamines how the grammar of

geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies

of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery.

The Political Writings (Bloomsbury) -

Available Now

By Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon's political impact is difficult to overestimate.

His anti-colonialist, philosophical and revolutionary writings

were among the most influential of the 20th century. The

essays, articles and notes published in this volume cover the

most politically active period of his life and encapsulate the

breadth, depth and urgency of his writings. In particular,

they clarify and amplify his much-debated views on violent

resistance.

These works provide new complexity to our understanding of

Fanon and reveal just how relevant his thinking is to the

contemporary world and how important his ideas are to

changing it.

Unapologetic (Beacon Press) - Available Now

By Charlene A. Carruthers

A manifesto from one of America's most influential activists

which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by

reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.

Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing

traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil

rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist

movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the

social justice struggle to make the movement for Black

liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist.

Sex, Love, and Letters (Cornell Univ Press)

Available Now

By Judith G. Coffin

When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure

trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from her international

readers, it inspired her to explore the intimate bond between the

famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the

heart of Sex, Love, and Letters, immerses us in the tumultuous

decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s-- from the painful

aftermath of World War Two to the horror and shame of French

colonial brutality in Algeria through the dilemmas and

exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements.

It also provides a glimpse into the power of reading and the power

of readers to seduce the authors of their favorite books.

Making All Black Lives Matter (Univ of California)

Available Now

By Barbara Ransby

Award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby

outlines the scope and genealogy of the Black Lives Matter

movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and

situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is

anticapitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most

marginalized members of the Black community. Ransby maps the

movement, profiles many of its lesser-known leaders, measures

its impact, outlines its challenges, and looks toward its future.

Stay Woke (New York Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, Candis Watts Smith

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith inspire readers

to address the pressing issues of racial inequality, and provide a

basic toolkit that will equip readers to become knowledgeable

participants in public debate, activism, and politics.

Angela Davis: Seize the Time (Hirmer) - Oct. 2

By Gerry Beegan (Editor), Donna Gustafson

(Editor)

Beginning in 1970 with her arrest in connection with a

courtroom shootout, then moving through her trial and

acquittal, the book traces Davis’s life and work during the

subsequent decades and her influential career as a public

intellectual. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the

archive, including press coverage, photographs, court sketches,

videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis’s political

writings. Also features essays on visibility and invisibility,

history, memory, and the iconography of black radical

feminism.

Undrowned (AK Press) - Nov. 17

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and

our whole species based on the subversive and transformative

guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer,

fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and

struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our

species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a mix of poetic

sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might

teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for

wondering and questioning.

Big Friendship (Simon & Schuster) - Available Now

By Aminatou Sow, Ann Friedman

A close friendship is one of the most influential and important

relationships a human life can contain. Anyone will tell you that!

But for all the rosy sentiments surrounding friendship, most

people don’t talk much about what it really takes to stay close for

the long haul.

Now two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story

of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this

honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one

another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your

Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate

conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own

friendship—its joys and its pitfalls.

Caste (Random House) - Available Now

By Isabel Wilkerson

American Studies

They Were Here Property (Harvard Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African

American history, historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on

a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were

sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and

benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women

typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were

often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women

often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands,

they employed management techniques that were as effective and

brutal as those used by slave-owning men. By examining the

economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning

women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to

rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding

America.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste

system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the

nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and

Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie

caste systems across civilizations, including divine will,

bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about

people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel

Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and

many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow

of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis

studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of

the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that

there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure

themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs

of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this

hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward

to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive

separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common

humanity.

A Promised Land (Crown) - Nov. 17

By Barack Obama

You probably know of this guy, right?

In his highly anticipated first volume of his presidential

memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his odyssey from

young man searching for his identity to president of the United

States.

We Are Not Dreamers (Duke Univ. Press) -

Available Now

By Leisy J. Abrego (Editor),

Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales (Editor)

The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers--themselves

currently or formerly undocumented--poignantly counter the

Dreamer narrative by grappling with the nuances of

undocumented life in this country. Theorizing those excluded

from the Dreamer category--academically struggling students,

transgender activists, and queer undocumented parents--the

contributors call for an expansive articulation of immigrant

rights and justice that recognizes the full humanity of

undocumented immigrants while granting full and

unconditional rights. Illuminating how various institutions

reproduce and benefit from exclusionary narratives, this

volume articulates the dangers of the Dreamer narrative and

envisions a different way forward.

Unworthy Republic (W. W. Norton) - Available Now

By Claudio Saunt

Saunt argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it,

was not an inevitable chapter in U.S. expansion across the continent.

Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new

lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the

southern states. He shows how the politics and economics of white

supremacy lay at the heart of the expulsion of Native Americans; how

corruption, greed, and administrative indifference and incompetence

contributed to the debacle of its implementation; and how the

consequences still resonate today.

The Torture Letters (Univ. of Chicago Press)

Available Now

By Laurence Ralph

In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of

torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against

police violence, and the American public’s complicity in

perpetuating torture at home and abroad.. This is a powerful

indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all

Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it.

Stakes Is High (Bold Type) - Available Now

By Mychal Denzel Smith

In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark

contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us,

individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to

looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional

oppression are ever-present.

There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound

work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and

imagination.

The Lexington Six (Univ. of Massachusetts Press) -

Oct. 30

By Josephine Donovan

On September 23, 1970, a group of antiwar activists staged a

robbery at a bank in Massachusetts, during which a police officer

was killed. While the three men who participated in the robbery

were soon apprehended, two women escaped and became fugitives

on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, eventually landing in a lesbian

collective in Lexington, Kentucky, during the summer of 1974. In

pursuit, the FBI launched a massive dragnet. Five lesbian women

and one gay man ended up in jail for refusing to cooperate with

federal officials, whom they saw as invading their lives and

community. Dubbed the Lexington Six, the group's resistance

attracted national attention, inspiring a nationwide movement in

other minority communities. Like the iconic Stonewall

demonstrations, this gripping story of spirited defiance has special

resonance in today's America.

Global Studies

If Then (Liveright) - Available Now

By Jill Lepore

A revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad,

algorithmic twenty-first century.

The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined

data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics,

and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and

Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These

Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set

out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the

methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.

The Polymath (Yale Univ. Press) - Available Now

By Peter Burke

The first history of the western polymath, from the fifteenth

century to the present day

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George

Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved

the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be

unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often

these individuals are remembered for just one part of their

valuable achievements.

Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view. Identifying 500

western polymaths, Burke explores their wide-ranging successes

and shows how their rise matched a rapid growth of knowledge in

the age of the invention of printing, the discovery of the New

World and the Scientific Revolution. It is only more recently that

the further acceleration of knowledge has led to increased

specialisation and to an environment that is less supportive of

wide-ranging scholars and scientists.

Spanning the Renaissance to the present day, Burke changes our

understanding of this remarkable intellectual species.

The chant of "Azadi "--Urdu for "Freedom "--is the slogan of the

freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as

the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of

millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu

Nationalism.

Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these

two calls for Freedom the streets fell silent. Not only in India,

but all over the world. The coronavirus brought with it

another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a

nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole

populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like

nothing else ever could.

In this series of essays, Roy challenges us to reflect on the

meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.

Revolutions (Haymarket) - Oct. 20

By Michael Löwy

The photographs collected in this unique book provide a

startling visual documentation of seminal revolutionary

events, from the Paris Commune of 1871 through to a series

of "Unfinished Revolutions", from May 1968 in France to the

Zapatista uprising in the mid-1990s. The immediacy of the

images tells the story of these struggles in a way that texts

rarely can, with revolutions appearing as complex and messy

events driven by the actions of real, breathing humans who

make their own history.

Azadi (Haymarket) - Available Now

By Arundhati Roy

From the Bill of Rights to contemporary direct action tactics utilized

by the Ruckus Society, this handbook outlines a brief history of social

protest. Helpful resources and handy information are included, as

well as tips on everything from getting arrested to manipulating the

media. New chapters include electronic privacy and encryption, and

lessons learned from post-millenial actions.

The Civil Disobedience Handbook (Manic D) - Dec. 31

By James Tracy (Editor), Jenifer Joseph (Editor)

The Global Police State (Pluto) - Available Now

By William L. Robinson

As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever

more 'disposable'. Today, governments systematically exclude

sections of their populations from society through heavy-

handed policing. But it doesn't always go to plan. William I.

Robinson exposes the nature and dynamics of this out-of-

control system, arguing for the urgency of creating a movement

capable of overthrowing it.

Using data that reveals how far capitalism has become a

system of repression, Robinson argues that the emerging

megacities of the world are becoming the battlegrounds where

the excluded and the oppressed face off against the global

police state.

Pandemic Solidarity (Pluto) - Available Now

By Marina Sitrin (Editor), Colectiva Sembrar (Editor)

In times of crisis, when institutions of power are laid bare,

people turn to one another. Pandemic Solidarity collects

firsthand experiences from around the world of people creating

their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in the time of

the global crisis of Covid-19.

Moving beyond the present, these stories reveal what an

alternative society could look like, and reflect the skills and

relationships we already have to create that society, challenging

institutions of power that have already shown their fragility.

My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press)

Available Now

By Resmaa Menakem

In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines

the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of

trauma and body-centered psychology.

My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize

that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and

introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond

our entrenched racialized divide. It paves the way for a new, body-

centered understanding of white supremacy—how it is literally in

our blood and our nervous system.

We Will Not Cancel Us (AK Press) - Nov. 17

By adrienne maree brown

In We Will Not Cancel Us, movement mediator adrienne maree

brown reframes the discussion of “cancel culture” in a way that

points to possible paths beyond its impasses. Most critiques of

cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it,

sometimes even from from its targets. However, brown explores

the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that

gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it

prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn't,

how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in ways that

reflect our values?

I Hope We Choose Love (Arsenal Pulp)

Available Now

By Kai Cheng Thom

Adelaide says: “In many ways these essays are a love letter to

movements for liberation. Kai Cheng challenges us to do better, to

act from love. Her critiques are sober reflections on the gaps

between our desires to create more magical worlds and our

behaviors which so often reflect the carceral logic of our current

one.”

Beyond Survival (AK Press) - Available Now

By Ejeris Dixon (Editor),

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Editor)

In this collection, a diverse group of authors focuses on concrete and

practical forms of redress and accountability, assessing existing

practices and marking paths forward. They use a variety of forms--

from toolkits to personal essays--to delve deeply into the "how to" of

transformative justice, providing alternatives to calling the police,

ways to support people having mental health crises, stories of

community-based murder investigations, and much more. At the

same time, they document the history of this radical movement,

creating space for long-time organizers to reflect on victories,

struggles, mistakes, and transformations.

The Cost of Free Shipping (Pluto) - Available Now

By Jake Alimahomed-Wilson (Editor), Ellen Reese

(Editor)

With a wide variety of cutting-edge analyses, The Cost of Free

Shipping looks at the many dark facets of Amazon, including

automation, surveillance, tech work, workers' struggles,

algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and

much more. This timely book shows how Amazon represents a

fundamental shift in global capitalism that we should name,

interrogate and be primed to resist.

Having and Being Had (Riverhead) - Available Now

By Eula Biss

Through a series of engaging exchanges, Eula Biss examines

our assumptions about class and property and the ways we

internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by The New

York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a

chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and

deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of

accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how

we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon,

Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we

invested?”

Think Least of Death (Princeton Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Steven Nadler

In Think Least of Death, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler

connects Spinoza's ideas with his life and times to offer a

compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a

guide to living one's best life.

We find Spinzoa’s moral philosophy invaluably insightful for

our lives still today. And who doesn’t need help with that?!

Wild Things (Duke University Press) - Oct. 23

By Jack Halberstam

In Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of

sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been

associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the

twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an

unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of

opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates

the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer

practice and politics operate.

Grieving (Feminist Press) - Available Now

By Cristina Rivera Garza

Grieving is a hybrid collection of short cronicas, journalism,

and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary

Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. Drawing together

literary theory and historical analysis, she outlines how

neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking--culminating in

the misnamed "war on drugs"--has shaped her country.

Working from and against this political context, Cristina

Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance

against state violence, and that writing is a powerful mode of

seeking social justice and embodying resilience.

Sentient Flesh (Duke Univ. Press) - Oct. 23

By R. A. Judy

Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and

musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as

Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts

and performative practices such as music and dance that

express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional

to those grounding modern racialized capitalism.

Theory / Philosophy

Natural History & Nature Writing

Lost Spells (House of Anansi) - Oct. 28

By Robert MacFarlane, Jackie Morris (Illustrator)

Since its publication in 2017, The Lost Words has enchanted readers

with its poetry and illustrations of the natural world. Now, The Lost

Spells, a book kindred in spirit and tone, continues to re-wild the

lives of children and adults.

It evokes the wonder of everyday nature, conjuring up red foxes,

birch trees, jackdaws, and more in poems and illustrations that flow

between the pages and into readers' minds. Robert Macfarlane's

spell-poems and Jackie Morris's watercolour illustrations are musical

and magical: these are summoning spells, words of recollection,

charms of protection.

Ghostways (W. W. Norton) - Nov. 24

By Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, Dan

Richards

A hauntingly beautiful diptych of works inspired by Robert

Macfarlane’s travels with celebrated collaborators to two eerie

corners of England.

In Holloway, Macfarlane, artist Stanley Donwood, and writer Dan

Richards travel to Dorset, near the south coast of England, to

explore a famed "hollowed way"—a path used by walkers and

riders for so many centuries that it has become worn far down

into the soft golden bedrock of the region.

In Ness, Macfarlane and Donwood create a modern myth about

Orford Ness, the ten-mile-long shingle spit that lies off the coast

of East Anglia, which the British government used for decades to

conduct secret weapons tests.

From the author of The California Field Atlas comes a major

work that not only guides readers through the Golden State's

forested lands, but also presents a profoundly original vision of

nature in the twenty-first century.

The Forests of California features an abundance of Obi

Kaufmann's signature watercolor maps and trail paintings,

weaving them into an expansive and accessible exploration of

the biodiversity that defines California in the global

imagination. Expanding on the style of the Field Atlas,

Kaufmann tells an epic story that spans millions of years,

nearly one hundred species of trees, and an astonishing

richness of ecosystems.

Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed) - Oct. 13

By Robin Wall Kimmerer

Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer,

the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor

of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates

the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages.

Beautifully bound in stamped linen cloth with a bookmark

ribbon and a deckled edge, this edition features five

brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate

Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the

experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America

have cherished about the book--gentle, simple, tactile,

beautiful, even sacred--and offer an edition that will inspire

readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about

scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings

of plants.

The Forests of California (Heyday)

Available Now

By Obi Kaufmann

Metazoa (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) - Nov.10

By Peter Godfrey-Smith

The scuba-diving philosopher who wrote Other Minds explores

the origins of animal consciousness.

Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical

reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals

that even in our high-tech, AI-driven times, there is no

understanding our minds without understanding nerves,

muscles, and active bodies. The story that results is as rich and

vibrant as life itself.

World of Wonders (Milkweed) - Available Now

By Aimee Nezhukumatathil,

Fumi Nakamura (Illustrator)

From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil

comes a debut work of nonfiction--a collection of essays about

the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach,

support, and inspire us.

As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the

grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina

mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of

Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the

chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter

where she was transplanted--no matter how awkward the fit or

forbidding the landscape--she was able to turn to our world's

fierce and funny creatures for guidance.

Animalia (Duke Univ. Press) - Nov. 6

By Antoinette Burton (Editor), Renisa Mawani

(Editor)

From yaks and vultures to whales and platypuses, animals have

played central roles in the history of British imperial control. The

contributors to Animalia analyze twenty-six animals--domestic,

feral, predatory, and mythical--whose relationship to imperial

authorities and settler colonists reveals how the presumed racial

supremacy of Europeans underwrote the history of Western

imperialism.

Absolutely fascinating.

Vesper Flights (Grove) - Available Now

By Helen Macdonald

In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of

her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging

from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of

farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall

asleep.

Few writers capture so well in words a sense of rapt observation,

fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense

of the world around us.

Iwígara (Timber Press) - Available Now

By Enrique Salmón

The belief that all life-forms are interconnected and share the

same breath—known in the Rarámuri tribe as iwígara—has

resulted in a treasury of knowledge about the natural world,

passed down for millennia by native cultures. Ethnobotanist

Enrique Salmón builds on this concept of connection and

highlights 80 plants revered by North America’s indigenous

peoples. Salmón teaches us the ways plants are used as food

and medicine, the details of their identification and harvest,

their important health benefits, plus their role in traditional

stories and myths. natural world.

Desert Oracle (MCD) - Dec. 8

By Ken Layne

For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-

mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only

by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the

occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-

page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word

spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a

radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—

and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—

ithas been bound between two hard covers and is available to you.

Black Nature (Univ. of Georgia Press)

Available Now

By Camille R. Dungy (Editor)

Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing

by African American poets, a genre that until now has not

commonly been counted as one in which African American

poets have participated.

Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments

of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as

political, historical, or protest poetry--anything but nature

poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what

constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral

or the wild.

Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that

provide unique perspectives on American social and literary

history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African

American poetics. This collection features major writers such

as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa,

Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda

Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as

newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and

Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery,

Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts

Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century

African American poetic movements.

Timefulness (Princeton Univ. Press

Available Now

By Marcia Bjornerud

Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales of our

planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of

the environmental problems we are creating. The lifespan of Earth

can seem unfathomable compared to the brevity of human

existence, but this view of time denies our deep roots in Earth's

history--and the magnitude of our effects on the planet. Timefulness

reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and

conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we

need for a more sustainable future.

Epidemics and Society (Yale Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Frank M. Snowden

This sweeping exploration of the impact of epidemic diseases

looks at how mass infectious outbreaks have shaped society, from

the Black Death to today, and in a new preface addresses the

global threat of COVID-19. In a clear and accessible style, Frank

M. Snowden reveals the ways that diseases have not only

influenced medical science and public health, but also

transformed the arts, religion, intellectual history, and warfare.

Named by the World Economic Forum as the #1 book to read for

context on the coronavirus outbreak

Constructing the Outbreak (Univ. of Massachusetts

Press) - Available Now

By Katherine A. Foss

Demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates

more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices,

political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also

shape the message.

Katherine A. Foss discusses how shifts in journalism and medicine

influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of

different disease outbreaks. Each case study highlights facets of

this interplay, delving into topics such as colonization, tourism,

war, and politics.

Blooming Flowers (Yale Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Kasia Boddy

An evocative and richly illustrated exploration of flowers and

how, over the centuries, they have given us so much sustenance,

meaning, and pleasure. In vibrant detail and drawing on a rich

array of illustrations, Boddy considers how the sunflower, poppy,

rose, lily—and many others—have given rise to meaning, value,

and inspiration throughout history, and why they are integral to

so many different cultures.

This is a delightfully unruly book, and extends far beyond the

garden.

Physical Sciences / Technology

The Alignment Problem (W. W. Norton) - Oct. 6

By Brian Christian

Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective

that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us—and to make

decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years

have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning

advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end,

do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially

existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment

problem.

In Brian Christian’s new book, we meet the alignment problem’s

“first-responders,” and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before

our hands are completely off the wheel.

Artificial Whiteness (Columbia Univ. Press) - Nov. 17

By Yarden Katz

Yarden Katz reveals the ideology embedded in the concept of

artificial intelligence, contending that it both serves and mimics

the logic of white supremacy. Bringing together theories of

whiteness and race in the humanities and social sciences with a

deep understanding of the history and practice of science and

computing, Artificial Whiteness is an incisive, urgent critique of

the uses of AI as a political tool to uphold social hierarchies.

In Analogia, technology historian George Dyson presents a look

back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution—and

an unsettling vision of what comes next.

he convergence of a startling historical archaeology with Dyson’s

unusual personal story—set alternately in the rarified world of

cutting-edge physics and computer science, in Princeton, and in

the rainforest of the Northwest Coast—leads to a prophetic vision

of an analog revolution already under way. We are, Dyson

reveals, on the cusp of a new moment in human history, driven by

a generation of machines whose powers are beyond

programmable control.

American Lucifers (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

Available Now

By Jeremy Zallen

The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and

consume the changing means of illumination over the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery,

industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often

hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and

enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children

and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the

streetlamp-lit poor as seriously as those of inventors and

businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of

artificial light be understood.

Analogia (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Available Now

By George Dyson

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color

are embedded in search engine results and algorithms.

Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of

how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the

21st century.

Algorithms of Oppression (New York Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Safiya Umoja Noble

Beyond the Finish Line (McGill-Queens Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Jonathan Finn

In this fascinating journey through the history of the photo-finish

in sports, Jonathan Finn shows how innovation was animated by

a drive for ever more precise tools and a quest for perfect

measurement. As he traces the technological developments

inspired by this crusade --from the evolution of the still camera to

movie cameras, ultimately leading to complex contemporary

photo-finish systems -- Finn uncovers the social implications of

adopting and contesting the photograph as evidence in sport.

Performing Arts

Wagnerism (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Available Now

By Alex Ross

For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in

the history of music. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the

magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A

pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do

battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers have come to

expect, Ross’ covers a lot of ground across artistic disciplines, from

the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick,

from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of

W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now.

Dolly Parton, Songteller (Chronicle) - Nov. 17

By Dolly Parton, Robert K. Oermann

As told by Dolly Parton in her own inimitable words, explore the

songs that have defined her journey. Illustrated throughout with

previously unpublished images from Dolly Parton's personal and

business archives.

Mining over 60 years of songwriting, Dolly Parton highlights 175

of her songs and brings readers behind the lyrics.

African American women have played a pivotal part in rock

and roll--from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping

hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite

this, black women's importance to the music's history has been

diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male

enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws

on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and

interviews to document the history of African American women

in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s.

The Meaning of Soul (Duke Univ. Press)

Available Now

By Emily J. Lordi

Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously

elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a

cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through

musical practices--inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs,

and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as

Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye,

Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship

and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril

and promise.

Black Diamond Queens (Duke Univ. Press)

Oct. 30

By Maureen Mahon

There are few creative acts more mysterious and magical than

writing a song. But what if the goal wasn't so mysterious and

was actually achievable for anyone who wants to experience

more magic and creativity in their life? That's something that

anyone will be inspired to do after reading Jeff Tweedy's How

to Write One Song.

Tweedy brings readers into the intimate process of writing one

song—lyrics, music, and putting it all together—and accesses

the deep sense of wonder that remains at the heart of this

curious, yet incredibly fulfilling, artistic act.

How to Write One Song (Dutton) - Oct. 13

By Jeff Tweedy

Hawkwind (Strange Attractor) - Oct. 13

By Joe Banks

Fifty years on from when it first formed, the English rock band

Hawkwind continues to inspire devotion from fans around the

world. Its influence reaches across the spectrum of alternative

music, from psychedelia, prog, and punk, through industrial,

electronica, and stoner rock. Hawkwind has been variously, if

erroneously, positioned as the heir to both Pink Floyd and the

Velvet Underground, and as Britain's answer to the Grateful

Dead and Krautrock. It has defined a genre--space rock--while

operating on a frequency that's uniquely its own.