From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, a strikingly fresh cultural critic (Washington Post), comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between.

Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individual topics: Can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting?

In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend” columnist, Gay reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of her best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years.

Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more—with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay’s devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.

Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas is an insightful and perspective-shifting journey by celebrated journalist Omar Mouallem. In the book, Mouallem explores his personal connection with Islam, delving into its influence on his values, politics, and heritage. Having grown up in a Muslim household, he later adopted atheism and used his voice to critique organized religion. However, as a father, Mouallem is confronted with the challenges his children may face due to their heritage in an increasingly nativist Western world.

Mouallem embarks on a quest to uncover the untold history of Islam across the Americas, visiting thirteen unique mosques from California to Quebec, and Brazil to Canada's icy north. Through his travels, he encounters diverse Muslim communities, each providing varied perspectives on what it means to be Muslim in the Americas. This exploration reveals the significant role Islam has played in shaping the continent, influencing everything from industrialization to political shifts.

Ultimately, Praying to the West uncovers a hidden narrative of home and belonging. It highlights the ongoing struggle for acceptance in towns and cities across the Americas, advocating for a more inclusive future for all.

From the author of Ayesha at Last comes a sparkling new rom-com for fans of “You’ve Got Mail,” set in two competing halal restaurants. Sales are slow at Three Sisters Biryani Poutine, the only halal restaurant in the close-knit Golden Crescent neighbourhood. Hana waitresses there part time, but what she really wants is to tell stories on the radio. If she can just outshine her fellow intern at the city radio station, she may have a chance at landing a job.

In the meantime, Hana pours her thoughts and dreams into a podcast, where she forms a lively relationship with one of her listeners. But soon she’ll need all the support she can get: a new competing restaurant, a more upscale halal place, is about to open in the Golden Crescent, threatening Three Sisters. When her mysterious aunt and her teenage cousin arrive from India for a surprise visit, they draw Hana into a long-buried family secret.

A hate-motivated attack on their neighbourhood complicates the situation further, as does Hana’s growing attraction for Aydin, the young owner of the rival restaurant—who might not be a complete stranger after all. As life on the Golden Crescent unravels, Hana must learn to use her voice, draw on the strength of her community and decide what her future should be.

From New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones comes a novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American Indian experience. Fans of Jordan Peele and Tommy Orange will love this story as it follows the lives of four American Indian men and their families, all haunted by a disturbing, deadly event that took place in their youth.

Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.

In Reclaiming the Discarded, Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice.

Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation.

Insightful, surprising, and with ground-breaking revelations about our society, Everybody Lies exposes the secrets embedded in our internet searches, with a foreword by bestselling author Steven Pinker. While people often lie to friends, lovers, doctors, pollsters—and to themselves—in Internet searches, they confess their truths, revealing secrets about sexless marriages, mental health problems, and even racist views.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist and former Google data scientist, presents what might be the most important dataset ever collected. This unprecedented database of secrets offers astonishing insights into humankind. For example, anxiety does not increase after a terrorist attack, crime levels drop when a violent film is released, and racist searches are no higher in Republican areas than in Democrat ones.

Stephens-Davidowitz reveals information that can be used to change our culture and addresses the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our well-being—both emotional and physical. Everybody Lies is insightful, funny, and always surprising, exposing the biases and secrets deeply embedded within us, at a time when things are harder to predict than ever.

It seems like kids are always hearing stories about America in the "good old days." But, in fact, the 1950s and 1960s were not as carefree as they sometimes seem. Through fascinating stories, advertisements, facts, and photographs, Norman H. Finkelstein invites people of all generations to decide for themselves.

Explore the real history behind the myths and discover surprising truths about a pivotal era in American history.

"Let her prove herself worthy as a man." Newly knighted, Alanna of Trebond seeks adventure in the vast desert of Tortall. Captured by fierce desert dwellers, she is forced to prove herself in a duel to the death -- either she will be killed or she will be inducted into the tribe. Although she triumphs, dire challenges lie ahead.

As her mythic fate would have it, Alanna soon becomes the tribe's first female shaman -- despite the desert dwellers' grave fear of the foreign woman warrior. Alanna must fight to change the ancient tribal customs of the desert tribes -- for their sake and for the sake of all Tortall. Alanna's journey continues...

In the Company of Crows and Ravens explores the fascinating interactions between humans and these intelligent birds. From the cave walls at Lascaux to the last painting by Van Gogh, and from the works of Shakespeare to Mark Twain, there is clear evidence that crows and ravens have influenced human culture throughout history.

The authors, John Marzluff and Tony Angell, alongside Paul Ehrlich, delve into the remarkable ways that crows and humans interact, reflecting a process they describe as “cultural coevolution.” This book offers a challenging new perspective on the human-crow dynamic—a view that may change our thinking not only about crows but also about ourselves.

Featuring more than 100 original drawings, the book examines the significant ways in which crows have influenced human lives and vice versa. In the Company of Crows and Ravens illuminates the entwined histories of crows and people and concludes with an intriguing discussion on how our attitudes toward crows may affect our cultural trajectory.

In 1978, Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as one of the most liberating books of its time. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment.

By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is—just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.

Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.

These two essays, now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

Teresa Caldeira's pioneering study of fear, crime, and segregation in S�o Paulo poses essential questions about citizenship and urban change in contemporary democratic societies. Focusing on S�o Paulo, and using comparative data on Los Angeles, she identifies new patterns of segregation developing in these cities and suggests that these patterns are appearing in many metropolises.

The book provides a brilliant analysis of the dynamics of urban fear and its impact on the city's geography. Caldeira's work is recognized for its theoretical boldness, rich ethnography, and specific historical insights. It addresses the many challenges and obstacles that government and civil society face in new democracies, shedding light on authoritarian continuity under political reform.

Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap is a groundbreaking book by Peggy Orenstein that explores the decline in confidence among young girls as they reach adolescence.

Inspired by an American Association of University Women survey, Orenstein investigates the obstacles girls face in school, at home, and within our culture. Through months of observation and interviews with eighth-graders from diverse communities, she uncovers the causes behind traditional patterns of self-censorship and self-doubt.

Orenstein brings to life the struggles of real young women dealing with eating disorders, sexual harassment, and declining academic achievement. She skillfully highlights the adolescent roots of issues that remain significant throughout the lives of American women.

This book challenges us to rethink how we raise and educate girls, making it a must-read for anyone interested in empowerment and social change.

Cool. The concept has distinctly American qualities and it permeates almost every aspect of contemporary American culture. From Kool cigarettes and the Peanuts cartoon's Joe Cool to West Side Story ("Keep cool, boy.") and urban slang ("Be cool. Chill out."), the idea of cool, in its many manifestations, has seized a central place in our vocabulary.

Where did this preoccupation with cool come from? How was Victorian culture, seemingly so ensconced, replaced with the current emotional status quo? From whence came American Cool?

These are the questions Peter Stearns seeks to answer in this timely and engaging volume. American Cool focuses extensively on the transition decades, from the erosion of Victorianism in the 1920s to the solidification of a cool culture in the 1960s. Beyond describing the characteristics of the new directions and how they altered or amended earlier standards, the book seeks to explain why the change occurred. It then assesses some of the outcomes and longer-range consequences of this transformation.