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.

From the #1 bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry—a contagiously funny, heartwarming, shocking, twisted, and absolutely magical collection. True stories that give voice to the thoughts we all have but dare not mention.

It begins with a Tang Instant Breakfast Drink television commercial when Augusten was seven. Then there is the contest of wills with the deranged cleaning lady. The execution of a rodent carried out with military precision and utter horror. Telemarketing revenge. Dating an undertaker. And much more.

A collection of true stories that are universal in their appeal, yet unabashedly intimate and very funny.

A candid and captivating memoir from award-winning and beloved actress Kelly Bishop, spanning her six decades in show business from Broadway to Hollywood with A Chorus Line, Dirty Dancing, Gilmore Girls, and much more.

Kelly Bishop’s long, storied career has been defined by landmark achievements, from winning a Tony Award for her turn in the original Broadway cast of A Chorus Line to her memorable performance as Jennifer Grey’s mother in Dirty Dancing. But it is probably her iconic role as matriarch Emily in the modern classic Gilmore Girls that cemented her legacy. Now, Bishop reflects on her remarkable life and looks towards the future with The Third Gilmore Girl. She shares some of her greatest stories and the life lessons she’s learned on her journey. From her early transition from dance to drama, to marrying young to a compulsive gambler, to the losses and achievements she experienced—among them marching for women’s rights and losing her second husband to cancer—Bishop offers a rich, genuine celebration of her life. Full of witty insights and featuring a special collection of personal and professional photographs, The Third Gilmore Girl is a warm, unapologetic, and spirited memoir from a woman who has left indelible impressions on her audiences for decades and has no plans on slowing down.

What do you want, when no one is watching?
What do you want, when the lights are off?
What do you want, when you are anonymous?

When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet for many reasons – some complicated, some not – so many of us don't talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key. Here's the key.

In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous letter). Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous.

Better is a gutsy, riveting memoir that intimately explores suicide, its legacy in families, and the often cyclical, crooked path of recovery. Arianna Rebolini delves into the profound questions surrounding the choice of death by one's own hands and the struggle to understand the desire to die.

After a decade of therapy and overcoming suicidal depression, Arianna was "better." Her life was seemingly on track with the publication of her first book, a fulfilling job, and the joy of motherhood. Yet, the dark pull of suicide lingered. In a poignant moment, as her young son played, she found herself contemplating the end of her life.

The narrative weaves through Arianna's month-long crisis as a new mother with decades of family history. From her childhood cries for help to the fear of passing the shadow of suicide to her son, Arianna seeks to understand the mechanisms of suicidality. Her journey includes an exploration of the writings of famous individuals who took their own lives, as she searches for insights into the fateful moment of committing to the act of suicide—or the harrowing realization that it cannot be undone.

When her brother faces a similar battle, Arianna confronts the limits of her insights into depression's grip. Better is a harrowing intellectual and emotional odyssey marked by clarity and compassion, a tour through the seductive darkness of death, and a life-affirming testament to the quest for getting better for good.

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin’s Lament, Feh: A Memoir is an exploration of Shalom Auslander's attempt to escape the biblical story he was raised on and his struggle to construct a new narrative for himself and his family. Raised in a dysfunctional family within the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York, Auslander recounts his life as the son of an alcoholic father, a guilt-wielding mother, and a violent, overbearing God.

Now, reaching middle age, he suspects that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't easily escape: a story. The story. Implanted in him at an early age, it told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting—a narrative we have all been told for thousands of years by both the religious and secular worlds, a story called “Feh”, Yiddish for “Yuck.”

Feh follows Auslander's midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari, and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles. Can he move from Feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that? Auslander's recounting of his attempt to exorcise the story he was raised with—before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him—isn't sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt, and fearlessly provocative.

Tattoos on the Heart meets Ghettoside in this gripping true story about a botched gang murder set in the invisible economy of LA's immigrant street vendors.

Baby-faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to build a reputation with local LA gang, the Columbia Lil Cycos -- so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang’s shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a baby instead. The imprisoned overlords who rule their world must be placated so the gang lures Giovanni across the border and plots his disposal. But, in turn, the gang botches Giovanni's killing. And so, incredibly, Giovanni rises from the dead, determined to both seek redemption for his unforgivable crime and take down the whole gang who drove him to do it.

The Rent Collectors is filled with ruthless gang members, tattoo artists, a legendary FBI investigator, a girl who risks her life to serve as a witness, all in service to the story of the irrationally courageous immigrant whose ethical stance triggers these incredible events.

Jesse Katz has built a teeth clenching and breathless narrative that explicates the difficult and proud lives of undocumented black market workers who are being exploited both by the gangs and by the city of LA -- in other words, by two sets of rent collectors.

No One Talks About This Stuff is a support group for almost-parents. It's a place to share their journeys of loss and limbo, to confront social pressure, and to find courage in the darkness of tragedies which happen every day yet are brushed under the carpet.

We hear from a stepmother who wrestles with infertility. A husband and wife each tell their experience of losing their baby. A lesbian comes of age at a time when gay people rarely become parents. A father finds loss to be his unlikely superpower. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder impacts a person’s choices about having a family. A black woman unpacks ancestral shame while finding renewed purpose.

And each person shares how they lived through it. This captivatingly beautiful, profound, and honest anthology opens a much-needed conversation about society, family, and honoring the missing children we will never forget.

A National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honoree delivers her first work of nonfiction: a compulsively readable, genre-bending story of finding her missing birth mother and, along the way, learning the priceless power of self-knowledge.

In 2020, Tracy O'Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship, thirtysomething, and in a world playing by new rules, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious birth mother she'd never met--may be dying somewhere in South Korea. Hiring a grizzled private investigator, O'Neill took his suggested homework to heart and, when he disappeared before the job was done, picked up the trail, becoming her own hell-bent detective.

Covid could have already gotten to her mother. Yet the promise of whom and what she might discover--the possibility that her biological mother was her own kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own--was too tempting. Written like a mystery novel, Woman of Interest is a tale of self-discovery, featuring a femme fatale of unique proportions, a former CIA operative with a criminal record, and a dogged investigator of radical connections outside the nuclear family and fugitivity from convention.

O'Neill gorgeously bends the detective genre to her own will as a writer, stepping out of the shadows of her own self-conception to illuminate the hope-filled woman of interest she is becoming.

Birds Aren't Real presents what is claimed to be the true story of a vast conspiracy involving mass avian murder and the implementation of a large-scale surveillance campaign in US history.

The book asks a provocative question: Have you ever seen a baby pigeon? It points out the curious absence of baby pigeons from our everyday sights, suggesting that pigeons, and indeed all birds, come out of a factory as fully grown adults. This, the authors argue, is one of the many pieces of evidence for the bird drone surveillance crisis they allege began in 1959, when the Deep State is said to have eradicated over 12 billion birds and replaced them with drone replicas designed to spy on citizens.

Authors Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos act as whistleblowers, tracing the roots of what they describe as a political conspiracy so expansive that it might be mistaken for an elaborate hoax. They present themselves as Bird Truthers, risking everything to bring to light information about the surveillance crisis, its proliferation, and the individuals today who are striving to spread awareness and restore America to the ideal of freedom. The book is replete with illustrations, activities, and purportedly leaked classified documents meant to persuade even the most skeptical readers of the authors' claims.

The manifesto is urgent, the cause is pressing, and the question lingers: Will you stand and fight before it's too late?

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist reveals biology's most transformative achievements in decades--a narrative that reads like a Double Helix for the dawning of the RNA age.

Delving into the heart of cellular function and the role of RNA in genetic expression, The Catalyst invites readers on a journey through the microscopic world where life's deepest secrets are being unlocked. Tom Cech masterfully intertwines the story of scientific discovery with the broader implications of RNA research, which has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of health and disease.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Pulitzer Prize finalist for Watergate comes the most up-to-date and complete account of D-Day—the largest seaborne invasion in history and the moment that secured the Allied victory in World War II.

D-Day is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military and human triumphs. Though the full campaign lasted just over a month, the surprise landing of over 150,000 Allied troops on the morning of June 6, 1944, is understood to be the moment that turned the tide for the Allied forces and ultimately led to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II.

Now, a new book from bestselling author and historian Garrett M. Graff explores the full impact of this world-changing event—from the secret creation of landing plans by top government and military officials and organization of troops, to the moment the boat doors opened to reveal the beach where men fought for their lives and the future of the free world.

Fascinating, action-packed, and filled with impressive detail, When the Sea Came Alive captures a human drama like no other, and offers a fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.

Searching, propulsive, and deeply spiritual, Accordion Eulogies is an odyssey to repair a severed family lineage, told through the surprising history of a musical instrument.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez never knew his grandfather. Stories swirled around this mythologized, larger-than-life figure: That he had abandoned his family, and had possibly done something awful that put a curse on his descendants. About his grandfather, young Noé was sure of only one thing: That he had played the accordion.

Now an adult, reckoning with the legacy of silence surrounding his family’s migration from Mexico, Álvarez resolves both to take up the instrument and to journey into Mexico to discover the grandfather he never knew. Álvarez travels across the US with his accordion, meeting makers and players in cities that range from San Antonio to Boston. He uncovers the story of an instrument that’s been central to classic American genres, but also played a critical role in indigenous Mexican history.

Like the accordion itself, Álvarez feels trapped between his roots in Mexico and the U.S. As he tries to make sense of his place in the world—as a father, a son, a musician—he gets closer to uncovering the mystery of his origins.

An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Hey girlfriend I got a proposition, goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want. Kathleen Hanna's rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 90s and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like "Rebel Girl" and "Double Dare Ya" are more powerful than ever.

But where did this transformative voice come from? In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes clear, being in a "girl band," especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her—including with her bandmates, Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Johanna Fateman; her friendships with Kurt Cobain and Ian MacKaye; and her introduction to Joan Jett— were all a testament to how the punk world could nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin.

She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how it continues to fuel her revolutionary art and music.

George Stephanopoulos, former senior advisor to President Clinton and for more than 20 years anchor of This Week and co-anchor of Good Morning America, recounts the crises that decided the course of history, from the place 12 presidents made their highest-pressure decisions: the White House Situation Room. No room better defines American power and its role in the world than the White House Situation Room. And yet, none is more shrouded in secrecy and mystery. Created under President Kennedy, the Sit Room has been the epicenter of crisis management for presidents for more than six decades. Time and again, the decisions made within the Sit Room complex affect the lives of every person on this planet.

Detailing close calls made and disasters narrowly averted, THE SITUATION ROOM will take readers through dramatic turning points in a dozen presidential administrations, including:

• Incredible minute-by-minute transcripts from the Sit Room after both Presidents Kennedy and Reagan were shot
• The shocking moment when Henry Kissinger raised the military alert level to DEFCON III while President Nixon was drunk in the White House residence
• The extraordinary scene when President Carter asked for help from secret government psychics to rescue American hostages in Iran
• A vivid retelling of the harrowing hours during the 9/11 attack
• New details from Obama administration officials leading up to the raid on Osama Bin Laden
• And a first-ever account of January 6th from the staff inside the Sit Room

THE SITUATION ROOM is the definitive, past-the-security-clearance look at the room where it happened, and the people—the famous and those you've never heard of—who have made history within its walls.

First Love: Essays on Friendship is a bracing, intimate essay collection that delves into the power and complexity of female friendship in the wake of violence. Authored by the critically acclaimed Lilly Dancyger, this book emerges from the tragic murder of her cousin Sabina, which profoundly altered her understanding of womanhood and rippled through her closest friendships.

The loss of Sabina, her first love, serves as a catalyst for a bold and refreshing exploration of the connections between women. Dancyger examines the intensity of adolescent best friendships, fluid sexuality, mothering, and chosen family. Each essay is deeply rooted in a significant female friendship from her life, reaching outwards to challenge cultural assumptions about feminine identity and desire, and the ways in which women support one another in a world that often seeks to diminish them.

With seamless integration of personal anecdotes, literature, and pop culture references—from fairytales and true crime to the works of Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath, and even the 'sad girls' of Tumblr—Dancyger's essays weave a multifaceted narrative of a life as told through the lens of friendships. This collection is a profound exploration of the essence of loving one another and elevates friendships to the status of love stories, offering them the deep consideration traditionally reserved for romantic relationships.

First Love argues that although friendship cannot shield us from the dangers of the world, the love found within it is always worth the risk. In times of tragedy, Dancyger reminds us, it is our friends who provide the support necessary for survival. Through First Love, the invaluable bonds of friendship are celebrated and given their rightful recognition.

Why grassroots data activists in Latin America count feminicide—and how this vital social justice work challenges mainstream data science. What isn’t counted doesn’t count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work.

Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D’Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account. Individuals, researchers, and journalists—these data activists scour news sources to assemble spreadsheets and databases of women killed by gender-related violence, then circulate those data in a variety of creative and political forms. Their work reveals the potential of restorative/transformative data science—the use of systematic information to, first, heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, envision and work toward the world in which such violence has been eliminated.

Specifically, D’Ignazio explores the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification—reducing complex social phenomena to convenient, sortable, aggregable forms—when the goal is nothing short of the elimination of gender-related violence. Counting Feminicide showcases the incredible power of data feminism in practice, in which each murdered woman or girl counts, and, in being counted, joins a collective demand for the restoration of rights and a transformation of the gendered order of the world.

Why grassroots data activists in Latin America count feminicide—and how this vital social justice work challenges mainstream data science. What isn’t counted doesn’t count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women.

Against this failure, Counting Feminicide brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D’Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account.

Individuals, researchers, and journalists—these data activists scour news sources to assemble spreadsheets and databases of women killed by gender-related violence, then circulate those data in a variety of creative and political forms. Their work reveals the potential of restorative/transformative data science—the use of systematic information to, first, heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, envision and work toward the world in which such violence has been eliminated.

Specifically, D’Ignazio explores the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification—reducing complex social phenomena to convenient, sortable, aggregable forms—when the goal is nothing short of the elimination of gender-related violence. Counting Feminicide showcases the incredible power of data feminism in practice, in which each murdered woman or girl counts, and, in being counted, joins a collective demand for the restoration of rights and a transformation of the gendered order of the world.

Mean Boys: A Personal History delves into the complex world of male friendships and rivalries, exploring how they shape our identities and experiences. Geoffrey Mak shares his personal journey, examining the intricate dynamics of competition and camaraderie among men.

Through a series of vivid anecdotes and reflective insights, Mak reveals the often unspoken rules that govern male relationships. He sheds light on the challenges and triumphs that come with navigating these bonds, offering a candid look at the role of masculinity in modern society.

This memoir is not just a tale of personal growth but a broader commentary on the societal expectations placed on men. Mak's narrative is both thought-provoking and relatable, as he invites readers to reconsider what it means to be a 'mean boy' in today's world.

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile, brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a slow-burning crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston—Fort Sumter.

Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, inflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.

Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.

From the author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL comes a prose collection like no other, where different styles of writing and different spaces of experience create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. Danielle Dutton's endlessly inventive books have been praised as "strikingly smart and daringly feminist" (Jenny Offill), "brilliantly odd" (The Irish Independent), and "beguiling" (The Wall Street Journal).

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, four distinct sections operate like Joseph Cornell boxes, each offering its own vibrant proposal for what contemporary writing might be. "Prairie" is a cycle of stories set in the Midwest, a surreal landscape of wildflowers, ominous rivers, violence, virtual reality, art, fear, and loss. The conceptual work in "Dresses" reconsiders the canon through the lens of its garb, like a wild literary closet. "Art" turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction relate to one another, a theme central to the whole book. The final section, "Other," collects pieces in irregular ("other") forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious or heartbreaking for reasons as inexplicable as the abiding beauty and strangeness of all of Dutton's work.

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America's most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. In his thirties, he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.

Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved. The Goodwins' last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.

Their expedition gave Dick's last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.

Briefly Perfectly Human is a deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more fulfilling, and authentic lives, from America’s most visible death doula.

For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.

Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.

This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.

Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls “death embrace.” Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,” Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”

Committed is a raw and masterful memoir that navigates the complexities of becoming a woman and going mad—and the intersection of both. Suzanne Scanlon's journey begins in the 90s as a student at Barnard College, where the loss of her mother sends her adrift in a sea of grief and inexpressible pain. This turmoil leads to a suicide attempt that results in her admission to the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Spanning nearly three years and a myriad of experimental treatments, Suzanne eventually leaves the institute on unsteady footing. The following decades mark her path to recovery and a profound understanding of her suffering as part of a broader narrative—a lineage of women whose intricate and often silenced stories of self-realization are dismissed as mere “crazy chick” and “madwoman” clichés.

Through her personal odyssey, Suzanne discovers a resonating thrill in the works of influential women writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, and Shulamith Firestone. Committed is both a tale of personal discovery and a call to reclaim the archetype of the madwoman, celebrating it as a source of insight and a means to transcendence.

From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, Knife is a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.

Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

HOW THE DISENCHANTMENT OF EMPIRE LED TO CLIMATE CHANGE.

While industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand with racial capitalism in the age of empires: a terrestrial paradise was to be achieved through accumulation and the ravaging of nature.

Far from a defence of religion, The States of the Earth argues that phenomena such as evangelism and political Islam are best understood as products of empire and secularization. In a world where material technology was considered divine, religious and secular forces both tried to achieve Heaven on Earth by destroying Earth itself.

All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural critic Becca Rothfeld's soul cry for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, ravishment, ugliness, and unbound truth in aesthetics, whether we're talking about literature, criticism, or design. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess; alas, in the contemporary Anglophone West, we've got it flipped.

The gap between rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, yawns hideously wide, while we stagnate in a cultural equality that imposes restraint. This collection of essays ranges from topics such as Sally Rooney, sadomasochism, and women who wait, making a glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in culture in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion.

Being Reflected Upon is a memoir in verse from one of America's legendary poets. Alice Notley delivers a collection that serves as a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics. The book is a reflective journey through Notley's Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, a period that encapsulates her experiences with illness and recovery following her first breast cancer treatment.

As Notley penned these poems, she discovered connections between events of this period and those from previous decades. The narrative moves from reminiscences of her mother and childhood in California to meditations on illness and recovery. It also encompasses various poetic adventures in cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh.

The collection is deeply concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and the dead. The term "stream-of-consciousness" is not just a stylistic description but also teases out a lived physics or philosophy that Notley explores through her work.

Death Styles is a poignant exploration of the intertwining of style and survival in the face of profound loss. Following her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, author Joyelle McSweeney embarks on a personal challenge to write a poem each day, using a single icon as a creative spark. From the unexpected muses like River Phoenix and Mary Magdalene to a backyard skunk, McSweeney delves deep into each subject, pushing through the exhaustion of grief.

With its candid and mesmerizing lyrics, Death Styles takes readers on a journey through the contradictory forces of survival and mourning. It is a testament to the power of poetic expression to navigate through life's most challenging moments, discovering hope in the act of creation and the resilience to step out of the shadows of death.

From the acclaimed and bestselling writer Nicholson Baker, a deeply personal account of his journey learning how to paint for the first time, and a meditation on the power of art in times of crisis.

Nicholson Baker wanted to learn how to paint. In 2019, after years of researching and writing about secret and often horrible government programs for his book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, he was wiped out. Having been steeped for so long in the history of war, violence, and conspiracy, the world had lost some of its brightness. Photography had scratched a creative itch for years, but now, Baker was desperate to squeeze more out of what he saw – he wanted to live, slowly, through the snatches of life he was recording in photos. Maybe, he thought, he could learn to paint? The idea consumed him, but he was nagged by an even more debilitating doubt: What if he failed?

Finding a Likeness is Baker's record of the years he worked to improve his artistic skills, beginning with his first, humble attempts to set paintbrush to paper. Driven by a natural curiosity and a strong desire to paint faces, clouds, and landscapes that actually resemble faces, clouds, and landscapes, he attends classes from local artists, watches YouTube tutorials, and seeks out master painters from the past and present in the hopes of uncovering their secrets. In his inimitable voice, Baker recounts the highs and lows of the creative process, reflects on memories of growing up as the son of two painters, and learns what it means to really see.

Filled with Baker's own art, as well as the work of artists from around the world, Finding a Likeness is a tender and deeply felt testimony to taking a step back and going back to basics. Baker improves dramatically in his craft, but as he considers what it means to try, fail, and try again, he discovers far more than what it takes to paint a cloud – rather, he shows us how to bear witness to the world, to the good and the bad, and to do it all justice with paper and ink.

Like Love: Essays and Conversations is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent.

The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.

Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

New and Selected Poems is an indispensable collection that spans more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from acclaimed poet Marie Howe. Characterized by "a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions," as noted by Matthew Zapruder in the New York Times Magazine, Howe's poetry effortlessly transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles.

This essential volume draws from each of Howe's four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood—and contains more than fifteen new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or contemplating aging while walking the dog, Howe is hailed as "a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy" by Dorianne Laux.

Sociopath: A Memoir is a compelling narrative that delves into the life of an individual grappling with sociopathy. Patric Gagne brings readers into her world, beginning with the realization in her early years that she was different from her peers. Emotions that come naturally to most—fear, guilt, empathy—were foreign to her, leaving her feeling an overwhelming sense of nothingness.

Struggling to conform to societal expectations, Patric resorted to theft, deceit, and occasional violence, all in an attempt to feel something. Her journey took a turn in college when she received confirmation of her long-held suspicion: she was a sociopath. Despite the bleak outlook presented by mental health professionals, who offered no treatment or hope for a 'normal' life, Patric's story takes a hopeful turn when she reconnects with a past love.

This reunion sparks a glimmer of possibility: if she is capable of love, perhaps she isn't the monster society makes sociopaths out to be. With new-found motivation, she sets out on a mission, with the support of her partner and a cast of intriguing characters, to challenge the stigma surrounding her diagnosis and advocate for the millions who, like her, are often misunderstood.

Sociopath: A Memoir is not just a tale of self-discovery and redemption; it's a testament to the power of love and the human spirit's capacity for change. It's a narrative that offers hope and understanding for those who have been labeled as different or difficult, and it encourages a deeper, more empathetic view of mental health.

Traces Of Enayat is a brilliant work of creative nonfiction from one of the preeminent poets of the Arab-speaking world, exploring the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature's tragic heroine. Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. In the following decades, it's as if Enayat never existed.

Years later, celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal discovers Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, leading her on a journey of reflection and rediscovery. Through interviews with family members and friends, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife, tracking down the places where Enayat spent her days. From the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal's own past, a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms.

Traces Of Enayat embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject, crafting a luminous biographical detective story.

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet is an intimate evocation of the glory of nature, our vexed position in the animal kingdom, and the difficulty of adoring what we destroy. In her first work of nonfiction, acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet offers a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of nonhuman beings.

Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, Millet offers intimate portraits of what she calls “the others”―the extraordinary animals with whom we still share the world, along with those already lost. Humans, too, fill this book, as Millet touches on the lives of her world-traveling parents, fascinating partners and friends, and colorful relatives, from diplomats to nut farmers―all figures in the complex tapestry each of us weaves with the surrounding world.

Written in the tradition of Annie Dillard or Robert Macfarlane, We Loved It All is an incantatory work that will appeal to anyone concerned about the future of life on earth―including our own.

You Are Here: Poetry In The Natural World, edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, is a singular collection of poems that reflects on our relationship to the natural world. This book brings together fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more.

Contrary to the traditional images evoked by "nature poetry," this collection presents an updated and vibrant perspective. Each poem interacts with the author's local landscape, whether it's the vast array of flora in a national park or a resilient tree blooming by a bus stop. These works offer an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us.

Through a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States, You Are Here challenges our preconceptions about nature and poetry. The collection is both joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, offering a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" signify in the current era, and inviting readers to experience both in a fresh, new light.

A new book from the acclaimed psychoanalytic writer Adam Phillips on giving up to feel more alive. To give up or not to give up? The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple. Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.

There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment—an attempt to make a different future. In On Giving Up, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive?

There's Always This Year is a poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent, and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America. While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan.

Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir. "Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jumpshot," Abdurraqib writes. "The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time."

There's Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It's about basketball in the way They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, Abdurraqib's exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

A Chance Meeting: Encounters Between American Writers And Artists by Rachel Cohen is a tapestry of creativity and circumstance, chronicling the many links and serendipitous meetings between giants of American culture. This inventive consideration of American culture evokes actual meetings between historical figures such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marcel Duchamp.

The narrative reveals how these figures met in ordinary ways—a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or simply standing near the drinks. They conversed for a few hours or for decades, and later, it seemed impossible that they could have missed each other. From a boyhood encounter between Henry James and Mathew Brady to the partnership of Avedon and James Baldwin, the book delves into the friendships, mentorships, and collaborations that sparked creativity and influenced American literature and art.

Cohen's work draws the reader into the mysterious process by which creativity has been sparked and passed on among iconoclastic American writers and artists, forming a long chain of influence stretching from the Civil War era through a century that profoundly affected contemporary culture.

The Black Box: Writing The Race is a profound exploration of how Black Americans have wielded the power of the written word to carve out their identity, defy the falsehoods of racism, and engage in robust debates within their own community throughout American history.

Derived from the renowned introductory course in African American Studies at Harvard, led by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this work narrates the journey of Black self-definition in America. It highlights the efforts of literary giants such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. These figures have utilized literature to create a "home" for Black individuals in a society marred by virulent racism.

At its core, the book celebrates the paradox that a community, initially shaped by oppressors to rationalize inhumane enslavement, has reinvented itself through literature. This transformation has been an act of defiance, leading to the emergence of a culture that is resilient, creative, and powerful, despite internal disagreements about the essence of being "Black" and the crafting of a past that fosters a more equitable future.

The Black Box: Writing The Race is an epic tale that documents how a multitude of creative minds have revealed and resisted the confines of the metaphorical "black box"—a label imposed upon them, often arbitrarily, since the nation's inception. This book captures the saga of a people's creation through their essays, speeches, novels, plays, and poems, chronicling their persistent struggle and triumph.

From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless.

Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau uses the lens of motherhood to craft a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice —and what it takes to find shelter. Lessons For Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises.

With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and ways her children may safely play in city parks while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community discovers the most intimate meanings of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black women/motherhood, and to the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature.

This innovative work of reportage and autobiography will appeal to readers of the bestseller All We Can Save and Joan Didion’s The White Album alike. Lessons For Survival stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.

How to think about the end of the world and what we must do to rebuild beyond that final moment, for readers of The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Extinction: A Radical History by Ashley Dawson. What are we to think as we face the sixth extinction moment? Kant's invitation to imagine an 'end of all things' no longer feels like just a thought experiment.

Philosopher Ben Ware argues that we must accept this without looking away. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we see our current reality. He argues that in order to map the catastrophic present, we will first need to take a tiger's leap into the past in order to construct a new 'dialectics of extinctions'.

On Extinction takes us on a breath-taking philosophical journey. Bringing dialectical thought to bear on one of the most pressing issues of our times, Ware argues that radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst, but rather with beginning again at the end: bringing to completion a mode of political and economic life which tethers us all–the yet to be born–to a sick but undying present. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need.

Marilynne Robinson, one of our greatest novelists and thinkers, presents a radiant, thrilling interpretation of the book of Genesis.

For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents, by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.

Both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture. Reading Genesis, which includes the original text, is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God's enduring covenant with humanity. This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God's abiding faith in Creation.

The Moon That Turns You Back is a new collection of poetry by Hala Alyan, the author of The Arsonists' City and The Twenty-Ninth Year. This collection explores the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family across different times and places. Alyan delves into the experiences of displacement and war, creating a tapestry of memories that interlink Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem.

The poems challenge the boundaries between space and time, intermingling daily life with the brutalities of geopolitical strife. Alyan examines the forces that can displace an individual from home and body, and conversely, the resilience and love that can anchor a person back into their essence and familial legacy. The work raises poignant questions about transformation and stability for those who have led a life in constant change.

Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression.

She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In this collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Morgan and her therapist, Morgan examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the ubiquity of a beauty culture that excludes Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche—and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.

An explosive, devastating debut book of poetry from the acclaimed author of The Boat. In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature—in a virtuosic array of forms and registers—before shattering the form itself.

In line with the works of Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this book is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression, and historical trauma.

But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one's home, country, culture, or language. And the complex violence—for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this—of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks, and camouflages, Le's poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

Ghost Dogs: On Killers And Kin is a collection of essays from the literary master and bestselling author of Townie, Andre Dubus III. In this work, Dubus reflects on a life filled with challenges, contradictions, and fulfillments. The narrative takes readers on an intimate journey through the author's personal experiences, thoughts, and emotions.