Politics and Prose Presents

From a preeminent King scholar, the origin story of the man, minister, and civil rights hero who would lead the nation and change the world.We know who Martin Luther King, Jr. became, but who was he at the beginning of his life? How did his youth inform his outlook and his approach to activism and service?Before Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights leader, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and a global hero, he was an emotional boy, and a middling high school student devoted to fashion, dancing, and dating. As he headed to college, he left the Jim Crow South for a summer job that would test his oratory skills preaching in the tobacco fields of Connecticut and ultimately give him a sense of hope for a life of racial peace and harmony.Lerone A. Martin, Centennial Professor at Stanford University and the Faculty Director of the Martin Luther King Institute, traces the youthful roots of this legendary American to reveal the makings of a mighty force. Filled with revelations and written with compassion, Young King offers a new understanding of the influential preacher and activist’s emotional life, his youthful confusion about his future and career direction, his inspiration to fight for justice, his teenage missteps, and his first revelations of courage. As America undergoes another era of turmoil and change, this powerful biography offers encouragement for readers at a similar moment of life and provides an understanding of how greatness comes to light.Martin illuminates both King’s weaknesses and the social failures that shaped him, including the brutal racism he endured growing up. This vital and essential work is a testament to how history shapes a leader.Young King includes rarely seen black-and-white photographs of an adolescent MLK from his high school days and college years.Lerone A. Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor in Religious Studies and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. Dr. Martin is an internationally recognized award-winning author and public speaker. His writing and commentary have been featured on the Today show, the History Channel, PBS, NPR, and C-SPAN as well as in the New York Times and the Boston Globe. He currently serves as senior editor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project and was an adviser on the PBS documentary series Gospel. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.Martin is in conversation with Kim Martin, who joined KIPP DC in January 2025 as a Deputy Chief of School Transformation. In this role, she has focused on driving systemic change and enhancing educational outcomes across the network's schools. Kim is a native of Ohio and obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in English and History from Case Western Reserve University, followed by a Master’s degree in Secondary Education from John Carroll University. Once in DC, she furthered her academic pursuits with an Executive Master’s in Leadership and a Certificate in Leadership Coaching, both from Georgetown University and she culminated her educational journey with a Doctorate in Education from American University. Prior to joining KIPP DC, Kim held the position of Instructional Superintendent for DC Public Schools. With a career spanning over 18 years as a high school principal, Kim served as a principal in DC, Ohio, and Colorado. When Kim isn’t working, she can be found listening to live music at the VFW, where she serves on the Auxiliary, or she can be found cooking, hiking, or riding her Peloton. She also serves on the board of the Urban Adventure Squad, which promotes outdoor education for DC youth. Kim lives with her son and her husband in Takoma Park, MD with their two dogs, Rosco and Charlie Brown.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063340947?ic_referral=TAAIFWSzQT9qcNWDrQvJ3tlmM7yNfYa5hhCNfZPki18wM8eTK-ubhKf9sqWr5aJlBfixw39PzLMEWbCJCAoaIDuXd8TUGcpzQepC3tPjTjlj-Q0g468KsULekQpy2vp8uA9UbZ8

In the late 1970s, Ziad Idilbi, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, marries Salma, a Lebanese refugee escaping the war in Beirut. Resolving to start over for the very last time, the couple opens a corner store in Toledo, Ohio, across from the General Motors factory, where Toledo’s Arab community intermingles with the working class. Over the decades, whether it’s bigotry (pre- and post-9/11), financial ruin, or terminal illness, the Idilbis find themselves on life’s outskirts, attempting to build something new.Achingly poignant and slyly funny, the linked stories in Carryout follow the Idilbis and their children as they teeter on the brink of catastrophe. Walid, the youngest child of Ziad and Salma, navigates the heartbreaks of youth as well as the colorful characters who haunt his parents’ corner store. As he grows up into a writer, Walid’s gaze fixes on his father and the long shadow of displacement and occupation. Mustafa, the eldest son, is forever trying to outrun the disasters that seem to seek him out, while Nawal, the only daughter, is dumped by a friend and hatches a scheme to win her back. Unsure whether to run toward each other or away from each other, the characters in Dudar’s exquisite debut suffer the absurdities and indignities of life in America with wry obstinance and striking wisdom.Hasan Dudar is from Toledo, Ohio, and lives in Washington, DC. Carryout is his first book of fiction.Dudar is in conversation with Eugenia Kim, whose debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Washington Post Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick. Her second novel, The Kinship of Secrets, was a Library Reads best book of November and Hall of Fame list for 2018, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month/Literature and Fiction. She is a two-time Washington DC Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship recipient, and received fellowships at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere. Ms. Kim teaches fiction and nonfiction at Fairfield University’s MFA Creative Writing Program.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781685970611?ic_referral=9u6qLdWRRoRAygnPuBkKr_PxcCG-kRXfWzO4b-s47CkwM0pCe8kpFIFyThteVCm4CSGsilx7jTKfLSaLvoLUFRYJgrosz76zgF-F1hNLU0d19MoK9Gs0bNEyhRNONueK0iuOIxY

One of the premier French cult novels of the last thirty years, a tender and combative portrait of Paris’s queer rave scene in the 90s — for fans of Virginie Despentes and Gary Indiana.Louise is a woman in her early thirties with a record contract, colorful roommates, and a passionate, volatile relationship with the lesbian community around her. She used to be part of the French rock scene, having dated and collaborated with a man named Nikki who was a crucial figure in that milieu. But she has been out of that world for years, having switched from rock to rave culture and, concurrently, having started to date chiefly women. Her longest and most combative relationship in this scene has been with Alex, another woman who has established herself as a DJ and has recently started seeing a much younger woman named Inès.    One day, Louise receives a life-changing advance from a record label to produce her own electronic music. She struggles to handle the responsibility of professionalizing her lifestyle, one suffused with the omnidirectional drama of the women in her circle, and with her own equivocations about her role in it. They bar-crawl, watch MTV, go to each other’s sets, hook up, and do copious drugs.    Tension builds as Louise finds herself pulled toward multiple possible paths: forward in her career in the techno world; backward toward rock’n’roll, Nikki, and the life he represents; toward Alex again; and toward Inès, leading to a dangerous and ultimately devastating affair. Ann Scott portrays the Paris underground in all its beauty, ugliness, and pulpy grandeur, with the caustic voice of a born punk struggling to conform to the standards of a new, hungry world of anticonformists. Jonathan Woollen, translator of SUPERSTARS, is a French-to-English translator originally from North Carolina, currently based in Queens, NY and working in publishing. He previously led the in-store author event program at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC and served as music director of the radio station WXYC-Chapel Hill. His work has appeared in outlets including Electric Literature and Asymptote. Superstars is his first published book-length translation. Woollen will be in conversation with Lily Meyer, a translator, a critic, and the author of the novel Short War. She is also a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals, and her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781662603471?ic_referral=GqB_WqRU2BS4sMU4xebeM-Qq-7Cb4J4SeMBAEnVgd4UwMxThvwwPsDAkEgDv9jZkq_hpaFJoxNyEejKnu6dPcKOQvi2DH3HH7pruJBEQguqp3_e0cHJFv2lY2Pw9CJ0sH6Elu_o

At a time when America faces escalating racial tensions, the re-emergence of white nationalist movements, and growing threats to democracy, Ralph Remington's Penetrating Whiteness is an urgently needed clarion call.This powerful and timely collection of essays offers piercing insights into the realities of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the damaging legacy of Donald Trump's divisive presidency. With Trump mounting another run for the White House in 2024 amid the fallout of the January 6th insurrection, the national atmosphere is tinged with volatility and civil war rhetoric. Into this powder keg moment steps Remington, one of America's leading Black multi-sector voices on identity, social justice, and the path toward racial healing. His essays boldly confront the uncomfortable truths about the persisting toxicity of white supremacy and systemic discrimination.Ralph Remington is currently the Director of Cultural Affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. He has extensive professional experience in arts administration and government, and has experience as a director, actor, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. He is the founding producing artistic director of Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis where he is also a former City Council member.Prior to joining the City and County of San Francisco, he served as the Deputy Director for Arts and Culture for the City of Tempe, Arizona. In that role, he was responsible for Tempe Center for the Arts' comprehensive performance and visual art programming, as well as overseeing public art, the Tempe History Museum, arts engagement and municipal arts granting. He previously served as the former Western Regional Director and Assistant Executive Director for Actors Equity Association in Los Angeles. Prior to that, he was Director of Theater and Musical Theater at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) under President Obama in Washington, D.C, where he was the first Black man ever appointed. In 2010, he received the NEA Chairman's Distinguished Service Award. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Howard University. Ralph Remington currently resides in San Francisco, California.Remington is in conversation with Kristal Knight. With over a decade of political experience, Kristal has positioned herself as a premier political operative and commentator. She recently hosted a self-titled podcast with Newsweek discussing relevant political and cultural news and she actively provides commentary on Fox News, News Nation, MSNBC and other outlets. Currently she advises national brands on communication and political strategies. During the 2022 midterm elections she consulted with NAACP, Demos and Faith in Action providing political strategy and training. She served as the political director for Priorities USA during the 2020 cycle, then Biden’s then preferred super pac. As a seasoned campaign operative, Kristal has worked local, state and national elections to help elect progressive candidates across the country. Her most impactful work involved helping women in her home state run and get elected to office when she ran Emerge Tennessee. In 2019 she founded and currently chairs a voting rights non-profit, Organize Tennessee, which shows her commitment to democracy and her home state. She completed her master’s degree in International Public Policy from University College London (UCL) and graduated from Howard University with a BA in Journalism.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781963667349?ic_referral=Fb-C9haoo6zEsvdfgkTfFraKp2mDhAuErobXAVe47FIwM8xlso97BOpRjA-mV8IcNAqG7JfItoqKKaKBWuStp9gv3sHt_TsGIZo9PiQrdJPbYmajbzuvqB8twlburfYrvX_4NI4

The inspiring story of the Declaration of Independence—the first to take us from its drafting by Thomas Jefferson to today—charting the many lives of a document that captures the soul of America and has united generations around its defiant ideals, published for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.Quiet and politically untested, Thomas Jefferson was not the obvious choice to draft a statement of principles explaining why the American colonies were breaking ties with the King of England, but his soaring rhetoric would inspire generations of Americans to live up to the founders’ dreams. National Treasure is the gripping story of our most revered founding relic, as a physical object and a set of ideals that have made America what it is today. An award-winning historian, Dr. Michael Auslin take us from the boarding house in Philadelphia where Jefferson put quill to paper to the Declaration’s stealthy printing, covert signing, dissemination in the doldrums of the revolutionary war, and long, harrowing, and ultimately hallowed afterlife. We follow the parchment as it is hauled out of a soon-to-be-burning Washington in 1814 and see it hidden in a dank cellar, posted in classrooms, recited on village greens, printed on handkerchiefs, and used to sell insurance and bundle coal. An inspiration to both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in the Civil War, it has grown more important for each new generation. While FDR and Churchill celebrated its commitment to freedom from tyranny, the document itself was lowered into a bunker at Fort Knox. After the war, its precious ink fading, it was painstakingly preserved and enshrined.Through it all, Jefferson’s words have inspired implausibly varied causes, from suffragists, abolitionists and civil rights leaders to groups waging war on the US government. As Jefferson had hoped, the principles enshrined in the Declaration became a beacon to the world. But what lessons should we take from it today? Can this statement of ideals in whose name the signers pledged their lives and sacred honor bring a disparate nation together? As we gather to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founders’ bold experiment in democracy, Auslin reminds us that this enduring document was not just a call for freedom and equality but an eloquent statement of the principles that bind us together.Dr. Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Prior to that, he was a history professor at Yale. He wrote National Treasure as a Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center and an American Heritage Partners Research Fellow at the American Revolution Institute. A longtime contributor to The Wall Street Journal, he is passionately committed to civic education and actively involved in celebrating America’s 250th. He writes a Substack, The Patowmack Packet, on Washington, DC, past and present, and lives in Virginia.Auslin is in conversation with Dr. Colleen Shogan, the 11th Archivist of the United States, the first woman in American history appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). A noted author and political scientist, Colleen is deeply committed to civics education and prioritized sharing the records of the National Archives to a wider audience. Under her leadership, NARA launched numerous strategic initiatives to enhance services and make its holdings more accessible, both in-person and online, with the goal of cultivating public participation and strengthening our nation's democracy. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668214541?ic_referral=fz2I7a_mYpNbvCpCsSjVVC68tg8_uAHJGw-mqWUSEUMwMysPaKnqGOdXQFZdJZTr2hCvjo8wClIkUa1HfJ79FeSaV5oVtpglfTs_4H1GhrCvOrRV08vrjQbAvf7q0m4Q6-m8X4A

A dazzling novel in stories from a master of the form that follows the Royal family across generations of obsession, betrayal, and reinvention.For fans of Mary Gaitskill and Lauren Groff.In postwar Paris, a boy is seduced by his mysterious nanny into a world of adult secrets. In 1950s New York, a young caretaker struggles to protect her charge, a married woman weakened by a recent stroke, as new bruises appear each day on her body. In 1969, a fragile cousin wanders into the Royals’ jazz-soaked townhouse, where music, sex, and ruin intertwine. And at the heart of these stories is Rainey Royal herself, struggling to come of age in Greenwich Village, reinventing herself as an artist despite neglect, even cruelty in the tumultuous ’70s and ’80s. By turns shocking, erotic, and deeply humane, List of All Possible Desires is a haunting portrait of family and history—written with Landis’s trademark beauty and precision.This publication is joined by special expanded reissues of the other two books in the Rainey Royal Cycle, the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This and the novel Rainey Royal. Each book can be read on its own, but together they echo and amplify one another, creating a world of almost unbearable richness and intensity.Dylan Landis is the author of the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This, both in the Rainey Royal Cycle. Her work has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other anthologies. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction and lives in Los Angeles.Landis is in conversation with Susan Coll, the best-selling author of eight novels, including The Literati, Real Life and Other Fictions, Bookish People, and The Stager, a New York Times and Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice. Her novel Acceptance was made into a television movie starring Joan Cusack. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, Moment Magazine, NPR.org, and Atlantic.com. She is the events advisor at Politics and Prose Bookstore.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781641297325?ic_referral=dS62JmVd_p96gKjRgXHqGwFbqu5WwxbtaMWmOovt-8owM4caDfSb9AriIUZXgOAbKH67ZQQ7r0elZF6hhf1DdqVVPgEgpisGWIpPmILvvbelAuOQRqJqs_WZelU0QOkJylsQHG4

From the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father's expectations and a son's desiresOut of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft where he grew up and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother.Cal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son's long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn't the only one in the croft house keeping secrets. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it was before.John of John is a singular novel about duty, passion, and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that cements Douglas Stuart's reputation as one of our greatest working novelists.Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His New York Times-bestselling debut novel Shuggie Bain won prizes including the 2020 Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, among many others. His latest novel, Young Mungo, was a national bestseller, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and a finalist for the British Book Award, and one of the most highly acclaimed books of the year. His stories are published in the New Yorker and his essays have featured on Literary Hub. He lives in New York City.Stuart is in conversation with Aminatta Forna, the author of the novels The Window Seat, Happiness, Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love, and The Hired Man, as well as the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Forna's books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics at Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780802167194?ic_referral=E6-xI__h0b7_s_leBv5xNtH70Bqrxs7FVWzyIamvY28wM0Bcn0sT0HjHcZPc9oXYRyIJMq2aJuqJYEtrpa6X-kkYihHjiK67xBiB25kW4edHQ2dYMbO9y_za-32cqL2SrHoKYvY

From the beloved host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, moving tales of the marvelous animals who have crossed his path.Scott Simon’s household does not make much distinction between humans and other animals. Whether two legged or four, flesh-covered, fur-covered, feathered, or gilled—everyone is family. Today, the beloved radio host lives with the haiku-writing and absolument charmant French poodle Daisy; the daringly audacious foster cat Gato Blanco; and the energetic, cage-escaping hamster Bagel, who was almost Gato’s meal. And that’s just the start. In Ulysses S. Cat and Other Animals I Have Known, Simon warmly philosophizes on the unforgettable and utterly ordinary but enduring moments in the remarkable relationships between species, along with their joys, worries, love, and humor. From a cat who escaped the British Embassy—Simon had to promise she’d keep her accent—to street dogs during Sarajevo’s siege, to a series of beta fish all named Salman Fishdie, this enchanting work is a profusion of exuberant memories and musings on a life spent in animal company.Scott Simon hosts NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday and Up First, and is special contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning. A winner of Emmy and Peabody Awards, he is in the Radio Hall of Fame and the Illinois Lincoln Academy. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two daughters.Simon is in conversation with Robert Siegel, who, prior to his retirement, was the senior host of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine All Things Considered. With 40 years of experience working in radio news, Siegel hosted the country's most-listened-to, afternoon-drive-time news radio program and reported on stories and happenings all over the globe, and reported from a variety of locations across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. He signed off in his final broadcast of All Things Considered on January 5, 2018.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324117186?ic_referral=YflW7jg35cZMe_V70NjIbZRs-06CrZnPUqsLhWSKqhUwM_YXHicBk7h-WLjtfmPGXzompqvKadEm4rIa3H59h7Cz7qumir3NecoaqAU6q2kHmhpKieHjrDSt4veZNY0fjwAA0dA

How to do more with less and use limits to stimulate creativity, innovation, and collaboration, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of RangeWe live in a world that gives us seemingly infinite choices and values freedom above all else. The irony is that total freedom can be paralyzing, and unlimited resources don’t necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, overvaluing complete freedom can be disastrous for everything from starting a company to harnessing creativity to finding personal satisfaction.David Epstein argues that we can all benefit from narrowing our options. He dives into the science and practice of constraints, exploring exactly when and how guardrails can be beneficial, whether we’re working with limited resources or using self-imposed boundaries to tap unexpected wells of focus and innovation.Original, galvanizing, and deeply researched, Inside the Box tells absorbing stories of people and organizations that embraced constraints to transform themselves, and the world—as well as a few that struggled from a lack of limits. Epstein reveals how boundaries create breakthroughs, and how setting the right constraints can help you become the most creative, productive, and satisfied version of yourself.David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Rangeand the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master’s degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and an investigative reporter for ProPublica. He lives in Washington, DC.Epstein is in conversation with Daniel H. Pink, who is the author of five books, including To Sell Is Human and the long-running New York Times bestsellers A Whole New Mind and Drive. His books have been translated into thirty-three languages and have sold more than a million copies in the United States alone. Pink lives with his family in Washington, D.C.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593715710?ic_referral=JZ1D554z9s4xszev700h4qcl_E7p7CVD9KrVXRWxUsEwM3pZ1O10wDeXqk4R9UKq3DZjUuoyBSIRVwqC3sIrutT5BaKrrsmrmkWy8UkkvhHgl_KnRlplmYnlfnXMm6ylZnmF328

A history of the engineering marvels behind one of America's most innovative and beloved entertainment experiencesWhen Disneyland opened to the public in 1955, it demystified the hidden world of factory automation through its extraordinary new attractions. In this fascinating book, Roland Betancourt tells the story of how the visionary engineers and designers at Disney transformed the technologies of the postwar assembly line into an entertainment experience unlike anything the world had ever seen.Disneyland and the Rise of Automation traces the origins and evolution of these technical innovations during the theme park's first three decades in operation, exploring how engineers reimagined the systems and machines of industrial manufacturing and the military. The magnetic tape used to test ballistic missiles was repurposed to animate the talking macaws in the Enchanted Tiki Room. Programmable Logic Controllers, widely used on automotive assembly lines, brought to life the spectacular rides of the Matterhorn Bobsleds and Space Mountain. Betancourt shows how these and other attractions helped to allay fears about automation and job displacement in 1950s America. Along the way, he situates Disneyland's remarkable creations within a broader history of the technologies that increasingly order and construct the world around us, from the Fordist factory to artificial intelligence.Essential reading for anyone interested in engineering, corporate histories, or popular culture, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation invites us to consider how technology and the logic of automation become integrated into our lives through entertainment.Roland Betancourt is Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. His books include the prize-winning Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton) and Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy.Betancourt is in conversation with Bruce Holsinger, the author of Culpability, the 116th selection of Oprah’s Book Club and hailed by Oprah Winfrey as “a must-read for all generations.” His four previous novels include The Gifted School, a Book of the Month Club selection and winner of the the Colorado Book Award; The Displacements, the inaugural title in the United Nations Read for Action Book Club; and The Invention of Fire and A Burnable Book, historical novels set in medieval London. He’s also written many works of nonfiction, most recently On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and he has been profiled on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. He is the editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History as well as a frequent instructor at WriterHouse, a nonprofit in Charlottesville. He teaches English at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691255873?ic_referral=Cp0te3F19h0pap0AuB-MLHlGio11mdL5RFwPXyi1P1YwMz2PHmq8HO9DSd-AwHRoNC6Rh0ia9-5SxdvLKbgX-mdn7aik7_OEAkeOxKiN8dcRylkl8ki3Fl1ar7PjBJ9TokEkKGc

Following his captivating and popular A Hundred Lovers, Hofmann’s new collection is a queer coming-of-age, tinged with myth: poems that bring us into a fever dream of antiquity and desire at its limitsRecognizing the fragility of the body and soul in a world of threat, these startling poems stem from a central boyhood memory—the author’s near-drowning in a swimming pool on Crete. The observant child was troubled that none of the statues he saw had arms—and then it was his father’s arms lifting him from the water, saving his life.Hofmann balances elegance and brutality as he explores the fables of that childhood as well as the contours of sex and relationships in modern cities, in order to write his own personal history of love and survival: “Masculine arms lifted me. / Masculine arms held me while I slept.” The poems navigate risks, abandonments, and rescues, moving through a series of mazes that become a labyrinth of erotic awakening, with quick turns and dangerous diversions. In poems that alternately sear and crush delicately, we wander the ruins where the self is lost and broken and ultimately reclaimed: at the dark center, in the heart of the past.A triumphant follow-up to the fetching catalog of lovers in Hofmann’s last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.Richie Hofmann is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous books, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Yale Review.Master craftsperson, renowned feminist poet and activist Robin Becker explores a number of themes in this bountiful selection of new and selected poems.Midsummer Count collects the best work of Robin Becker, considered by many to be the foremost feminist poet of her generation. With selections from each of her previously published books and nearly thirty new poems, readers enter Becker’s lifelong exploration of childhood, animals, cherished places, complex friendships, and romantic intimacy. A life-affirming current yokes these narratives across time, even as a sister’s early suicide haunts the decades. In blank and free verse, in couplets, quatrains, and sonnets, the poet wrestles formal tensions, creating a present-day idiom for beauty, grief, and compassion. Lovers of Becker’s work and those new to it will find in Midsummer Count a master class by one of today’s most dynamic poets.Robin Becker is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including The Black Bear Inside Me and the Lambda Award winner All-American Girl, both published in the Pitt Poetry Series. A liberal arts research professor emerita in English and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she lives in central Pennsylvania and southwestern New Hampshire.PURCHASE BOOKS: https://politics-prose.com/richie-hofmann-robin-becker

Stretching from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing and melodious debut captures the spirit of China’s One-Child Generation as its characters navigate homes and cultures, hopes and contradictions, survival and resistance. These frank, tender, and playful stories offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today.The collection begins with “Scenes from Childhood,” in which a lonely, elderly woman in a dystopian reality remembers her grandfather’s village. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a politically divided couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco. “You Won’t Read This in the News” features four migrant workers during one night of petty theft and connection. In “Tough Egg,” a filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood. Other stories portray a photographer reuniting with her first love in Beijing; the historic White Paper protests that ended the zero-COVID policy; and generations into the future, a newly instated Memory Museum where two sensory architects share their vision for a utopian world.With daring political and creative commitment, The Memory Museum brims with joy even as Lin exposes the knife’s edge between powerlessness and agency, pain and intimacy, our memories and our futures.M Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023, and her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.'Lin is in conversation with Shannon Sanders, a Black writer and attorney and the author of the forthcoming linked short story collection Company. Sanders’s short fiction was the recipient of a 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and has appeared in several publications including One Story, TriQuarterly, Joyland, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and three sons.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644453858?ic_referral=93prCHPAWp4A6renEzx7LCA5iVLo4Td5J4USEJcG-9swM63bqrmnPr7Sb-azcbtYBi5ELqYw3JZdK_rQdxrp669MUiiBkCu905pCU8uKJx5nHJiCHcXRx0AeXmTP4Cr_pXgPpYQ

WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY TRIVEDI SCIENCE BOOK PRIZEAward-winning author and leading neurologist Masud Husain shares seven fascinating cases of brain disorders from across his career - and shows what they can teach us about our own brainsWhat makes us who we are?Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create, change and can even restore our identity. Husain introduces us to a man who ran out of words, a woman who lost all inhibitions and another who believed she was having an affair with the man who was really her husband.These compelling human dramas reveal how our identities are created by different functions within the brain. It will ignite new ideas about who we really are - and why we act in the ways we do.Masud Husain is Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford. Unusually, he works across departments of neuroscience, brain imaging and psychology to understand cognitive functions in both healthy people and patients with brain disorders. Masud is Editor-in-Chief of Brain, a leading international journal of neurology. First established in 1878, Brain is widely considered to be the most influential publication in the field, with its monthly editorials being a key source of authoritative perspectives. @MasudHusain masudhusain.org.Husain is in conversation with Dr. Peter Turkeltaub, a neuroscientist and board-certified cognitive neurologist focusing on stroke neurorehabilitation. Dr. Turkeltaub’s clinical efforts are devoted to post-stroke language and cognitive impairments, primarily aphasia. He is part of an interdisciplinary care team at the Aphasia Clinic at MedStar NRH that makes recommendations for optimizing recovery from post-stroke aphasia.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781837261109?ic_referral=DqlT-hJ37nSwiAHWa81I7rfYCJu2htpil_K2z_L7lYcwMxi4tXnMFC3joqHEV9eLI7IcmBoOLDcrv88dx6USby52ryyvmCub6UGTjc7woMbfykJYZzhK1Yq2vKZg0jbdC0gJv3A

Molly Irani, the visionary cofounder of the James Beard Award–winning restaurant Chai Pani, shares her passion for hospitality and story of building a thriving business that puts people first.Growing up with parents who owned a restaurant, Molly understood the power of service but also had a keen understanding of the industry’s challenges. When her husband Meherwan wanted to open a restaurant that would serve the Indian street food of his childhood, Molly thought he was nuts. And yet, the couple turned this unlikely dream into a vibrant reality. Chai Pani would eventually win the James Beard Award for Most Outstanding Restaurant in America, and be named one of 50 Favorite Restaurants in America by The New York Times, and one of Southern Living’s 20 Friendliest Places in the South.In Service Ready, Molly takes readers on their inspiring journey to the heights of culinary and professional success. While she and her husband learned their way into running a restaurant, Molly created a groundbreaking work culture with industry-leading retention rates. They have fostered a loyal team and legions of fans, and have since launched multiple Chai Pani locations, the fast-growing spin-off, Botiwalla, and the popular spice business, Spicewalla.Molly shares the ten core principles that have shaped their path, offering essential lessons for any industry. She opens up about the challenges and rewards of being business partners with your life partner and shares how she and Meherwan learned to merge their strengths in order to thrive. Her story celebrates the power of female leadership in a traditionally male-dominated field and is a testament to the essential impact these strengths bring to businesses. As she reflects on navigating a recession, a global pandemic, and the devastating floods in Asheville, she explores resilience, innovation, and how to create a strong culture in any workplace.Molly Irani is the cofounder and Chief Culture Officer of the James Beard Award–winning Chai Pani Restaurant Group in Asheville, North Carolina. She is responsible for the business’s groundbreaking culture, management style, community engagement, and “mindblasting” hospitality. She lives in Asheville with her husband and business partner, Meherwan Irani, where they raised their daughter, Aria, and her siblings (a.k.a. two goldendoodles).Irani is in conversation with Nevin Martell, a freelance writer-photographer based in the D.C. area who focuses on food, travel, and foraging. His work regularly appears in The Washington Post, USA Today, National Geographic, and many other publications. He is the author of nine books, including How to Eat Foraged Foods without Dying, Red Truck Bakery Cookbook, and The Founding Farmers Cookbook. On top of his writing, he is co-founder of the highly successful, long-running New Kitchens On The Block food festival, which gives diners a first taste of the D.C. region’s hottest new restaurants before they open. He holds a master’s from The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and a bachelor’s from Vassar College. When he's not working or on the road, he treasures time with his son, Zephyr.  PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668052990?ic_referral=FwwPXubJ-iEJG7-K9EGG-T3-RZ_bsRw9vu9nvLgkHXowM7N-MjPMtoWWr6Eqzlzw_IcNBGc2yc69RtNDWvO2CY5Z2EqNTu8vL_fEezY0xito9Olk-7AohQwSvfs61kgoe8yL71o

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Literary HubThe best in short fiction from around the world, from celebrated anthologist and author John Freeman and award-winning novelist Rabih AlameddineIn The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages, and sensibilities come together in a globe-spanning and long overdue tour of modern fiction. In “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” Haruki Murakami brings us a man who believes a giant amphibian is enlisting him to protect his city from an impending earthquake. In “War of the Clowns,” Mozambique’s Mia Couto sketches a perfect allegory for our divided culture. In the predecessor story to her iconic novel The Vegetarian, Han Kang depicts a protagonist quietly undergoing an unlikely transformation. A Colm Tóibín character thinks, “I do not even believe in Ireland,” while Carol Bensimon reflects from Brazil, “All great ideas seem like bad ones at some point.” Salman Rushdie brings us to unsettled rural India, Olga Tokarczuk to an ugly woman exhibit at the circus, Abdellah Taïa to the queer Arab world, Ted Chiang to a far-off galaxy.The United States is far from the center of the literary universe. This anthology is reminiscent of iconic director Bong Joon Ho’s line about overcoming “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” to enter a new world of film—the work of thoughtful and accomplished translators opens the door wide for those curious about what lies beyond the Western canon and classroom. Writers from six continents, ranging from new voices to literary icons, each offer a window into a distinct point of view, both transcending and illuminating their place of origin. They offer not only captivating prose, but a reminder of the power of the imagination across space and time.Rabih Alameddine has written nine books that have been translated into more than twenty languages. His most recent awards include the 2019 Dos Passos Prize, the 2021 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He divides his time between his bedroom and his living room.Alameddine is in conversation with Paxima Mojavezi, an Iranian-American author and journalist. She has been writing short stories for nearly three decades, and four of her short story collections have been published in Persian since 2000. The story “Forty-Eight Steps” is one of the stories from her second book. She has also published two nonfiction booksPURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593834138?ic_referral=iALJlJDoo7xiPvFiIGdCD6HlkicS4YTc5VAezVYrrTcwM0S79NMRgPrsRwcxVrw9z2K8GfmBpbR_Gc51ZnPRlqDi8uqtNXYErksLv6m71B7oEalpGstZHBlQHSn638WRIbSgz2A

What is driving the rise of fascism--and how can we stop it?In this singular investigation into the sinister realms of fascism and its many guises, Omer Aziz, author of the acclaimed Brown Boy and contributing writer for the Boston Globe, sets out to answer the question: Why are so many young people like him drifting to the ultranationalist right? Shadows of the Republic offers a haunting portrait of American fascism, how it began, and why it is now focused on immigration, technology, and the purification of society.Fascism is not coming to America; it has been here for a long time. With astringent clarity, Aziz traces the flaring up of fascist ideas in both American history and our current moment. From the dominance of the KKK, to the Nazi rally in New York in 1939, to the alliances between U.S. elites and European fascists, Aziz examines the long shadows of fascism. Traveling across the United States and Europe, he illuminates connections between street fascists and the ones in suits, between Hitler and the country across the ocean he so admired. Aziz examines culture in Germany and Italy in the 1930s, where propaganda ministers made people believe both everything and nothing, and he examines the apppeal of the far right among the very group it targets. Using interviews with experts and his own experience, he also offers an anti-fascist playbook to reinvigorate democracy and our civic life.Fascism is a precise term, cheapened by overuse. Yet when a word describes reality, we can't afford to ignore it. From the pulsing power of an ideology of the past to its comeback among even those with the most to lose, Shadows of the Republic offers the definitive story of American fascism--and what we can do to salvage democracy for years to come.Omer Aziz is a lawyer, writer, and former foreign policy advisor in the administration of the Canadian Prime Minister. He was born to working-class parents of Pakistani origin in Toronto, Canada, and with the help of scholarships, became the first in his family to go to college in the West, later studying in Paris, at Cambridge University, and Yale Law School. Aziz has clerked for the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria and served as a foreign policy advisor in the government of Justin Trudeau. He has held residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and many other publications. He was most recently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798889836643?ic_referral=jEh9G2nxcZGON5HPZIqvQUviyHz78k5KSTZFvwQxt88wMzB6OdOJmEJO5xwUO7YU9lDs_MnvopZtKaw1kGdZjTSCXUa2IXAEWKpONdZ_9uZQw1R7lT39H1p58J1JoOm2ap8n7r0

Tread Upon- by turns tender and furious, and wholly original--attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich's Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where "even one blade is a place," the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.Christopher Kondrich is a poet and writer whose third book, Tread Upon, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in April 2026. He is also the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), which won the National Poetry Series and was selected by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. His poetry appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.David Baker is the author many books of poetry, including Transit (2026), Whale Fall (2022), and Swift: New and Selected Poems (2019); his Never-Ending Birds was awarded the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is coeditor of Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly (2025). Baker’s work appears in APR, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and is included in the landmark anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Baker is Emeritus Professor at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio. He served for many years as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.Kondrich and Baker are in conversation with Sandra Beasley, who is the author of four poetry collections: Made to Explode, winner of the Housatonic Book Award; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize,; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, the John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, and six DCCAH Artist Fellowships. She is also the author of the memoir Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, and the editor of Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C. She serves as the poetry editor for Blair, a nonprofit press based in Durham, North Carolina.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781556597244?ic_referral=FgMxNKER8rD8kBv4ilfyXUP-a1F_s5es3SRtntU3cF0wM-mhx2RyFGFEldJIiexHRVr1YVGUUl2jp93u4DQQ4iOepboH8JCtm4YAxknfy87oVoiz3yNwot5EijkAExIoO7WoN_c

From the acclaimed author of Number One Chinese Restaurant comes an affecting novel about an unforgettable group of friends trying to make their way in the world without losing themselves, or one another.Diana, Justin, Errol, and Vivian were always told that success is guaranteed by following a simple checklist. They worked hard, got A's, and attended a good university—only to graduate into the Great Recession of 2008. Now, despite their newly minted degrees, they’re unemployed and stuck again under their parents’ roofs in a hypercompetitive Chinese American community. So when Grace—once the neighborhood golden child, now a Harvard Law School dropout—asks to make a documentary about the crew, they agree. It’s not like her little movie will ever see the light of day.But then the video, Bad Asians, goes viral on an up-and-coming media platform (YouTube, anyone?). Suddenly, millions of people know them as cruel caricatures, each full of pent-up frustrations with the others. And after a desperate attempt at spin control further derails their plans for the lives they’d always imagined, the friends must face harsh truths about themselves and coming of age in the new millennium.Lillian Li’s novel wryly captures a generation shaped by the rise of the internet and the end of the American dream. An epic tale of friendship and family, Bad Asians asks, Can the same people who made you who you are end up keeping you from who you’re meant to be?Lillian Li is the author of Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Granta, and Travel + Leisure. She is from the DC metro area and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.Li is in conversation with Angie Kim, who moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea, to the suburbs of Baltimore. After graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy, she studied philosophy at Stanford University and attended Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award, the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award, and the Pinckley Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the Today show. Angie Kim lives in northern Virginia with her family.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250363626?ic_referral=Y5NPp7pyz38vT_kHq3zG6ZiNWUJTqL8dm9YWXAuCqLwwMxpsgLE1sLepO113ExJ3oHiJQlyw8EO2p2qLlqSgGutogjQNTYGa65AUYRTmT5Ow2XkNWBJpNSfDpvG8wwsYzbNB2fQ

“An indispensable book, as intellectually provocative as it is emotionally wrenching.”—Greg Grandin¸ author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the MythAlthough the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In a work distinguished not only by its original research but by its “passionate prose” (James F. Brooks), historian Linford Fisher demonstrates how the enslavement of Indigenous people began in the years just after 1492, ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas. Although largely erased from the public consciousness, Native enslavement continued for centuries to become a colossal phenomenon that affected nearly 600,000 Native?Americans in North?America?alone, revealing the shocking truth that American colonizers enslaved Natives in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans.From Virginia to California, from New England to Barbados, Stealing America traces the history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession, detailing how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that subsequently plundered Indigenous land and stole the labor of Natives from nations like the Cherokee, Navajo, Nisean, and many others. “This double theft,” Fisher writes, “was central to the origins, growth, and eventual success of the English colonies and the United States—not just initially but throughout all of American history.”In this expansive narrative, Fisher weaves together accounts of major episodes in American history including early colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War with lesser-known stories of Native enslavement and land loss. Fisher upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.Nearly fifteen years in the making, this magisterial volume not only uncovers a five-century genocidal history but also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America emerges as a saga of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience, one that reframes American history at its core.Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. The author of The Indian Great Awakening and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations project, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.Fisher is joined in conversation with Mishy Jacobson, a Politics & Prose bookseller.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324094951?ic_referral=4ihiOdI-sYuLYY0mCksox8A_5Gx8zFw4eYHd0j1lGOMwM5yluLzJgbd-yUJqQJ_6y_VRlOyZpDJRAuJBPyHhXNqnE8MEPV0D-MzRSFDbBtdnHknWt07E-AQyVbneaP_CtPj-xLo

In this deftly comedic and deeply contemplative memoir, the New York Times bestselling author faces life's biggest curveball only to find resilience in the most unlikely places.After Annabelle Gurwitch received an out-of-the blue diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer, an existential dread set in. Precision medicine offered a temporary reprieve--but instead of turning into a cancer warrior, Annabelle declared herself a cancer slacker. Her motto: no runs, no ribbons, no religion.Told with her signature wit, warmth, and gimlet eye, Gurwitch draws inspiration from Greek mythology and TV comedies, Kermit the Frog and Samuel Beckett. She accidentally acquires an angel, embraces being in it "just for the sex," and finds herself on a European van tour selling merch for a heavy metal band.In this hilariously and deeply affecting meditation on mortality, the actress and activist illuminates life with chronic disease, inequities in care, and celebrates tiny victories, the crusty ends of baguettes, the discreet pleasure of sucking at a hobby, and the unshakable bond of female friendship. She upends the notion of living each day as if it were your last, as she discovers you can carpe too much diem, embracing, instead, the extraordinariness of the ordinary.Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and New York Times bestselling author of six books and a two-time Thurber Prize finalist. Her essays and satire have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post amongst other publications. Her books include the New York Times bestseller I See You Made an Effort and You're Leaving When? a New York Times "Favorite Book for Healthy Living." Annabelle co-hosted the fan favorite Dinner & a Movie on TBS and was a regular commentator on NPR. She is a Jewish mother, lung cancer survivor and patient advocate, a terrible ukulele player, and an unrepentant cat lady who lives in Los Angeles.This event is co-sponsored by Moment Magazine and Annabelle will be in conversation with Moment Opinion and Books Editor Amy E. Schwartz. Amy E. Schwartz  is the opinion and book editor of Moment Magazine, as well as editor of the magazine's popular "Ask the Rabbis" section. She is editor of the 2020 book Can Robots Be Jewish? And Other Pressing Questions of Modern Life. Before joining Moment in 2011, she spent 17 years as an editorial writer and weekly op ed columnist at The Washington Post, specializing in education, science and the culture wars. Schwartz received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Harvard University in 1984 and studied in Germany from 1990-91 as a Chancellor’s Scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has lived in and reported from France, Germany and Turkey and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 1988. She has also worked at Harper's, The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly. In 2024, she won three first-place Rockower Awards from the American Jewish Press Association. Schwartz is president of the non-denominational Jewish Study Center, an independent adult education institution in Washington, DC. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798992377071?ic_referral=fL63Y7vzInMKcyDRzszyzvzVAtWvRZEnkQwEPOBmt_QwM-fq32MD5nrQk5fCAZLexZy8tmZCbmQ6NsNWPc9_dCjCkXV298Yk7frTL3pYieojdIgAUpjyiCCELtRXoog9Tavdaes

Author and historian Garrett Peck traces Willa Cather’s adventures in the Southwest and how they influenced her best book.Six months before she died, Willa Cather called her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop her “best book.” The Atlantic magazine concurred, including Archbishop on its Great American Novels list in 2024. A perennial favorite for people who love New Mexico, the novel tells an unusual story of two French priests and best friends serving on the American frontier before the arrival of the railroad. This Western work of fiction is loosely based on two historical figures, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Bishop Joseph Machebeuf.In The Bright Edges of the World, Garrett Peck explores how Cather’s travels to the Southwest inspired her writing. She visited the Southwest six times between 1912 and 1926, and from these journeys came three novels, the last of which was Death Comes for the Archbishop. Through Cather’s letters, postcards, articles, and interviews, Peck traces how integral travel was to Cather’s imagination while highlighting the vital contribution that Cather’s longtime partner, Edith Lewis, made to the story. The Bright Edges of the World is richly illustrated to highlight Cather and Lewis’s extensive Southwestern adventures.Though Archbishop is a work of fiction, Peck explores how Cather wove some of the most legendary people in New Mexican history into her novel, such as Archbishop Lamy, Kit Carson, and Padre Antonio José Martínez, while subtly hinting toward the complexity of Pueblo Indian and Navajo (Diné) faith. Archbishop is a multicultural novel that reflects the diversity of New Mexico’s people.Death Comes for the Archbishop remains a timeless book of friendship on the American frontier and an inspiration for people who, as Cather wrote, “have gone a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the Archbishop.”Garrett Peck is an author, historian, and tour guide in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author of nine books focusing on American history. He leads the Willa Cather’s Santa Fe tour and many other excursions around New Mexico.Peck is in conversation with Bob Attardi. Bob’s career in books, music, and public programs started here in Washington, D.C. in 1986 at Olsson’s Books and Records. A few stops along the way included Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and 15 years with the National Geographic Society. Bob is currently the Director of Programs at Politics and Prose. His team creates classes, salons, bus trips, and travel opportunities for our book community. We hope that you will join us! PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780826369253?ic_referral=gTl2iC9QVnubLvjOHM93ELtfR4VEiWS1u5NgQL5lx3kwM5Ob_ZGxCNLQOTQdiDJxreFjhC4kdR-4JM0I6YulSTelhDK89NitAP-SdCV2G0iAf_OgUFI7jlMDvvwdzdQj0k_rLJk

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West.Before Larry McMurtry became one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, he worked on his family’s ranch in rural Texas. At night he heard vivid stories of his cowboy uncles driving herds of cattle across the plains where there once were bison and Native Americans. “McMurtry Means Beef,” as one ranching magazine put it. By the time he died in 2021, McMurtry had published forty books, won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove and an Oscar for his cowritten adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and seen his work made into such classic films as Hud and Terms of Endearment. Now, McMurtry means great stories.For all his fame, McMurtry was an elusive figure. He loved women but was married to his typewriter; he was wary of critics and distrustful of other men—except David Streitfeld. When McMurtry gave the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist the keys to his past, Streitfeld dug into every archive and interviewed everyone who would talk. He found that, even as McMurtry’s work criticized the old cowboy myths, he loved making up stories about himself.Western Star reveals the real and complicated life of a storyteller who was both an icon and critic of Texas, the favorite of presidents, confidant to movie stars like Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd, friend to Ken Kesey and husband to his widow Faye, an obsessive bookseller, and the most enduring voice of the American West. David Streitfeld is a prize-winning journalist who is publishing Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry in early 2026. The book is the harvest of extensive research into the iconic Texas writer, whom David knew well. Like his subject, David spent many years in Washington, attending college there and then going to work for The Washington Post, where he became the paper's literary correspondent. In 1999, he drifted West, working for The Los Angeles Times and later The New York Times. He was part of a team that won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. Much of his work at the Times has been about Amazon and the rise of digital book culture. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family and too many books.Streitfeld is in conversation with Marie Arana, who is a prizewinning author of eight books, nonfiction and fiction. Winner of an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, she has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a guest columnist on Latin America for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Marie is most recently the author of “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” chosen by the New Yorker as one of the 12 Must Read Books of the Year. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063234888?ic_referral=j8CupFycxwu1Qb2xrRwnng-pmtyl1QO7PWUoMqjNBqgwM3KwIreHWw5wgB_cYBKXlGKWpCnrT8THi5ftJM9PE72Y8AW5KkqgUGKZrHqcxGu1lhX1OMEELxjaoI-8OrHlK4YG1hM

Democracy is fracturing—and one woman may hold the key to saving it.This electrifying new thriller from former CIA officer and TikTok sensation Brittany Butler is the perfect geopolitical thriller for fans of David McCloskey and Alma Katsu.When a wave of Russian cyberattacks ignites a disinformation firestorm, the United States is pushed to the brink of a civil war. State governments defy Washington. Militias rise. As trust crumbles and chaos spreads, the CIA races to expose the source behind such unrest before democracy collapses from within. Brilliant, relentless, and haunted by her mother’s disappearance, Ava was recruited for a moment like this. Dispatched to infiltrate Russia’s foreign intelligence service, her mission becomes personal when she locks onto her target, Konstantine, a charismatic SVR officer whose shadowed past intertwines with her own. What Ava uncovers is more insidious than she feared. With the country unraveling, she must navigate a minefield of deception. Her only anchor is Ben, a veteran counterintelligence officer with complicated romantic feelings for Ava. But in a world where nothing is as it seems, trusting the wrong person could be fatal.Ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, The Patriot’s Daughter is a fresh new take on the international spy genre.Brittany Butler is a former CIA targeting officer with years of experience recruiting spies and dismantling terrorist networks overseas. She brings rare authenticity to her fiction, drawing on her time in the field to illuminate the moral complexities of espionage. Her debut novel, The Syndicate Spy, explores how female operatives navigate religious and cultural divides to fight for peace. Brittany lives by the ocean with her husband, their three sons, and their beloved dog, Gus. Her highly anticipated second novel, The Patriot’s Daughter—set for release in early 2026—tells the gripping story of a young woman’s quest to uncover the truth about her mother, a decorated intelligence officer accused of being a double agent for Russia. As past and present collide, the novel explores betrayal, legacy, and the cost of loyalty in the shadowy world of espionage.Butler is in conversation with K.T. Nguyen, a former editor at Glamour magazine. Her psychological thriller YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID received the Agatha and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. In a starred review, Booklist described it as “a twisty horror-filled thriller” and an “incredibly compelling debut.” Selected as a Best Book by People Magazine and Elle, YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID is now available in paperback. When she's not writing, K.T. enjoys practicing Krav Maga and rooting for the Mets. A graduate of Brown University, she lives just outside of Washington, D.C.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798892423885?ic_referral=2kMAJWO9T_t-LWF3XI4wgkmN6soCvZ0RMSwUa4a8EDUwM955WxIykckBYFthZKdlDotZBmdj9Ph7Jw7OWJxsb7HncihMmN4poGspHZPYwDjH1SHEl9hsQ2vk7nxlcsO-oTnxNjQ

From the award-winning author of American Sirens and A Thousand Naked Strangers comes a real-life thriller about the most daring rescue in air-medical history. JULY 2014. Two American medical volunteers who joined the fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak in world history have gotten infected. The virus kills in just over a week and they’re trapped in a hot zone with the clock ticking. If there’s going to be a rescue it has to happen now.  The very notion of getting the patients out is a radical and dangerous idea. Bringing them home might cause an outbreak of Ebola here in the US. No one’s certain if it can or should be done or if they’ll even survive the flight. In fact, the only thing anyone can agree on is that there’s just one group of people resourceful enough (or crazy enough) to pull this off. Thousands of miles away and deep in the north Georgia mountains, a phone rings at Phoenix Air. It's the US government calling with another impossible mission.  Kevin Hazzard chronicles the ten frantic days that followed that phone call, dropping readers into the center of a first-of-its-kind international rescue. Phoenix Air, an eccentric band of engineers, pilots, and doctors with a reputation for doing things nobody else could, would become a lifeline to the world.Terrifying, fascinating, and inspiring, No One’s Coming is a story of selfless heroes on both sides of the Atlantic who overcome the apathy and resistance of their own governments and communities, risking their lives to save others—once again proving that ordinary people are capable of overcoming the most extraordinary of problems. As contagions spring up around the world, this story of outbreaks and the people who fight them resonates more than ever.Kevin Hazzard is a journalist, TV writer, and former paramedic. He is the author of American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics (Hachette Books 2022). His first book, A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back, was published by Scribner in 2016. He now writes for film/TV, with work produced by Hulu, CBS, ABC and Universal. His freelance journalism has been published at 99% Invisible, the Atavist, Men’s Journal, Creative Loafing, Atlanta Magazine, and elsewhere. He is also a sought-after voice on emergency medicine. He lives in Atlanta.Hazzard is in conversation with Robert Holman, MD, a trained in Infectious Diseases at the NIH, practiced in Arlington for 24 years while teaching for Georgetown, and was the medical director for DC Fire & EMS for more than eight years.He has combined perspectives on Infectious Diseases and Emergency Medical Services.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780306835186?ic_referral=vs8_85F97HPZXmgP3jCqNXToKaftV70nt0arEmu65NswM7smMaDiOAvArfiaO5O0QFBS8MtDXCGdifn3Bq6d3m1xaa8qEp_cmh1te4vQbuTD-igZgSkmWt0BZrkH_Wut3-fonig

How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction—until America’s opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of patients. Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it’s also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult to access. And yet, the medications at the center of this treatment—and the private industries that distribute them—generate roughly sixteen billion dollars each year, on par with national sales of coffee and pet food. In Addiction, Inc., historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success—and a public health disaster. Urgent, eye-opening, and deeply human, Addiction, Inc. reveals how, over the past fifty years, the United States built an addiction treatment system that made recovery harder instead of easier, and what it will take to change its course.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. The recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Smithsonian magazine, and other publications. She lives with her husband and children outside Washington, DC.Dufton is in conversation with Tim Shenk, a historian of modern American politics at George Washington University. His latest book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, was named one of the best books of 2024 by the New Republic, and his previous book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, was chosen as one of the best political books of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal. A former editor of Dissent, he was named GW’s best professor by the university’s student newspaper, the Hatchet, in 2024.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780226750064?ic_referral=1qaEbzGqvs_K-OxBXARPqrvExQyFEaqgNjaMZG0TUB8wM0oD-DZGWs8A-zr0bl9U8EWPoMCi2XVlNTWojz6RfrXFqPnWJZ5ABbaEPiLWzTRrNnWrckBEqfUoOkV-HkucY-aGDoA

In this blend of police thriller and poignant autofiction, a writer revisits a tragic crime from his adolescence and reckons with a dark, underexplored side of Spain.On Christmas Eve 1995, Miguel Ángel Hernández’s best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. It happened in a small hamlet in the Murcia countryside. No one ever knew why. The investigation was closed, and the crime forgotten.20 years later, when the wounds seem to have stopped bleeding and the mourning died down, Miguel decides to return to the countryside and, putting himself in the shoes of a detective, tries to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But travelling in time always means altering the past, and the investigation will awaken ghosts that he thought he had left behind: a childhood marked by the Church, by sin and guilt; the constant presence of illness and death; the oppressive, closed world from which he managed to escape.This raw, moving novel about the collision of two worlds and two ways of life is a reckoning with the past and, above all, a subtle and incisive meditation on the ethics of literature, which makes us aware that “writing isn’t always a triumph, that sometimes, we too may founder upon the pain of others.”Miguel Ángel Hernández is a Spanish writer best known for his works of fiction, among them the novels Intento de escapada (2013), which won the Premio Ciudad Alcalá de Narrativa and was translated into five languages, El instante de peligro (2015), which was a finalist for the Premio Herralde de Novela, and El dolor de los demás (2018), which was selected as a book of the year by El País and the New York Times en Español. Hernández teaches art history at the University of Murcia and has authored several books on art and visual culture. His novel Anoxia was published by Other Press in 2025.Ángel Hernández is in conversation with Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington, D.C. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781635424607?ic_referral=ZeZPzQvm2jKdWguIlt5_8Nq17I9HIYmJRvFwdoQB0oIwMyUx2-aK3PDB30klACIzLM7yXgMcFvEaTXqhvuxOFAxae2pRpfuhwAinu08Pa4nXo6AXoEJJg16R4UgM86zSkVnWic0

In The Soldier’s House, Helen Benedict tells the story of an Iraq War veteran who saves the lives of his assassinated Iraqi interpreter’s widow and child by bringing them to his home in upstate New York. For the soldier, this is a way of making amends for his interpreter’s death. But the widow finds being rescued by the enemy both humiliating and compromising. This is a compassionate tale that examines whether redemption and forgiveness are even possible in the wake of war. Like Benedict’s related novels, Wolf Season and Sand Queen, both of which feature some of the same characters that appear in The Soldier’s House, this book breaks new ground. In the light of the current wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the worldwide controversies over refugees, The Soldier’s House is particular timely and poignant.Helen Benedict has been writing about refugees and war for many years, both in her three most recent novels, The Good Deed, Wolf Season and Sand Queen, and in her 2022 book of nonfiction, Map of Hope & Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece. A recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict is also the author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. Her writings inspired a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of those sexually assaulted in the military and the 2012 Oscar nominated documentary The Invisible War. She is a professor at Columbia University in New York.Benedict is in conversation Mary Kay Zuravleff, the award-winning author of American Ending, inspired by both her grandmothers and her coal-mining grandfathers. Her third novel, Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book, was praised by People magazine for its "impressive intelligence and sly humor," and the New York Times called her second, The Bowl Is Already Broken, "a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world's bickering and scheming." She is the recipient of the American Academy of Art's Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts.She has taught writing at American University, the Chautauqua Institution, Johns Hopkins and George Mason Universities, and she has written and edited extensively for the Smithsonian. Her essays and short stories have appeared in such venues as The Daily Beast, American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, This Is What America Looks Like, and Why I Like This Story. She was born in Syracuse, New York, raised in Oklahoma City, educated in Houston and Baltimore, and has made Washington, DC, her home.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781636282787?ic_referral=8EfHcezIKZCL1a85jE-2GxewMsd0ddVmaOQUX0W12McwM0TpjeLjwYtaaAMU-YUQNl6fVTVU2gfBA6GWHbq7xvy7vuUrU3fiYRDdyEs4pO_sOdlf_xP4IsNXHPf01NEEWC-PA2I

From Marginalian Editions comes a gorgeous reissue of celebrated poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman's debut: a soaring ode to our solar system, planet to planet, blending science and imagination, astronomy and cosmology, as well as fantasy, satire, myth, and confession.First published in 1973, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral introduced not only a splendid new poet but a whole new adventure in poetry. With bravura style, unbridled imagination, and a connoisseur's eye for precise scientific detail, Diane Ackerman's debut brought us an unforgettable ode to each planet in our solar system, not to mention the moon, the comet Kohoutek, and the asteroid belt, as well as strange voyages to the stars, the bottom of the sea, through the human body, and into the mind.Diane Ackerman herself says: "I've always been baffled by people who write about nature only in terms of, say, junipers and cornfields, eschewing all things so-called 'scientific, ' as if science were, per se, the spoil-sport of feeling. So wonderless a view of nature really doesn't appeal to me." The Planets is a rare fusion of art and science--one of the great poetic works of cosmic imagination.Poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman is the author of over two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including the New York Times bestsellers The Zookeeper’s Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, and The Human Age.Ackerman is in conversation with David Grinspoon, who is a planetary astrobiologist, award-winning science communicator, and prize-winning author. He is Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Previously he served as Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy at NASA, where he worked to define the agenda for the future of Astrobiology research and communicationPURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781961341746?ic_referral=OfogLhTNIlxZy_Xaxe2bXalP6W6SIZRLhlW_R6oeDVUwM1EdZvGFV3KYZFldDZ47h3XE3aXrC3w1STm2fAlmdowDufFo6YJZGg6jEvjP-jeSEEicJoBVzPLBJz-mFMSwzt8i-ao

This event will be in partnership with The Atlantic.An invigorating guide to fighting back—part philosophy, part history, and part manual for living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian driftHow do we push back in a world where political leaders wield fear and intimidation? Where digital technology dehumanizes and flattens us? We need role models, and in this engaging book, acclaimed writer Gal Beckerman goes looking for them. Drawing on the stories of dissidents from around the globe and across time, from Socrates to Ai Weiwei, and thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, Beckerman reveals the defining characteristics these extraordinary figures share, a set of attributes and practices for anyone navigating the pressures of modern tyranny.Structured around ten qualities—among them, Be Pessimistic, Be Funny, Be Reckless, and Be Immortal—this illuminating, surprising book blends intellectual history, biography, and cultural criticism. It charts a dissident’s journey from the solitary moment of recognizing the truth, through the risks of speaking it, to the legacy that can outlast a life. What makes dissidents tick? And how might we change when we encounter them?Urgent and inspiring, Beckerman’s book shows that dissidence is a human capacity we can all cultivate, a refusal to betray one’s inner voice, no matter the cost. In a polarized America and a world sliding toward authoritarianism, we need dissidents—not only the jailed and martyred, but also those of us who face small daily compromises of conscience. How to Be a Dissident lights the way.Gal Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, a New York Times notable book, and When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, which won the Sami Rohr Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. He has a PhD from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.Beckerman is in conversation with Adam Harris, podcast host at The Atlantic. He is the author of The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right. Before joining The Atlantic in 2018, Adam was a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education covering federal higher-education policy and HBCUs. At The Atlantic, he writes about politics and education.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217089215?ic_referral=q7vhcK8R7fQym1UWChNy0W1D-jDpGNZ5imraDFKYbYYwM8qhk0xZdI5K2NNB4DpHr_K-MVaigndkcr5kiJ34nHfbArIaiOnl1XNEfVYW2H4nnWzxYFX_nBHKH4vCs7K0yRWPg5I

A major revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition: For the first time in a generation, This Vast Enterprise offers a fresh and more accurate account of one of the most important episodes in American history, humanizing forgotten figures and shattering long-held myths. Celebrated young historian Craig Fehrman, whose first book, Author in Chief, was hailed by Thomas Mallon in The Wall Street Journal as “one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years,” delivers a major new account of the Lewis and Clark expedition.When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned from their long journey, in 1806, they brought an incredible tale starring themselves as courageous explorers, skilled scientists, and peaceful ambassadors. There was truth in those descriptions. But there was also distortion.For the first time in a generation, This Vast Enterprise offers a fresh and more accurate account of their expedition—a gripping narrative that draws on new documents, stunning analysis, and Native perspectives. Fehrman’s central insight is that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on much more than just Lewis and Clark. We all know Sacajawea, and some of us know York, the Black man Clark enslaved. But This Vast Enterprise introduces us to John Ordway, a working-class soldier who fought grizzlies and towed the captains’ bulky barge. It introduces us to Wolf Calf, a Blackfoot teenager who watched his friend die in a battle with Lewis and his men.To capture this cast of characters, each chapter in This Vast Enterprise moves to a new point of view, describing that person’s desires and contradictions with an unprecedented level of care. Fehrman balances the story’s inherent adventure with the humanity of its protagonists. One chapter shows Thomas Jefferson operating in an age of bitter partisan unrest—his secret maneuvers to fund the expedition, uncovered here for the first time, are a case study in presidential power. Another chapter reveals the strategy and strength of Black Buffalo, a Lakota leader, completely upending our understanding of early Lakota American diplomacy. Clark, in his chapters, is not a folksy Kentuckyian but a student of the Enlightenment. (Fehrman found Clark’s college notebook.) Lewis is someone whose psychological demons feel at once heartbreaking and modern.And yet, in the end, the captains are men who needed help—from Sacajawea, from York, and from each other. Their expedition truly was a vast enterprise, a sprawling and federally funded military mission that came down to the heroic sacrifices of a few human beings. This book portrays those people, all of them, for the first time. It is more than just a work of history—it’s a testament to the power of innovative research and emotional storytelling, and a thrilling reminder that even the most familiar moments in history can still surprise us.Craig Fehrman, a journalist and historian, spent five years writing and researching This Vast Enterprise. His first book, Author in Chief, was described by Thomas Mallon in The Wall Street Journal as “one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years.” Fehrman lives in Indiana with his wife and children.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781982174248?ic_referral=hZqIK8Kc7E30KRxFbf2ZfTKPh0WAivNj_wVEuZaG_GkwM6Rrlpm64YzZloSor61f63UJX9dUAgVV54TXoMui3DXq2mVX78H65CldLw8TdX-nRfrxSJBTweH-QDKP6KUf8XmQ5Wg

Sara Hall shares the story of her record-breaking career and her unconventional path to motherhood via adoption, all while battling insecurities, injuries, and doubters.Sara Hall has been a fixture atop American distance running for more than two decades: first as a national high school champion, then as an NCAA star at Stanford University, and later, as the only pro runner to ever win U.S. titles in the mile and the marathon. She's held the American record in the half marathon, clocked the fastest marathon in the U.S. by a woman aged 40 or older, and represented her country in ​multiple World Championships.But success has never come easy. Fear of failure set in during high school. In college, Sara competed through a results-obsessed culture that carried into her professional career. She battled anxiety and imposter syndrome, alongside outside pressure to quit the sport and instead devote herself to supporting her husband, Olympic marathoner Ryan Hall, and later, her kids. Yet Sara never gave up on the dream of reaching her potential.Fueled by faith, family, and an unbridled love of exploring her limits, Sara has proven the doubters wrong at every turn. When she and Ryan adopted four daughters from Ethiopia, motherhood only made her faster, running personal bests year after year and landing on podiums at the world’s most competitive races. Along the way, she discovered that choosing love over fear allowed her to take risks. She let go of results and embraced the pursuit of excellence instead.For the Love of the Grind is a love letter to running, and the story of Sara’s growth as an athlete, wife, and mom. Through her unflinching honesty and keen introspection, readers will be inspired to chase their dreams, to reimagine what might still be possible, and to embrace their own love of the grind.Sara Hall is a professional runner, wife to American marathoner Ryan Hall, and mom of four daughters adopted from Ethiopia. She has been competing professionally for over twenty years and been nationally ranked for almost three decades. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona with her family.Hall will be in conversation with Lahaina Mae Mondoñedo, the co-founder of Every Person Running Club, a DC-based running community built on inclusivity and camaraderie. A marketing and events professional, Lahaina is passionate about amplifying unheard voices and creating memorable experiences that connect people.  When she’s not organizing events or crafting campaigns, she’s likely running on the National Mall or Navy Yard boardwalk or taking a workout class, embracing the athlete’s mindset that drives her in every aspect of life.Joining Hall and Mondoñedo for a panel discussion are Iwona Kesting and Brittany M. Greene. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250404282?ic_referral=BcGOSTJhLExSWu388yExmfYbDqJtBHgprSfEdywKBw0wMw2xdUJ3tyDsLPHlh0QxFMKNf-honsAsujWpg-I1dq-SVwKaXfNqFGZYvTITu3EoawgKNiP9gYVJkGuajJtWN1DqYG8

A best-selling novelist turns to memoir in this compelling story of a son’s love, a mother’s obsession, and the malevolent grip of the past.Indian American author Manil Suri grew up in a large crumbling apartment in Bombay (now Mumbai) which his parents, who were Hindu, shared with three Muslim families. Their single room, at times a refuge from the religious and territorial tensions pervading the apartment, was also a prison that held them captive—his parents stuck in an unhappy marriage, the author unable to explore the dawning realization he might be gay. At age 20, Suri managed to break free and come to the US, where he finally found the freedom to embrace his sexuality and find a life partner. But the room, which still held his parents hostage, kept wrenching him back to Bombay.By now real estate prices had risen so much that neighbors had begun conspiring to take over the room, causing Suri’s parents to dig in even more. Eventually it was only his mother, Prem, left, who had staked all her happiness on her son but was unable to escape the room’s hold on her. When a rash of mysterious incidents seemed to beset the room, Suri realized how little time he had left to convince Prem that a happier life might await beyond the four walls that both enthralled and imprisoned her.This remarkable, gripping memoir explores how an abode can shape destiny, while delving into the difficult question of how much to prioritize our parents’ happiness over our own. Inspired by over 2,700 letters the author wrote home over three decades, it is ultimately a testament to the abiding, unbreakable bond tying a son to his mother.Manil Suri is the internationally acclaimed author of The Death of Vishnu and other books. His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages and received several honors, including winning the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and being longlisted for the Booker Prize. He is a distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and lives with his husband in Silver Spring, Maryland.Suri is in conversation with Rabih Alameddine, the author of the novels The Wrong End of the Telescope; The Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; and Koolaids, as well as the story collection The Perv. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. His most recent awards include the 2019 Dos Passos Prize, the 2021 Lannan Prize for Fiction, the 2022 Pen/Faulkner award and the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in March 2025. He divides his time between his bedroom and his living room. He is co-editing The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, forthcoming from Penguin Press in 2026, and his new novel, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) was published by from Grove in September 2025 and won the National Book Award for Fiction.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324106388?ic_referral=drvlrTzKeEohbW4Bu_KjWTrTjClEBPC81nxMif8ch5wwM-XiHRbeeyRhR9vn__PUREhv-acJ7w9kVXGknStGL_RoIDOmW2vkS0hkgIINBMy_lXDgYIlcDbsYwEa8zr9CTUO1PPE

A deeply moving photographic and narrative history of a southern waterway that the enslaved were forced to build for mercantile shipping—but which they used to escape slavery.Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida.In this book, Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history.Virginia Richards is an award-winning documentary photographer, historian, and environmental lawyer.Richards is in conversation with Dr. Frederick Knight, an expert on early African American and African Diaspora history. He is the author of Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (Penn Press, 2024), which argues that elders were central to African American community formation through Reconstruction. His first book Working the Diaspora:  The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) traces how Africans, though carried across the Atlantic against their wills, drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780262051712?ic_referral=PgfJiMhP25sfn-lXBTY4w84RkvIkHDIQUCiZdvFjsOAwMxNXhyM9ymjGnmDq57QFHkXt79WZn70hnGXMr2gjpWA3FwMffIwWtfQikoXxXlubBcPRJMb2X7IKOdOLzGk_FTLWeT4

With lyrical prose and a deeply empathetic voice, The Migraine Diaries offers a raw, unflinching look at the impact of chronic illness on the human spirit.When a 30-something man experiences his first migraine at the funeral for his best friend, his life within a close-knit friend group threatens to come undone. He must navigate despair and debilitation alongside relationships, work, and the quest for meaning. He struggles to find sparks of hope and beauty even as his body and mind rebel against him.How does he live with endless, invisible hurt? How does he support his friends even as he loses the ability to support himself? His very experience of time alters—looping, regressing, and flashing back to a before that’s lost forever.The Migraine Diaries, told in the unique format of a diagnostic headache journal, is a visionary look at human endurance, as well as a poignant exploration of pain. Most of all, it’s a testament to the power of friendship in the face of strife and grief.Zach Powers is a native of Savannah, Georgia, and lives and writes in Arlington, Virginia. He will publish his next novel, The Migraine Diaries, in April 2026 with JackLeg Press. His novel First Cosmic Velocity was published in 2019 by Putnam, and his debut story collection Gravity Changes won the BOA Short Fiction Prize and was published in 2017 by BOA Editions. His prose and poetry have been featured by American Short Fiction, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, and elsewhere. He co-founded the literary arts nonprofit Seersucker Live. He led the writers’ workshop at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home for eight years. He was an arts and culture columnist for Savannah Morning News. He serves as Executive & Artistic Director for The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal. He once won a regional Emmy for writing a public service announcement.Powers is in conversation with Hannah Grieco whose debut short story collection First Kicking, Then Not is out now from Stanchion Books. She is a professor at Marymount University, a columnist for Washington City Paper, and a rabid fan of independent publishing. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on most social media @writesloud.PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781956907254?ic_referral=ZFOzuVTJi1LostTy22Ht0QEIFb0Nzsydp3d-6E60orswM4aU5NZ2_Glh9DsFpYTd9qwpn9t0Gr83_0B4y3zTpf-2AjLm3MTmzTtZfAjnbGjocBaOuA4YAdOVH-zF8DeLovN5XWo

A myth-busting glimpse into the inner workings of the Supreme Court, revealing what we get wrong about the Roberts Court, what the justices' clerks gossip about, and how to fix a court in crisis—from the popular ABC news pundit and top legal podcaster"Isgur has all your answers in these smart, snappy, clear-eyed pages.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel AdamsMost people get the Supreme Court all wrong. A smattering of high-profile decisions have popularized a simplistic idea of the Court and its justices. Yes, six of them were appointed by Republicans, and only three by Democrats. So, how does that 6-3 conservative majority explain why in the 2024-25 term, conservative Brett Kavanaugh was more likely to agree with liberal Elena Kagan than conservative Neil Gorsuch? Or why the court threw shade at Florida’s attempt to ban drag shows?To truly understand the Court, argues Sarah Isgur, you have to look beyond partisan politics—the “X-Axis.” The wisest court watchers apply another measuring stick, the “Y-Axis," where the nine justices span from order-loving institutionalists to true chaos agents. Once you appreciate these overlapping and even competing impulses, the Court begins to look a lot more like a 3-3-3 split than 6-3.The ultimate insider, Isgur takes readers on a deep dive inside the Supreme Court: how cases land at the Court’s doorstep, which justices attend clerk happy hours (and which ones even bother showing up to the office), why conservatives already have buyer’s remorse about Amy Coney Barrett, and how the whole judicial system is kind of a constitutional anomaly. She’ll even help you decide whether you should throw your hat in the ring and go to law school! Blending irreverent humor and incisive commentary, Isgur goes underneath the robes—and shows us what we need to do to preserve the rule of law amid dicey times in this little self-governing experiment we’ve been running for the last 250 years.Sarah Isgur is the editor of SCOTUSblog, a regular on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and co-host of Advisory Opinions, the nation's top legal podcast. She served in the DOJ as the director of the Office of Public Affairs, helped run Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, and clerked for Judge Edith H. Jones of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. She’s a graduate of Harvard Law School and Northwestern University.Isgur is in conversation with Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. He has reported from the White House under four presidents and fourteen press secretaries. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents' Association.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593800928?ic_referral=lrxQ1bCO7L9SVK92BWH69_1BuRvuXI8J-zLsil2HFvAwM4QDndWE26djtJLsu__phGkHD2Or1lcIKFouM4YylJiLZ5Q2eRTo4g4mVSp4BvYbtvaqpC31QhC1C6rC5SpssyWfhTk

Sharmila Basu has curated the perfect life. He is the one variable she never planned for.As an Indian American political journalist, Sharmila appears to be living the ultimate American Dream: a high-powered career, vintage wardrobe and a swanky home in the power corridors of Washington, DC. She lives with her boyfriend, America's reigning heartthrob and favourite TV news anchor Lionel Stern. Even Lionel's notoriously icy mother has welcomed her into the fold. But for the daughter of an Indian Foreign Service attaché, who spent her childhood traversing the globe before finally settling in the US, predictable is a dangerous word and stability an illusion. At a high-profile awards gala, Sharmila's orderly world is upended by a chance encounter with a group of vibrant Indian Americans – specifically, Jake Thacker. A math savant turned tech mogul, Jake possesses a gravitational pull that Sharmila can't ignore. Sparks fly. Lines blur. And suddenly, everything she has felt certain about feels negotiable.As kismet begins to unravel her carefully constructed reality, a darker threat looms. Beneath Sharmila's poised exterior lies a secret from her past, one that no longer intends to stay buried. When her past threatens to become national headlines, Sharmila must decide if she is willing to let her world implode to finally find her own truth.From the gala circuits of DC and the quiet porches of Iowa City to the sun-drenched streets of San Sebastian in Spain, this is a love triangle unlike any other.Chandrani Ghosh is a former journalist (Time, Forbes, and Business Standard) who, many years ago, traded her press pass for a carpool one. Now that the carpoolers are drivers, she returns to the page. Drawing on her experiences of growing up in the chaotic worlds of Kolkata and Delhi, spending her twenties in London, Geneva, and Kathmandu, and eventually settling in Washington, Ghosh makes her literary debut with Heartlines.Ghosh is in conversation with Kathleen Matthews, a Washington journalist and communications strategist. For  25 years, she reported and anchored the news for WJLA-TV. In 2006, she moved to Marriott International as chief communications and public affairs officer for the global hotel company. In 2016 she ran for Congress in Maryland's 8th congressional district, later served as chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, and she remains active in Democratic politics. She is a voracious novel reader.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9789369529193?ic_referral=bcKEZTxWk8JPkiUXYxGneeEE1NccGPUZapJa4LjW-iEwM7E-uE88AAvt2YtXhfG0Y_cZDMN0pkafoHISHv8lu4A3lPCsx0CmsfWP9uPe6YgEZGexcOrGVx9CwNi8OIveHLjEhNA

From befriending George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton at Yale to defending Bill Clinton and earning a reputation as “the da Vinci of spin,” a legendary political adviser takes readers behind the curtain of three decades of US history, the decline of civility in the Trump era, and how both parties can regain their faith in America by restoring it.Beginning with his early days on the Yale campus with two future presidents, three future senators, and three future governors, few politicos have found themselves closer to the people who matter most in both American political parties in the past three decades than Lanny Davis.Shortly after graduating from Yale Law School in the early 1970s, Davis first met Hillary Rodham—a promising law student he thought would be the first president of the baby boomer generation . . . until she introduced him to an up-and-coming political star named Bill Clinton.It was in their first conversations about the deep divisions brought on by the Vietnam War that Clinton said, “Back in Arkansas, to solve a problem, we learned you can’t just attack and label people. It’s not about ‘right’ versus ‘left’—it’s about finding a third way that solves a problem, with each side giving in a little.” At that moment, Davis began to reconsider whether Hillary would make it to the White House first.The “Third Way” that Clinton described was not a mushy center where there were no principles, just compromise. It was a new brand of politics that started with principled liberalism and conservatism and ended on common ground such as wariness of government overreach and protection of individual liberty.As both an FDR liberal Democrat and a friend of future Republican President George W. Bush, Davis found this Third Way philosophy to be a natural fit. After learning the ways of Washington from the likes of Edward Bennett Williams and Tommy Boggs while a partner at the landmark law firm Patton Boggs, he became the go-to crisis manager for the Clinton White House and a respected figure on all sides of the spectrum as the Third Way became the dominant political force of the 1990s and 2000s.Lanny J. Davis is a lawyer who counsels individuals, corporations, and others on crisis management and legal issues. He served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton and was a spokesperson for the president and the White House on matters concerning campaign finance investigations and other legal issues. In 2005 President George W. Bush appointed Davis to serve on the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by the U.S. Congress as part of the 2005 Intelligence Reform Act. He graduated from Yale Law School, where he won the prestigious Thurman Arnold Prize for moot court and served on the Yale Law Journal.Davis is in conversation Michael McCurry, is former White House Press Secretary and State Department Spokesman in the Clinton Administration. He served on staffs in the U.S Senate and on national campaigns prior to his government service. As a second career, McCurry taught at the Wesley Theological Seminary prior to retiring in 2022. Davis is also in conversation with Carl M. Cannon, the Washington Bureau Chief of RealClearPolitics and the Executive Editor of RealClear Media Group. He writes his “Cannon Fodder” column for RCP and co-hosts a daily podcast carried on Sirius XM radio. He has covered every presidential campaign since 1984 and has received the two most prestigious awards for White House coverage: the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting of the Presidency, and the Aldo Beckman award for “excellence in presidential news coverage.”PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798891383357?ic_referral=rX32ZwivS9kS0vn5v08LodK0YKyu2sv-kwieN251kAMwM28_pHt_k5wLZ3vpjx4a5t50PJWs2YBRYAagI8JmUxObU30WuhdqduDHOYJXLih-Z5_avJ3M_Bue4F5m87yuBjBwPS4

From the author of the cult classic Lives of the Saints, a diaristic novel of middle-aged reckoning that roves from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, from court records to Don Giovanni, all of it riotously narrated by one of American fiction’s most singular voices.Delery Anhalt—middle-aged, prone to “embroidering everything into vast ideals” like Don Quixote, but incapable of identifying the Shakespearean villains in her life, like Desdemona—is at a crossroads in life. Her father and his peers, the old guard of New Orleans, are entering their twilight years, her daughters are stepping into adulthood, and she is navigating the uncertainty of being midway upon the journey of her life.Caught between a generation fixed in the past and one intent on changing the future, Delery decides to take stock of herself and the people around her through a series of diaries brimming with wry observations of her upbringing in New Orleans and daily travails in Washington DC, and frank appraisals on what she calls her lions at the gate: the interior demands of insecurity, ego, annoyance, operatic wrath (felt most keenly towards bad houseguests), and remorse.A disarmingly funny and poignant portrayal of the vicissitudes of adulthood that is as exuberant as it is indignant, The Oyster Diaries sees the return of the beloved character Claude Collier from Lives of the Saints. Full of uncomfortable hilarities and potent truths, this novel proves to us, once again, that Nancy Lemann is one of our most fearless and original writers on the human condition.Nancy Lemann was born in New Orleans and is the author of Lives of the Saints, The Ritz of the Bayou, and Malaise, among other books.Lemann is in conversation with Terence Monmaney, the former executive editor of Smithsonian magazine. He has also worked as a writer for The New Yorker, Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. His free-lance stories have appeared in Esquire, GQ, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review and many other publications. Among the documentary movies he has written is, Marcel Proust: A Writer’s Life. Monmaney is currently working on a book about photosynthesis.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798896230328?ic_referral=ZUD9PiBsDjR-h_92lNPWwrNcW6qm34S0m1Qq2F3LsAwwM8Bnn6NLseR23_Qr4mPpF_8gyvwfO6qHIxERqnyv4WF1H-0gbcCzFrXKGvjqOCIqVAX7cMNN15PXq05Q-KX_ZRmjl3w

The Crown meets The West Wing in this illuminating history that chronicles the largely unknown story of Queen Elizabeth II’s relationship with thirteen American presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Donald J. Trump, and changed world history.No American or foreign leader has met with as many sitting presidents as Queen Elizabeth II. Her Royal Majesty’s seventy-year reign witnessed the highs and lows of the close and crucial alliance between the U.S. and the U.K., from the Suez crisis to Brexit.Following the advice of her mentor, Winston Churchill, to “stay close to the Americans,” Queen Elizabeth played an unexpected role behind the scenes that has never been thoroughly explored. In The Queen and Her Presidents, veteran political reporter Susan Page goes beyond the image of a staid monarch in colorful hats to reveal a skilled strategist, who, like many powerful women, was routinely underestimated and discounted.Page also shows the impact American presidents had on the monarch as she developed from a shy, anxious princess to a powerful and persuasive global leader, and analyzes both the reach and the limits of the “soft power” she wielded. These accounts of the Queen’s deft diplomacy provide candid and telling assessments of her partners in the Oval Office as well.Page shares fascinating true stories and details, including:Going beyond rumors and speculation, the reality of the relationship between Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth – and Trump’s own surprising comments about the monarch whose approval he coveted.The unexpected and genuine connection between the Queen and Barack Obama, and her surprising admission to him, and how each ranked the other as among the most impressive leaders of their lifetimes.Her influential friendship with Ronald Reagan during the Cold War, a bond built on their shared love of horses—and their conflict with Britain’s then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.How Richard Nixon sought the Queen’s help during Watergate—and even wanted to make her a relative.Elizabeth’s hand-in-glove cooperation with John F. Kennedy and the distance from his successor, Lyndon Johnson, the only president who declined to meet with her in office.The almost paternal role played by Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, offering support and advice as the young monarch assumed the crown in the wake of her beloved father’s death.Eye-opening and compelling, featuring an 8-page color photo insert, The Queen and Her Presidents is a remarkable chronicle of a legendary contemporary monarch and the American presidents who helped shape who helped shape her—and were shaped by her.Susan Page is the award-winning Washington Bureau chief of USA Today, where she writes about politics and the White House. Susan has covered eight White House administrations and twelve presidential elections. She has interviewed the past ten presidents and reported from six continents and dozens of foreign countries. Her previous bestselling books are The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power, and The Rulebreaker: The Life and Time of Barbara Walters. She lives in Washington, DC.Page is in conversation with Susan Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker, author of its weekly “Letter from Biden’s Washington” and co-host of its “The Political Scene” podcast. She previously served as the editor of POLITICO and founded the award-winning POLITICO Magazine. She was editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine and Moscow Co-Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. She is author of three books, including The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, and The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, with her husband, Peter Baker of The New York Times. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063397392?ic_referral=g7_k5c1F4k3r3tR7vY_1UxMHHJ2qWI79TzWv8Xm_8K0wM0zA5GTXezbQfaMJBc8wUy7qoIW4rAFQ6Nncv_KgD61snwRwdFnQph2tejdWqB3RjWF95YhfVxaTGOgA9l6j5ouT7as

This event is co-sponsored by OneAID.“A gripping page-turner that doubles as both a warning and an inspiration.” —Samantha Power, winner of the Pulitzer PrizeA Civil Servant Discovers His Breaking Point when the Trump Administration’s Cruelty and Indifference Threaten to Violate the Oath He Swore to UpholdNicholas Enrich had finally achieved his lifelong dream: becoming USAID’s lead official for global health. But that dream turned out to be a nightmare in the tumultuous time after President Trump’s second inauguration.In the months that followed, USAID became the first target of Elon Musk’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The mission to which Enrich had dedicated his career was being dismantled before his eyes—even the name of the agency was removed from the building’s facade. Enrich witnessed firsthand the Trump administration’s lies, how it systematically prevented USAID from providing lifesaving foreign aid, and the death and suffering around the world that resulted from careless decisions. Finally determining he could no longer keep quiet, and risking the career that he loved deeply, Enrich released a set of whistleblowing memos exposing the administration’s illegal and destructive actions.Enrich was put on administrative leave, yet his memos went viral and had a sustained impact. In the days following their release, hundreds of canceled aid projects were revived, and the documents were cited in a Supreme Court case on the legality of USAID’s dissolution. While his memos were too late to save USAID, Enrich was one of the first government officials to publicly blow the whistle on DOGE’s reckless destruction, sounding an early alarm bell for other federal agencies that would soon find themselves in the crosshairs.Urgent and profoundly human, Enrich’s story offers an astonishing behind-the-scenes look at a federal agency under siege, from the early days when Enrich and his team were unaware of what was to come to the shockingly ignorant, callous, and bigoted conversations they witnessed. Enrich reveals in this detailed, no-holds-barred account what was truly at stake when DOGE set out to dismantle one of America’s most effective humanitarian institutions, and how millions of lives hung in the balance.Nicholas Enrich is a former civil servant who worked at USAID under four administrations. He served as the Bureau of Global Health’s director of policy, programs, and planning until January 2025, when he was designated as USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health. On March 2, 2025, he was placed on administrative leave for exposing the Trump administration’s illegitimate and dangerous dismantling of USAID. Enrich is in conversation with Atul Gawande, author of several bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better; The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. OneAID is a grassroots organization whose mission is to sustain and empower the U.S. foreign assistance community. They serve as a connector and information hub to carry forward the knowledge, expertise, and dedication of a community that transcends borders and advances global peace and prosperity.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668226957?ic_referral=SEcgACC8EGWjaLVjJLH9ZTHIeIEAcufIXeud6yaWpS0wMxXIvQQvOYdQrb7XtTI_4eM-8Bx4S9xLxLJbatl6kq6tjQugUu5YfL03l4EhCR9yIgv_nHub6D5lY2f36Deq5Tiudl0

Wild meets The Wife Between Us in this page-turning thriller, set in Maine's Hundred Mile Wilderness—the treacherous final stretch of the storied Appalachian Trail—an addictive tale of passion, betrayal, control, and what it means to survive.Raised by a doomsday prepper and hardened by the startup world, Emma Sharp has learned how to endure—especially in her marriage to Logan Grant, a charismatic tyrant who keeps her under tight control. To Emma, her marriage is a cage: it keeps you in, but it also keeps you safe. Until it doesn't. When Emma forms an unexpected bond with Logan’s former girlfriend, the two women form a plan to help Emma take her life back. Destination: the punishing final stretch of the Appalachian Trail known as the Hundred Mile Wilderness.After all, bad things happen in the woods all the time. As the three venture deeper into Maine’s backcountry, desire and dread curdle into something unpredictable, dark, and deadly. Someone is lying. Someone is watching. And in the remote heart of the forest, someone is about to be lost . . . or found.How to Survive in the Woods is a heart-stopping knockout of a novel, by turns smart, psychologically rich, and deliciously dark. In her masterful hands, Kat Rosenfield asks us to consider what it means to be a survivor—and what, or who, you would sacrifice to stay alive.Kat Rosenfield is the author of six books, including No One Will Miss Her (Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel), and the New York Times-bestselling A Trick of Light, co-authored with the late, great Stan Lee. A former reporter for MTV News and current columnist for The Free Press, her essays and cultural criticism have appeared in The Boston Globe, Vulture, Wired, AirMail, and The New York Times. She lives in Connecticut.Rosenfield will be in conversation with Ben Dreyfuss. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063467484?ic_referral=fR1VBXKGzjmT4pZfUWEqNujcEbEIQ_0Byv4K6nJtZCgwMxbVbVAhcdN8J2FIJ3J_tLKzbQDW9bbTr1G6kLj2Tir33tHll1z0iRgbuDI-tc5gsHh96202foPhcfImFpOrTI3y-1g

The story of a disillusioned generation that set out to reclaim its dignity and take on corporate America.In recent years, young college grads have faced an alarming reality: crushing debt, unemployment, and jobs below their qualifications. They are frustrated that the time and money they invested in a degree have failed to bring about the opportunities they were promised.The anger of this college-educated working class began to boil over during the Covid pandemic, when workers at companies like Apple and Starbucks shocked corporate America by voting to unionize. Not long after, the veteran New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber met Chaya Barrett, an astute college grad and eight-year Apple employee who had helped organize her coworkers at an Apple store near Baltimore.While following Barrett and her cohort as their seemingly spontaneous rebellions spread far and wide—from college-educated workers at Apple stores and Starbucks cafés, through video-game studios, and even to Hollywood writers’ rooms—Scheiber realized he was witnessing something deep and lasting. Mutiny is the revelatory account of a generation made confident by their historic educational achievements, only to become disillusioned when their degrees yielded far less than they were taught to expect.With striking empathy, Scheiber paints a vivid portrait of this new working class while telling the dramatic story of its revolt against the status quo. He describes how recent developments like the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the war in Gaza have further fueled its discontent, and he explains why the college-educated working class will continue to demand change in the workplace, in cities like New York, and in national politics for years to come.Noam Scheiber covers workers for The New York Times. Before that, he covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns for The New Republic. His first book was The Escape Artists. He holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of Oxford.Scheiber is in conversation with Franklin Foer, a staff writer at the Atlantic. For seven years, he was the editor of the New Republic. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle For America's Future. Sports Illustrated named his book How Soccer Explains the World one of the "most influential books of the decade;" it has been translated into 29 languages. He is a native of Washington, D.C.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374610814?ic_referral=31QNyJViaEUIOMhKNbPoeD0-c2ORP_m2UbrsW0C_vrAwM3KkbfJi1inqOn14GxG06ZTI1EoSeZvnBk3-SSD6KBQoslIdjCFx6cNZQSkHYeiYELIlXwts_wPckyYU-cEhAevMeFo

Interrogates how digital self-surveillance can be turned against us by police, prosecutors, and political whimsFor consumers living in a digitally-connected world, smart technologies have built an inescapable trap of digital self-surveillance. Smart cars, smart homes, smart watches, and smart medical devices track our most private activities and intimate patterns. While these devices allow users to receive personal insights by monitoring their every move, that data can be accessed by police and prosecutors looking to find incriminating clues. Digital technology exposes everyone, everywhere, all at once and we have few laws to regulate it.In Your Data Will Be Used Against You, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson warns us of how the rise of sensor-driven technology, social media monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms. At the same time, that data will solve crimes, radically transforming how criminal cases are prosecuted. Ferguson explores how this proliferation of private data in combination with public surveillance networks promises new ways to solve previously unsolvable crimes but also leaves us vulnerable to governmental overreach and abuse. He argues for legal interventions that address the threat of digital self-surveillance and provides concrete suggestions about how legislators, judges, and communities should respond.As consumers, citizens, and potential subjects of surveillance, the questions in this book must be confronted now, before the trap of surveillance captures us completely. Providing a stark warning of the dangers of digital self-surveillance, Your Data Will be Used Against You is a defense of civil liberties against the growing threat of data-driven policing.Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. He is a national expert on new surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice. He is the author of the 2018 PROSE Award winning book, The Rise of Big Data Policing. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.Ferguson is in conversation with Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she works to shed light on the government’s use of surveillance technologies and authorities and its collection and use of data for law enforcement and homeland security purposes. Rachel has authored articles and reports on topics including DHS's counterterrorism efforts 20 years after 9/11; the government’s use of social media; and the constitutional implications of law enforcement surveillance in public. She has written and provided expert input for publications including the Guardian, Washington Post, Wired, Atlantic, and the New Republic. From February to June 2024, she served as an Ian Axford Fellow in Public Policy for the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Wellington, New Zealand. She previously served as senior counsel to the American Association of University Professors and trial counsel in the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and was a law clerk to the Honorable Margaret M. McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She is a graduate of Williams College and the University of Chicago Law School. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781479838288?ic_referral=3rZX02MEW8cLPLnminHYruqdvDuOzSQ_MSnX6Wi_hw0wM9oFHSL5tFTX90ejjFPugVq47zv8lnIYRG4NH2PHZnQW3l2ZTGKYKgPp8L9J0oIR4uAgJ_tvj_Ryx84qGoJW9SYeq8k

The first-ever biography of the most pivotal Justice on the Supreme Court whose decisions, like the overturning of Roe, will drive the reshaping of America, by prize-winning journalist Peter Canellos.When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the landmark case overturning Roe v. Wade, it marked a turning point in the lives of millions of Americans. It was also the culmination of a decades-long movement whose grievances were embodied by the man who wrote the court’s opinion: Samuel Anthony Alito Jr.Steely in his demeanor, with an impassive appearance that defies changing fashions, Alito could be the family lawyer in a 1960s television drama. But when he talks there is an emotional undercurrent, a fast-flowing stream beneath a placid surface. This is a man driven to push boundaries and mold ideas. His aim is to right the wrongs of the past six decades, as he saw them. He was the prized son of an Italian-born father and a mother whose parents emigrated from Italy shortly before her birth, worked their way into the middle class despite anti-Catholic prejudice and humiliating setbacks like evictions, and exacting big achievement demands of their children. But his family’s values came under attack during the sixties and later when Alito was at Princeton as the Vietnam war raged, women demanded equality, and their brand of patriotism was devalued.The Federalist Society provided a safe space for Alito and those like him, and he moved fast up the judicial ladder to eventually land on the Supreme Court. There he has been aggressive in pushing the law in new, conservative directions—from pushing for expanding rights for the religious conservatives, overturning affirmative action, extending the right to bear arms to thwart gun controls, and reducing the power of the Environmental Protection Agency. And finally—most crucial to his legacy—he was the author of Dobbs v. Jackson, bringing the conservative legal movement full circle in overruling Roe v. Wade. His ethnic and religious background, his intellectual confidence, and his unyielding determination are all illustrative of a group of men and women who, beset by grievance, embarked on a decades-long mission to change the rules that govern society.Peter S. Canellos is the author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero, and the editor of the bestselling Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. He is currently managing editor for enterprise at POLITICO, and also has been POLITICO’s executive editor, leading the newsroom during the 2016 presidential coverage; and the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. He has also been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors award in 2011 for excellence in editorial writing along with the 2022 George Polk Award, Robin Toner Award, and News Leaders Association Batten Medal for his writing about the Supreme Court.Canellos is in conversation with Kimberly Wehle, a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law who speaks and writes on democracy, the rule of law, the Supreme Court and the separation of powers. A former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Associate Independent Counsel in the Whitewater Investigation, she has authored four books, including How to Read The Constitution—and Why, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why, and How to Think Like a Lawyer—and Why and Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works—and Why. She is also a legal contributor for ABC News, has a monthly column with Zeteo called Constitution in Crisis, and writes semi-monthly for The Hill. Her Substack, The Little Law School with Kim Wehle, breaks down complex legal issues for general audiences. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668200025?ic_referral=hT3PVozCmDrX6Z41gLO4lJNrHmXr1CrHwU9oHemSZo4wM2AYkG5HyeYsiVPLbHVfuq2B2lITOuDL0Wt0jbgRaUJgAT2oEaDpoa91stt5fWqhznRi2tNPtEQi5rUjZX5gc2PyHBM

The 30th Anniversary Edition of this classic memoir includes a new introduction by the author.A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by the longtime All Things Considered commentator charts the trajectory of a marriage so impossible that it became inevitable."Gritty, funny, moving, horrific, outrageous—and, above all, fearlessly honest.... ultimately a joyous story." —NewsdayWhen Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi Gras in New Orleans, her friends shook their heads. For starters, she was straight and he was gay. But Marion and Tony's impossible love turned out to be true enough to produce a marriage and two beautiful sons, true enough to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal, and the AIDS that would kill Tony at the age of thirty-seven, twelve years after they met.Marion Winik is heard regularly on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." She was the recipient of a 1993 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction and has been voted Favorite Local Writer by the readers of the Austin Chronicle for four consecutive years. First Comes Love won the Violet Crown Award for Best Book by an Austen Writer, 1996, from the Austen Writer's League. The author of Telling, she lives in Austin, Texas, with her two sons.Winik is in conversation with Susan Coll, the best-selling author of eight novels, including The Literati, Real Life and Other Fictions, Bookish People, and The Stager, a New York Times and Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice. Her novel Acceptance was made into a television movie starring Joan Cusack. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, Moment Magazine, NPR.org, and Atlantic.com. She is the events advisor at Politics and Prose Bookstore. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780679765554?ic_referral=_MOCg5WVTDMmfRWbuNGJgre-GEy7jUr-DJLX1PG-6qQwM8IJdPJNNe_IkKS6VCImyl0uEoU_neWNviBuKNMIb1grpHIdtFKEzWR0gPxkYTCZ99wO8GdfDGQtfzWI_zi90Y7ubYo

From award-winning author Nora Lange comes a ransacking of the house of motherhood and matrimony.Nora Lange’s debut novel, Us Fools, was praised as the “Great American Novel” by Molly Young in The New York Times, and “a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism” by Michael Schaub at NPR. Now, she turns her eye toward the daily exercise of getting by.In “Heart Beats,” Carol and David arrive late to a Boston dinner party for a night of “messy socializing” with other couples, including a former cult-leader turned financial-advisor and a woman who learned of a “kinky sort of game” while riding public transit, details that she will reveal after the peach crumble. In “Island of Phaetons,” an expatriate living in Istanbul is called away from her daily life with “the husband” and “the friend who wanted more than friendship” to visit her mother, who notoriously makes bad decisions, and who has just arrived in Greece “with news” for her daughter, a tantalizing invitation that has her daughter immediately on a plane. In “Dog Star,” two figurines live out their dreams before succumbing to the truth that they have been assembled inside of a snow globe and will never go anywhere. In the title story, a new mother in Los Angeles navigates a job, a long-distance relationship with her husband, and her visiting mother, while hoping to find relief in daytime app sex.These stories of lust, estrangement, and self-preservation are at once hilarious and savage. Day Care is a biting reflection on economic precarity, love, and peeing your pants.Nora Lange’s debut novel Us Fools was awarded the The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Hazlitt, and elsewhere. Her project “Dailyness” was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family.Lange is in conversation with Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington, DC. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013 and was shortlisted once again in 2016. He was also recently named to the Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of A Particular Kind of Black Man.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781953387578?ic_referral=Au7ChQ1cBhMKWuq2u7RHQLmciq8fjB4MhF8kAJ7GRw8wM4Vr_G-8xEqfL4yu63-S_AhrBN96zwEzixGg5iiLP-rUnaixM6eAivLJSN7rQbTLyiAhHIi-uY0oN5lo3nLV41VeHZ4

A gripping story that reveals what happened to a small American town when an influential white nationalist group relocated its headquarters there, illustrating how radical changes in American politics impact our psyches and divide our communities When the white nationalist group VDARE used dark money to purchase a historic castle overlooking Berkeley Springs in West Virginia, America’s “cold civil war” spilled into this scenic tourist town. From behind the imposing stone walls of their castle, VDARE’s Peter and Lydia Brimelow spread propaganda focused on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, sowing discord in the once-peaceful town below. In an attempt to restore civility, a group of neighbors banded together to oppose VDARE’s presence in Berkeley Springs. Strange People on the Hill urgently demonstrates how extreme reactionary ideology and the national politics that embody it disrupt the lives of everyday Americans while highlighting the intimate relationship between violent, racist radicalism and what now passes for mainstream conservatism. Through extensive on-the-ground reporting, renowned researcher and investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden shows how the politicized culture wars manifest in deeply personal dramas and conflicts in a moving narrative about how the people of Berkeley Springs are bravely standing up against hate and division and forging a community built on inclusivity, respect, and neighborliness.Michael Edison Hayden  is an investigative reporter and a leading expert on far-right extremism. As a reporter, he broke some of the biggest stories on the radical right over the last decade, and his analyses—featured in outlets like NPR, MSNBC, and CNN—helped shape perspectives on the authoritarian, anti-democracy movement that took over the Republican Party. He is the co-host of the podcast Posting Through It and he resides in New York. Hayden is in conversation with Jared Holt, an acclaimed investigative researcher and reporter known for his coverage of right-wing political movements in the United States. He currently works as a senior researcher at Open Measures, an open-source social intelligence platform. His reporting and analysis has appeared in major national outlets including The Washington Post, MSNow, The Daily Beast, Columbia Journalism Review, and HuffPost, among others. He has also worked with leading research organizations such as Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, Right Wing Watch, and Media Matters. He is based in ChicagoPURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781645030607?ic_referral=V3JYFF9e14hKFk6u6ImBBzOTElZsvuAEBOcVMQGNI68wMwLAk9zsxM5UbNQMFOakLvg5UqEYKydQ_63oaj7WpLKLETAVNZDu1ish__V0gze9DkFFYsgrh1utQDd9VXee0J1kzc8

An assembly of refusals portraying the radical power of "no" by the renowned scholar and author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, Sara Ahmed.To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Ahmed attunes her "feminist ear" to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly--how they work, and for whom they work.Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where--Ahmed's accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say "No " and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar who works at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life as well as institutional cultures. She has published eleven books, including The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England.Ahmed is in conversation with Soraya Chemaly, an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. She is the director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project and an advocate for women's freedom of expression and expanded civic and political engagement. A prolific writer and speaker, her articles appear in Time, The Verge, The Guardian, The Nation, HuffPost, and The Atlantic. Follow her on X at @SChemaly and learn more at SorayaChemaly.com.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781558613683?ic_referral=O-VYY_qK6xdHs6y47VMA3SXxwjSaCPA6NxTWEnMEzQAwM9ftbIv_CRmI_UV3vQd3dP7Zsf3v_B_D-megeypHdm4MEge9mdqPVKva0enBieo044Wi0QuVUs05pJfPaJI8hXS2J-A

A GI’s guide to the brain-gut-microbiome connection, including research on why people develop IBS and how anyone can achieve poophoriaWelcome to the easy-to-digest user’s manual for your body’s unsung hero: the gut. Leading Harvard gastroenterologist, Dr. Trisha Pasricha takes us on a riotous deep dive into our own bowels with new insight from neuroscience, enteric biology, and physiology for an actionable framework to make pooping a breeze.No one would expect you to have stunning teeth if you were never shown a toothbrush. You would struggle to fall asleep if you never knew how to turn off the bedroom lights. But no one talks about the fundamentals of pooping, and so many—even the highest of achievers—spiral into a quagmire of poor habits and toilet-anxiety.You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong will teach you:What is a “normal” bowel movement? What do different colors mean? Is there a wrong way to sit? Is there a better way to wipe?The intricate connection between your brain and your gut: Why do you suddenly need to find the restroom right before your turn at karaoke and why does stress make you constipated?How to harness your gut’s microbiome to boost your health: How does your lifestyle influence your microbiome and how can your microbiome, in turn, reshape you?The three P's of having a perfect poop: A simple framework to transform your bowel habits based on years of gastroenterological expertise.And much more…Here, you’ll learn the tools to achieve bowel consistency, ease, and—yes—joy so that your gut flows on autopilot and you live your life without obsessing about the toilet: in short, poophoria.Trisha Pasricha, MD, MPH is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the “Ask A Doctor” columnist for The Washington Post where she translates complex medical topics into must-read insights—with a touch of humor—for millions each week. A graduate of Harvard College, Dr. Pasricha earned her medical degree from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her training includes an internal medicine residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and gastroenterology and motility fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital. Currently, Dr. Pasricha serves as director of the Institute for Gut-Brain Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, leading an NIH-funded research laboratory at the forefront of gut-brain science. Her work has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Network Open, and Nature Reviews.Dr. Pasricha will be in conversation with Ann Compton.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593855133?ic_referral=6W0CM3KGuadQlptRSjTLTJZkPgaLYuSZiK24UWy6ABQwMwu94QvMk88nY0si0k3qVl7K4aykyqODUYED1FmYI-YpWESnHMGrlOC6IbPeXa4NsNES_9hzTguxXi4OmDTCix6IKdA

When a Victorian fossil hunter discovers a baby pterodactyl, she vows to protect him, with the help of a fellow scholar—her former fiancé—in this enchanting and transporting historical fantasy.Mary Anning wants to be a geomagician—a paleontologist who uses fossils to wield magic—but since the Geomagical Society of London refuses to admit women, she’s stuck selling her discoveries to tourists instead. Then an ancient egg hatches in her hands, revealing a lovable baby pterodactyl that Mary names Ajax, and she knows that this is a scientific find that could make her career—if she’s strategic.But when Mary contacts the Society about her discovery, they demand to take possession of Ajax. Their emissary is none other than Henry Stanton, a distinguished (and infuriatingly handsome) scholar . . . and the man who once broke Mary’s heart. She knows she can’t trust her fellow scholars, who want to discredit her and claim Ajax for their own, but Henry insists he believes in the brilliant Mary and only wants to help her obtain the respect she deserves.Now Mary has a new mystery to solve that’s buried deeper than any dinosaur skeleton: She must uncover the secrets behind the Society and the truth about Henry. As her conscience begins to chafe against her ambition, Mary must decide what lengths she’s willing to go to finally belong—and what her heart really wants.Book One of The Geomagician DuologyJennifer Mandula lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with her husband, three daughters, and a neurotic corgi. She first learned of the historical Mary Anning while studying for her master’s in education at the University of Oxford. In her spare time, she visits local bakeries and plans her next escape to the beach. The Geomagician is her debut novel.Mandula is in conversation with Camila Domonoske, who covers cars, energy and the future of mobility for NPR's Business Desk. Before she joined the business desk, Domonoske was a general assignment reporter and a web producer for NPR. She has covered hurricanes and elections, walruses and circuses. She has written about language, race, gender and history. In a career highlight, she helped NPR win a pie-eating contest in the summer of 2018. Domonoske graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina, where she majored in English, with a focus on modern poetry.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593983300?ic_referral=y_8NzUv5IK_Xn0aUfpp3AeADFdu4Hqiuw0Ay-ftF6X8wM0ZPwOkIEk8ui55CcYdg4FXIiZl5M8_rE3SPziy1XxfowRoTT195Q7LxITuZN0vYTvXvfqhcFtv1m2NfkOkEuK_Gilc