“I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Easy Beauty is a groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and a journey to far-flung places in search of a new way of seeing and being seen.
As father and son travel from the town of Jay’s birth to the labor camp from which he escaped, and to Auschwitz, where many in his family were lost, the stories Jason’s father has told all his life come alive. So too do Jason’s own memories of the way his father’s past complicated and impacted Jason's own inner life.
Randall Kenana wrote widely and profoundly about what it meant to be Black, gay, and Southern. In astonishing prose, he recollects the memories of his three mothers (especially Mama, his great-aunt), his boyhood fear of snakes, his rapture in books, and his sensual evocations of tobacco picking and hogkilling, butterbeans and scuppernongs, of the eastern North Carolina lowlands where we grew up.
Toni Morrison, born Chloe A. Wofford, was a towering figure in the world of literature when she entered A. J. Verdelle's life. Their literary friendship was a young writer's dream—simultaneously exhilarating, intimidating, fulfilling, and challenging. The relationship crossed generations, spanned several cycles in life, exhibited high and low notes, reached and dipped, and found its way.
On Autumn Lake collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring Transcendentalism tradition. Douglas Crase's prose is rich with conviction and desire, inspired as John Yau wrote, "the kind of attention usually reserved for poetry."
Americans consume over 1.5 billion pounds of peanut products every year, but few of us know the peanut's tumultuous history, or its intimate connection to slavery and freedom. Lyrical and powerful, Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions, revealing how demand for peanut oil in Europe ensured that slavery in Africa would persist well into the twentieth century.
What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own," but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? Award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge, evoking the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers including Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Neel.
Drawing on her own medical experience as well as fifteen years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, Meghan O’Rourke’s speaks to an urgent subject: the epidemic scale of autoimmune disease in America—even greater with the advent of “Long Covid”—and where we go from here.
Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet tells the incredible story of Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia—a tale that spans more than two centuries and captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age.
Gourevitch's unforgettable We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority: close to a million people murdered by their neighbors in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us a staggeringly vivid exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, denial and confession, vengefulness and forgiveness.
