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New Fiction
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The Mystery Guest
A new mess. A new mystery. It’s up to Molly the maid to uncover the truth, no matter how dirty, in this standalone novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid, a Good Morning America Book Club pick.
“Polished to perfection!”—Shari Lapena, author of Everyone Here Is Lying
“A page-turning delight from start to finish . . . Once I checked into the Regency Grand, I never wanted to leave.”—Jenny Jackson, author of Pineapple Street
A POPSUGAR AND CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Molly Gray is not like anyone else. With her flair for cleaning and proper etiquette, she has risen through the ranks of the glorious five-star Regency Grand Hotel to become the esteemed Head Maid. But just as her life reaches a pinnacle state of perfection, her world is turned upside down when J. D. Grimthorpe, the world-renowned mystery author, drops dead—very dead—on the hotel’s tearoom floor.
When Detective Stark, Molly’s old foe, investigates the author’s unexpected demise, it becomes clear that this death was murder most foul. Suspects abound, and everyone wants to know: Who killed J. D. Grimthorpe? Was it Lily, the new Maid-in-Training? Or was it Serena, the author’s secretary? Could Mr. Preston, the hotel’s beloved doorman, be hiding something? And is Molly really as innocent as she seems?
As the high-profile death threatens the hotel’s pristine reputation, Molly knows she alone holds the key to unlocking the killer’s identity. But that key is buried deep in her past, as long ago, she knew J. D. Grimthorpe. Molly begins to comb her memory for clues, revisiting her childhood and the mysterious Grimthorpe mansion where she and her dearly departed Gran once worked side by side. With the entire hotel under investigation, Molly must solve the mystery posthaste. Because if there’s one thing she knows for sure, it’s that secrets don’t stay buried forever. -
A Grandmother Begins the Story
Award-winning author Michelle Porter makes her fiction debut with an enchanting and original story of the unrivaled desire for healing and the power of familial bonds across five generations of Métis women and the land and bison that surround them.
Written like a crooked Métis jig, A Grandmother Begins the Story follows five generations of women and bison as they reach for the stories that could remake their worlds and rebuild their futures.
Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens truly means.
Allie, Carter's mother, is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother. Lucie wants the granddaughter she's never met to help her join her ancestors in the Afterlife. And Geneviève is determined to conquer her demons before the fire inside burns her up, with the help of the sister she lost but has never been without. Meanwhile, Mamé, in the Afterlife, knows that all their stories began with her; she must find a way to cut herself from the last threads that keep her tethered to the living, just as they must find their own paths forward.
This extraordinary novel, told by a chorus of vividly realized, funny, wise, confused, struggling characters--including descendants of the bison that once freely roamed the land--heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in literary fiction. -
The Manor House
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nanny and What She Knew comes the terrifying story of what can happen after all your dreams come true
Be careful what you wish for...
Childhood sweethearts Nicole and Tom are a normal, loving couple--until a massive lottery win changes their lives overnight.
Soon they've moved into a custom-built state-of-the-art Glass Barn on the stunning grounds of Lancaut Manor in Gloucestershire. They have fancy cars, expensive hobbies, and an exclusive lifestyle they never could have imagined.
But this dream world quickly turns into a nightmare when Tom is found dead in the swimming pool. Was Tom's death a tragic accident, or was it something worse?
Nicole is devastated. Tom was her rock. And their beautiful barn --with all its smart features that never seem to work for her--is beginning to feel very lonely. But she's not entirely by herself out there in the country. There's a nice young couple who live in the Manor itself along with their middle-aged housekeeper who has the Coach House. And an old friend of Tom's from school has turned up to help her get through her grief.
But big money can bring big problems and big threats. And is Nicole's life in danger as well?
Nicole's beginning to feel like a little fish in a big glass bowl.
Surrounded by piranhas.
Don't miss these other chilling novels by New York Times bestselling author Gilly Macmillan:
The Long Weekend
To Tell You the Truth
The Nanny
I Know You
Odd Child Out
The Perfect Girl
What She Knew
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Class
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick
“Raw and inspiring.” —People
“Land is not just exploring her own story, but also the larger implications of what it means to fall between the cracks of American capitalism.” —The New York Times
From the New York Times bestselling author who inspired the hit Netflix series about a struggling mother barely making ends meet as a housecleaner—a gripping memoir about college, motherhood, poverty, and life after Maid.
When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, it was called “an eye-opening journey into the lives of the working poor” (People). Later it was adapted into the hit Netflix series Maid, which was viewed by 67 million households and was Netflix’s fourth most-watched show in 2021, garnering three Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Stephanie’s escape out of poverty and abuse in search of a better life inspired millions.
Maid was a story about a housecleaner, but it was also a story about a woman with a dream. In Class, Land takes us with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn including a byzantine loan system, not having enough money for food, navigating the judgments of professors and fellow students who didn’t understand the demands of attending college while under the poverty line—Land finds a way to survive once again, finally graduating in her mid-thirties.
Class paints an intimate and heartbreaking portrait of motherhood as it converges and often conflicts with personal desire and professional ambition. Who has the right to create art? Who has the right to go to college? And what kind of work is valued in our culture? In clear, candid, and moving prose, Class grapples with these questions, offering a searing indictment of America’s educational system and an inspiring testimony of a mother’s triumph against all odds. -
Plot Twist
"Definitely needs to be on your TBR." --Frolic on For Butter or Worse
"With great tension, simmering heat, and clever banter, For Butter or Worse is a mouthwateringly delicious enemies-to-lovers romance." --Helen Hoang, USA Today bestselling author of The Heart Principle
She's written off more than she can chew...
Romance author Sophie Lyon's ironic secret just went viral: she's never been in love. Though her debut novel made readers swoon, Sophie's having trouble getting her new characters to happily-ever-after, and she blames it on her own uninspired love life. With a manuscript deadline looming, Sophie makes an ambitious plan to overcome her writer's block: reunite with her exes to learn why she's never fallen in love--and document it all for her millions of new online followers. Which also means facing her ex-girlfriend Carla, the one person Sophie could have loved.
Luckily, Sophie's reclusive landlord, Dash Montrose--a former teen heartthrob--has social media all figured out and offers to help. But he doesn't mention that he's an anonymous online crafter, a hobby that helps him maintain his sobriety. No one knows about his complicated relationship with alcohol and he intends to keep it that way. His family is Hollywood royalty, so Dash has to steer clear of scandal.
As Sophie and Dash grow closer, they discover a heat between them that rivals Dash's pottery kiln. But Sophie needs to figure out who she is outside her relationships, and Dash isn't sure he's stable enough for the commitment she deserves. So Sophie suggests what any good romance author would: a friends-with-benefits arrangement. Surely a casual relationship won't cause any trouble... -
Good Girls Don't Die
A sharp-edged, supremely twisty thriller about three women who find themselves trapped inside stories they know aren’t their own, from the author of Alice and Near the Bone.Celia wakes up in a house that’s supposed to be hers. There’s a little girl who claims to be her daughter and a man who claims to be her husband, but Celia knows this family—and this life—is not hers…
Allie is supposed to be on a fun weekend trip—but then her friend’s boyfriend unexpectedly invites the group to a remote cabin in the woods. No one else believes Allie, but she is sure that something about this trip is very, very wrong…
Maggie just wants to be home with her daughter, but she’s in a dangerous situation and she doesn’t know who put her there or why. She’ll have to fight with everything she has to survive…
Three women. Three stories. Only one way out. This captivating novel will keep readers guessing until the very end. -
Day
NATIONAL BESTELLER • A “quietly stunning” (Ocean Vuong) exploration of love and loss, the struggles and limitations of family life—and how we all must learn to live together and apart—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours
“Along with George Eliot, Michael Cunningham belongs in that rare group of novelists who hold the world close, with apparently infinite respect, compassion, and tenderness, all while describing the world and its inhabitants unsparingly.”—Tony Kushner
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Harper’s Bazaar, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews
April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, is living vicariously through a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while his sister, Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.
April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the cozy brownstone is starting to feel more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And dear Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.
April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—and with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on. -
The Future
A Most Anticipated Book of Fall at Associated Press, Booklist, Chicago Tribune, Goodreads, Good Housekeeping, Literary Hub, Time, The Week, and W Magazine
The bestselling, award-winning author of The Power delivers a dazzling tour de force where a handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.
When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?
Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?
Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.
By turns thrilling, hilarious, tender, and always piercingly brilliant, The Future unfolds at a breakneck speed, highlighting how power corrupts the few who have it and what it means to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here. -
Better Hate than Never
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
A Best of the Month Pick from:
Amazon · Apple · LibraryReads
Childhood enemies discover the fine line between love and loathing in this heartfelt reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
Katerina Wilmot and Christopher Petruchio shared backyards as kids, but as adults they won’t even share the same hemisphere. That is, until Kate makes a rare visit home, and their fiery animosity rekindles into a raging inferno.
Despite their friends’ and families' pleas for peace, Christopher is unconvinced Kate would willingly douse the flames of their enmity. But when a drunken Kate confesses she’s only been hostile because she thought he hated her, Christopher vows to make peace with Kate once and for all. Tempting as it is to be swept away by her nemesis-turned-gentleman, Kate isn’t sure she can trust his charming good-guy act.
When Christopher’s persistence and Kate’s curiosity lead to an impassioned kiss, they realize “peace” is the last thing that will ever be possible between them. As desire gives way to deeper feelings, Kate and Christopher must decide if it’s truly better to hate than to never risk their hearts—or if they already gave them away long ago. -
Let Him in
"Let Him In is a feast of a novel." -- Darcy Coates, USA Today bestselling author
An October Library Reads Pick!
"Daddy, there's a man in our room..."
Alfie wakes one night to find his twin daughters at the foot of his bed, claiming there's a shadowy figure in their bedroom. When no such thing can be found, he assumes the girls had a nightmare.
He isn't surprised that they're troubled. Grief has made its home at Hart House: nine months ago, the twins' mother Pippa died unexpectedly, leaving Alfie to raise them alone. And now, when the girls mention a new imaginary friend, it seems like a harmless coping mechanism. But the situation quickly develops into something more insidious. The girls set an extra place for him at the table. They whisper to him. They say he's going to take them away...
Alfie calls upon Julia--Pippa's sister and a psychiatrist--to oust the malignant tenant from their lives. But as Alfie himself is haunted by visions and someone watches him at night, he begins to question the true character of the force that has poisoned his daughters' minds, with dark and violent consequences.
Whatever this "friend" is, he doesn't want to leave. Alfie will have to confront his own shameful secrets, the dark past of Hart House, and even the bounds of reality--or risk taking part in an unspeakable tragedy.
A horror debut perfect for readers of Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street and The Spite House by Johnny Compton, this emotional, hair-raising story will grip you from the first page, and won't let you go.
New Nonfiction
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Becoming Ella Fitzgerald
A landmark biography that reclaims Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator.
Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist.
Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' reformatory school--where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald's tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury.
Tick's compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald's complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre's mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella's transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre.
From the singer's first performance at the Apollo Theatre's famous "Amateur Night" to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb's big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form.
Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records.
A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century.
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When I Was Your Age
When I Was Your Age is a hilarious, heartwarming and surprising ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and luck, life, and learning from the school of hard knocks, from SNL's longest-serving actor, Kenan Thompson
Kenan Thompson is Saturday Night Live's longest-ever-serving cast member and a star of such pioneering sketches as "Black Jeopardy" and is hugely beloved thanks to a tidal wave of nostalgic fans who grew up on early 2000s classics All That, Good Burger, and Kenan & Kel on Nickelodeon.
He's also a dad (to two girls) in his mid-40s living in suburbia, and whose universal, relatable, family-friendly humor has created unbelievable appeal and engagement from fans from middle America to coastal elites. Becoming a dad sucked the cool right out of him -- and he's OK with that!
When I Was Your Age is packed with hilarious yet poignant essays that are aimed to offer any reader valuable advice on parenting, focusing on positivity, and having fun in life. Kids, new parents, fellow fathers, budding comics, and aunties who want to pinch his cheeks, can all learn from his biggest mistakes and most triumphant victories. There's something for everybody here!
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Songs on Endless Repeat
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 from: LA Times * Boston Globe * The Millions * LitHub
By the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning AFTERPARTIES comes a collection like none other: sharply funny, emotionally expansive essays and linked short fiction exploring family, queer desire, pop culture, and race
The late Anthony Veasna So's debut story collection, Afterparties, was a landmark publication, hailed as a "bittersweet triumph for a fresh voice silenced too soon" (Fresh Air). And he was equally known for his comic, soulful essays, published in n+1, The New Yorker, and The Millions.
Songs on Endless Repeat gathers those essays together, along with previously unpublished fiction. Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, the essays examine his youth in California, the lives of his refugee parents, his intimate friendships, loss, pop culture, and more. And in linked fiction following three Cambodian American cousins who stand to inherit their late aunt's illegitimate loan-sharking business, So explores community, grief, and longing with inimitable humor and depth.
Following "one of the most exciting contributions to Asian American literature in recent years" (Vulture), Songs on Endless Repeat is an astonishing final expression by a writer of "extraordinary achievement and immense promise" (The New Yorker).
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Weightless
A poignant and ruthlessly honest journey through cultural expectations of size, race, and gender--and toward a brighter future--from National Book Award nominee Evette Dionne
My body has not betrayed me; it has continued rebounding against all odds. It is a body that others map their expectations on, but it has never let me down.
In this insightful, funny, and whip-smart book, acclaimed writer Evette Dionne explores the minefields fat Black woman are forced to navigate in the course of everyday life. From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to diagnosis with heart failure at age twenty-nine, Dionne tracks her relationships with friendship, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image.
Along the way, she lifts back the curtain to reveal the subtle, insidious forms of surveillance and control levied at fat women: At the doctor's office, where any health ailment is treated with a directive to lose weight. On dating sites, where larger bodies are rejected or fetishized. On TV, where fat characters are asexual comedic relief. But Dionne's unflinching account of our deeply held prejudices is matched by her fierce belief in the power of self-love.
An unmissable portrait of a woman on a journey toward understanding our society and herself, Weightless holds up a mirror to the world we live in and asks us to imagine the future we deserve.
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The Night Parade
A Most Anticipated Book by Poets & Writers - The Boston Globe - San Francisco Chronicle - Los Angeles Times - The Millions - Library Journal - Book Riot - Debutiful - and many more!
In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated speculative memoir that draws upon the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyo--the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons--to shift the cultural narrative around mental illness, grief, and remembrance.
"Jami Nakamura Lin has reinvented the genre of memoir. . . . Serpentine, polyphonic, and stunningly textured, The Night Parade positively pulses with life." -- Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, award-winning author of The Fact of a Body
Are these the only two stories? The one, where you defeat your monster, and the other, where you succumb to it?
Jami Nakamura Lin spent much of her life feeling monstrous for reasons outside of her control. As a young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, much of her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and an array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships suffered as a result, especially as her father's cancer grasped hold of their family.
As she grew older and learned to better manage her episodes, Lin became frustrated with the familiar pattern she found in mental illness and grief narratives, and their focus on recovery. She sought comfort in the stories she'd loved as a child--tales of ghostly creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other figures from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legend, she set out to interrogate the very notion of recovery and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.
Featuring stunning illustrations by her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin, and divided into the four acts of a traditional Japanese narrative structure, The Night Parade is a genre-bending and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between realms. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, the grieving process, and other haunted topics with storytelling tradition, Jami Nakamura Lin shines a light into dark corners, driven by a question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?
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Seek
Maximize your potential for connection, healing, and personal growth with this "timely bridge for our divided world." (Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential)
"We've been hiding from each other for far too long. Seek offers us an empathic, practical, and heartfelt road map forward." ―Seth Godin, author of The Song of Significance and Tribes
If you've felt alienated and alone in recent years, you're in good company. Whether it's a rift in your family, polarization at your workplace or just a sense that society isn't as connected as it once was, many of us feel painful chasms in our connections. Internationally-recognized curiosity expert and bridge builder Scott Shigeoka knows that there's only one cure: Deep Curiosity.
Rooted in a desire to understand, rather than to know, a practice of Deep Curiosity can help us leverage something we think of as an intellectual force or personality trait into a heart-centered daily practice to transform our well-being and our lives.
In Seek, Shigeoka blends cutting-edge research with electric, vulnerable storytelling to teach readers their signature DIVE model. With his guidance, you'll learn more than a dozen practical strategies to:
- Detach -- Let go of your ABCs (assumptions, biases, certainty),
- Intend -- Prepare your mindset and setting,
- Value -- See the dignity of every person, including yourself,
- Embrace -- Welcome the hard times in your life.
"Energizing, creative, and exciting" (Gretchen Rubin), Seek is a revolutionary playbook to heal division, loneliness, estrangement, hatred, and our most urgent societal challenges. -
The Worlds I See
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON AI * FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2023
From Dr. Fei-Fei Li, one of TIME's 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL in AI, comes "a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the centre of our latest technological transformation" (Financial Times).
Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li “one of a tiny group of scientists—a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table—who are responsible for AI’s recent remarkable advances.”
Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China’s middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made all the harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother, who was working tirelessly to help them all gain a foothold in their new land.
Fei-Fei’s adolescent knack for physics endured, however, and positioned her to make a crucial contribution to the breakthrough we now call AI, placing her at the center of a global transformation. Over the last decades, her work has brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities—and the extraordinary dangers—of the technology she loves.
The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century’s defining moments from the inside. It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is—and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart. -
To Free the Captives
ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might—together—come to a new view of our shared past
“A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils...Hopeful...Beautiful and haunting.” —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again
In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.
In Smith’s own words, “To write a book about Black strength, Black continuance, and the powerful forms of belief and community that have long bolstered the soul of my people, I used the generations of my own patrilineal family to lean backward toward history, to gather a fuller sense of the lives my own ancestors led, the challenges they endured, and the sources of hope and bolstering they counted on. What this process has led me to believe is that all of us, in the here and now, can choose to work alongside the generations that precede us in tending to America’s oldest wounds and meeting the urgencies of our present.”
To Free the Captives touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where Smith’s father’s family comes from, and where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero’s record but difficult prospects as a Black man. Smith considers his life and the life of her father through the lens of history. Hoping to connect with their strength and continuance, she assembles a new terminology of American life.
Bearing courageous witness to the terms of Freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Weaving in an account of her growing spiritual practice, she argues that the soul is not merely a private site of respite or transcendence, but a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions: Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been? -
Mother, Nature
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of To Shake the Sleeping Self . . .
“Exquisitely written and completely compelling . . . As Jedidiah Jenkins traces a 5,000-mile route with his wildly entertaining mother, Barb, he begins to untangle the live wires of a parent-child bond and to wrestle with a love that hurts.”—Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms
When his mother, Barbara, turns seventy, Jedidiah Jenkins is reminded of a sobering truth: Our parents won’t live forever. For years, he and Barbara have talked about taking a trip together, just the two of them. They disagree about politics, about God, about the project of society—disagreements that hurt. But they love thrift stores, they love eating at diners, they love true crime, and they love each other. Jedidiah wants to step into Barbara’s world and get to know her in a way that occasional visits haven’t allowed.
They land on an idea: to retrace the thousands of miles Barbara trekked with Jedidiah’s father, travel writer Peter Jenkins, as part of the Walk Across America book trilogy that became a sensation in the 1970s. Beginning in New Orleans, they set off for the Oregon coast, listening to podcasts about outlaws and cult leaders—the only media they can agree on—while reliving the journey that changed Barbara’s life. Jedidiah discovers who Barbara was as a thirty-year-old writer walking across America and who she is now, as a parent who loves her son yet holds on to a version of faith that sees his sexuality as a sin.
Along the way, he peels back the layers of questions millions are asking today: How do we stay in relationship when it hurts? When do boundaries turn into separation? When do we stand up for ourselves, and when do we let it go?
Tender, smart, and profound, Mother, Nature is a story of a remarkable mother-son bond and a moving meditation on the complexities of love. -
Jumpman
"In 1991, Michael Jordan was on the brink of his first national championship and global superstardom. As he overcame stiff competition from the reigning titans of basketball and solidified his iconic status in the imagination of the American public, every new success created unprecedented commercial possibilities. Yet his life grew increasingly isolating. Every game, every appearance on television, amplified the public clamoring for Jordan to meet an impossible standard. As a national symbol, praised for transcending race, Jordan came to be seen as a bridge between white America and Black America, a unifying force in an age of dissolving social solidarity. It was a burden that was ultimately too much for one person, even one as extraordinary as Michael Jordan. Jumpman is the story of how Michael Jordan became the most famous and celebrated athlete in America. The book chronicles his ascendance as an NBA champion during the 1990-1991 season revealing the social, cultural, and political forces that shaped him and redefined the sport's importance. It explores how the NBA and Nike, publicists and producers, coaches and competitors, reporters and fans molded Jordan into a mythic version of the man from Wilmington, NC. Examining the unreckoned consequences of Jordan's fame and how race shaped the way people interpreted him and his achievements, Jumpman uncovers how Michael Jordan became something he never intended to be: an American hero. The book also reveals the paradox of Jordan with unprecedented acuity. In response to the growing demands on his time and the increasingly intrusive requests from the public and the press, Jordan became disillusioned with the trappings of celebrity, consciously cultivating an aura of secrecy. By design, this also hid the importance of race. Jordan understood that the less the public knew about his politics and his personal life, particularly past battles with racism, the more likable he would appear to people living under the illusion that the nation had solved its racial dilemmas. Blending dramatic accounts of gametime drama with grand depictions of the social forces sweeping America in the early 90s, Jumpman incisively portrays how racial conflict shaped Michael Jordan as he changed basketball history"--