In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation’s sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a “new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has attempted to realize—or subvert—that promise over the past century and a half. The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all...

This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postem...

On May 1, 1866, a minor exchange between white Memphis city police and a group of black Union soldiers quickly escalated into murder and mayhem. Changes wrought by the Civil War and African American emancipation sent long-standing racial, economic, cultural, class, and gender tensions rocketing to new heights. For three days, a mob of white men roamed through South Memphis, leaving a trail of blood, rubble, and terror in their wake. By May 3, at least forty-six African American men, women,...

These stories are enveloped by change and the changes that shift the trajectories of our lives: change that shatters us, change that opens the world, and change from which we can never come back. These fourteen stories tell us about extensive and inevitable changes and how we realign ourselves and our lives, if we can.

With a reporter's eye for the inside story and a historian's grasp of the ironies in our collective past, Greg Downs affectionately observes some of the last survivors of what Greil Marcus has called the old, weird America. Living off the map and out of sight, folks like Embee, Rudy, Peg, and Branch define themselves by where they are, not by what they eat, drink, or wear.The man who is soon to abandon his family in "Ain't I a King, Too?" is mistaken for the populist autocrat of Lo...

Boston Noir & Boston Noir 2: The Complete Set combines all twenty-five stories from best seller Boston Noir."Dennis Lehane advises us not to judge the genre by its Hollywood images of sharp men in fedoras lighting cigarettes for femmes fatales standing in the dark alleys. [Lehane] writes persuasively of the gentrification that has left people feeling crushed." --New York Times, on Boston Noir"The contributor list is delight...

A new edition of the Arthur Ellis Award winning crime novelArthur Beauchamp, the scholarly, self-doubting legend of the B.C. criminal bar, is enjoying his retirement on B.C.’s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client. Nick “The Owl” Faloon, one of the world’s top jewel thieves, has been accused of raping and murdering a psychologist. Beauchamp has scarcely registered how unlikely it is that the rascally Faloon could commit a savage ...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “terrifically charming” (The Washington Post) collection of short stories, John Grisham takes us back to Ford County, Mississippi—the setting of his timeless first novel, A Time to Kill.“Ford County is the best writing John Grisham has ever done.”—Pat ConroyWheelchair-bound Inez Graney and her two older sons embark on a bizarre road trip through the ...

Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to disco...

**A classic summer thriller from the most popular storyteller of our time.When New York law student Jack Mullen learns that his brother has drowned, he knows it can't be an accident . . .**Jack Mullen is in New York City when the shocking news comes that his brother Peter has drowned in the ocean off East Hampton. Jack knows his brother and knows this couldn't be an accident — someone must have wanted his brother dead. But the powers that be say otherwise.As Jack tr...

From the hit podcast and radio show, a collection of soul-bearing stories from The Moth's archives.A wedding toast hone horribly awry. A rapper's obsession with a Sarah McLachlan song. A death-defying stunt in a bullring. The fight to save Mother Teresa's life. These are the spellbinding tales from The Moth's storytellers.Inspired by friends telling stories on a porch, The Moth was born in small-town Georgia, garnered a cult following in New York City, and th...

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker PrizeWinner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardFinalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardFinalist for the 2023 Dublin Literary AwardLonglisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionAn uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of TelephonePercival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a s...