“The path the slave took to ‘citizenship’ is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen’s music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel, development, jazz…[If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music.”So says Amiri Baraka in the introduction to Blues People, his classic work on...

"A great read."—Whoopi Goldberg, The ViewPrentice Onayemi narrates the story of how the clash between the civil rights firebrand and the father of modern conservatism continues to illuminate America's racial divideThis audiobook includes as a bonus feature the original audio recording of the Cambridge Union debateOn February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic ...

There’s a fine line between real life and video games in this engrossing novel that’s part Kathryn Erskine’s Mockingbird, part Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls.Severkin is an elf who slinks through the shadows of Wellhall’s spiraling stone towers, plundering ancient ruins and slaying mystical monstrosities with ease.He’s also a character in a video game—a character that twelve-year-old Nick Reeves plays when he needs a break from the real world. And lately Ni...

Selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—offered by the people who make history happen, but are often left out of history books: women, workers, nonwhites. Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn.New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning, speaking after her thirty-five-year prison sentence; Naomi Klein, speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square; a member of Dream Defenders,...

The Columbia space shuttle and its contents rain down on the people of Kiser, Texas, in Kathryn Schwille’s imaginative debut novel set six weeks before the invasion of Iraq.What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle’s break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after ...

As a survivor of the devastating civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Joseph Kaifala recounts the harrowing details af an early life punctuated by unimaginable violence and his journey to survival that eventually led him to the United States. Told with humility and grace, Adamalui is the true story of one man’s unshakable faith, thirst for knowledge, and indomitable will.Kaifala’s experiences as a child prisoner and refugee are told through a series of flashbacks as he ...

Ronald Kitchen was walking to buy cookies for his young son on a summer evening in 1988 when Chicago detectives picked him up for questioning. As the officers’ car headed toward the precinct, the twenty-two-year-old called out the window to his family, “I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”It took him twenty-one years to make it home.Kitchen was beaten and tortured by notorious police commander Jon Burge and his cronies until finally confessing to a gruesome quintuple homici...

An instant New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today Bestseller • AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB SELECTION • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021 • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTIONA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times • Time • Washington Post • Oprah Daily • People • Boston Globe • BookPage • Booklist • Kirkus • Atlanta Journal-Constit...

In order to reclaim her throne and save her people, an ousted queen must join forces with a young warrior in the second book of this "relentlessly gripping, brilliant" epic fantasy series from a breakout author (James Islington).Tau and his Queen, desperate to delay the impending attack on the capital by the indigenous people of Xidda, craft a dangerous plan. If Tau succeeds, the Queen will have the time she needs to assemble her forces and launch an all out assaul...

In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan’s East Village, the Christodora. The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared’s lives in ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, Milly and Jared’s...

A 2026 Audie Award Finalist for Short Stories/CollectionsA seminal work in Ray Bradbury’s career, The Illustrated Man is a mesmerizing collection of eighteen interconnected sci-fi short stories that explore the dichotomy of human nature and technology.Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. For this peerless American storyteller, the most bewitching force in the universe is human nature. In these eighteen startling tales unfolding acros...

On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto―a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck.In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without ...