Clearance

Riveting . . . An engrossing, street-level recounting and ambivalent ode to a great city.--Jamie Berger, San Francisco Chronicle

On July 13, 1977, there was a blackout in New York City. With the dark came excitement, adventure, and fright in subway tunnels, office towers, busy intersections, high-rise stairwells, hotel lobbies, elevators, and hospitals. There was revelry in bars and restaurants, music and dancing in the streets. On block after block, men and women proved themselves heroes by helping neighbors and strangers make it through the night.

Unfortunately, there was also widespread looting, vandalism, and arson. Even before police restored order, people began to ask and argue about why. Why did people do what they did when the lights went out? The argument raged for weeks but it was just like the night: lots of heat, little light-a shouting match between those who held fast to one explanation and those who held fast to another.

James Goodman cuts between accidents, encounters, conversations, exchanges, and arguments to re-create that night and its aftermath in a dizzying accumulation of detail. Rejecting simple dichotomies and one-dimensional explanations for why people act as they do in moments of conflict and crisis, Goodman illuminates attitudes, ideas, and experiences that have been lost in facile generalizations and analyses. Journalistic re-creation at its most exciting, Blackout provides a whirlwind tour of 1970s New York and a challenge to conventional thinking.

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. Translated by Vanessa PÃ(c)rez-Rosario. Mayra Santos-Febres is one of our most powerful writers; and BOAT PEOPLE has long been a part of the poetic counter-tradition that shaped generations of Puerto Rican poets. Thanks to Vanessa PÃ(c)rez-Rosario; English-language readers are now plunged into the depths of a text that; to echo Patrick Chamoiseau; is composed of 'that strange conference of poets and great beings;' lost at sea; tossed on shores; or caught in a world without return address or safe passage. Written like a border drawn on water; this oceanic book is both a source of life and a record of death. It remains as devastatingly urgent as the day it was written.--Raquel Salas Rivera

The ocean in BOAT PEOPLE is haunted and the book is the heartbreaking journey from sea to horizon. Melancholy and songlike; Santos-Febres documents the nameless; the chum: bodies set adrift by commerce. Like M. NourBese Philips's Zong!; this phenomenal translation in which I become 'a drop of fish sweat;' my body dancing to the poetry's music but also lamenting the violences that underlie it.--Carmen GimÃ(c)nez Smith