General Books
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Afropessimism
Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery--in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms--continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III's seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.
Combining precise philosophy with a torrent of memories, Wilderson presents the tenets of an increasingly prominent intellectual movement that sees Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Drawing on works of philosophy, literature, film, and critical theory, he shows that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but the very engine that powers our civilization, and that without this master-slave dynamic, the calculus bolstering world civilization would collapse. Unlike any other disenfranchised group, Wilderson argues, Blacks alone will remain essentially slaves in the larger Human world, where they can never be truly regarded as Human beings, where, "at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life."
And while Afropessimism delivers a formidable philosophical account of being Black, it is also interwoven with dramatic set pieces, autobiographical stories that juxtapose Wilderson's seemingly idyllic upbringing in mid-century Minneapolis with the abject racism he later encounters--whether in late 1960s Berkeley or in apartheid South Africa, where he joins forces with the African National Congress. Afropessimism provides no restorative solution to the hatred that abounds; rather, Wilderson believes that acknowledging these historical and social conditions will result in personal enlightenment about the reality of our inherently racialized existence.
Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker and as a twenty-first-century inheritor of many of the African American literary traditions established in centuries past.
America Fantastica
An American Master returns: The author of The Things They Carried delivers his first new novel in two decades, a brilliant and rollicking odyssey, in which a bank robbery by a disgraced journalist sparks a cross-country chase through a nation corroded by shameless delusion and deceit.
At 11:34 a.m. one Saturday in August 2019, Boyd Halverson strode into Community National Bank in northern California.
"How much is on hand, would you say?" he asked the teller. "I'll want it all."
"You're robbing me?"
"Not you, " Boyd replied, revealing a Temptation .38 Special.
Angie Bing, the teller, scraped together $81,000.
Boyd stuffed the cash into a paper grocery bag. "I'm sorry about this," he said, "but I'll have to ask you to take a ride with me. ..."
So begins the adventure of Boyd Halverson--star journalist turned notorious online disinformation troll turned JC Penny manager--and his irrepressible hostage, Angie Bing. Haunted by his past and weary of his present, Boyd has one goal before the authorities catch up with him: settle a score with the man who destroyed his life. By Monday Boyd and Angie reach Mexico; by winter, they are in a lakefront mansion in Minnesota. On their trail are hitmen, jealous lovers, ex-cons, an heiress, a billionaire shipping tycoon, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, and the ghosts of Boyd's past. Everyone, it seems, except the police.
America Fantastica marks the triumphant return of an essential voice in American letters. Just as O'Brien's modern classic, The Things They Carried, so brilliantly reflected the unromantic truth of war, America Fantastica puts a mirror to a nation and a time that has become dangerously unmoored from truth and greedy for delusion.
Amorisco
From "Heartsong"
And I say come like a stranger, like a feather
falling on an old woman's shoulder, like a hawk
that comes to feed from her hands, come like a mystery,
like sunlight rain, a blessing, a bus falling off a bridge,
come like a deserting soldier, a murderer chased by law,
like a girl prostitute escaping her pimp, come like a lost horse,
like a dog dying of thirst, come love, come ragged and melancholy
like the last day on earth, come like a sigh from a sick man,
come like a whisper, like a bump on the road, like a flood,
a dam breaking, turbines falling from the sky,
come love like the stench of a swamp, a barrage of light
filling a blind girl's eye, come like a memory
convulsing the body into sobs, like a carcass floating on a stream,
come like a vision, come love like a crushing need,
come like an afterthought. Heart song. Heart song
Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, and immigrated to the United States in his teens. As a poet, he is a citizen of the world. Both American and an exile, he writes of the beauties and grievances of history and culture in language born of profound experience. The author of Ismailia Eclipse and translator of three volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, Mattawa has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA translation grant.
Art of Perpetuation
Vivid explorations of cryogenics, lion baiting, iDollators, dodo birds, SpaceX, and more populate The Art of Perpetuation, a poignant new collection of lyric essays from Alison Powell that troubles the boundaries between human and animal, living and dead, man and woman, adult and child. These nine whip-smart essays juxtapose personal narrative-memories of the author's childhood growing up in southern Indiana and experiences as a mother of two-with scientific, historical, and cultural narrative. Throughout the collection, Powell seeks to unearth, to peel back, to lay bare: "To pry something out of someone, the meat of a walnut from its enamel-like shell, is an excavation-to uncover a lie, an infidelity." Dizzying, fragmentary, and provocative, Powell's lyrical investigations dig in deep, coming up for air only to expose the meaningless of naming in a world obsessed with self-perpetuation. "To say a poem is like a body is to say one's self is a machine. To say a body is erasable is to say extinction is a temperate clicking.... And like that, with one hand on the glass and one gloved hand inside the mouth of the woolly rhino, you have done it."
Audition for Murder
Bad Blood
After an argument with her grandmother at her Maryland home, sixteen-year-old Ginny Marshall - "born rotten," according to Gram - gets high and runs away. She turns up on the doorstep of Maggie Ryan and Nick O'Connor's Brooklyn brownstone. Her presence in Brooklyn is unsettling, but, more urgently, Ginny is a suspect in a murder investigation back home. Maggie travels undercover to Maryland, where she searches for a killer as threads from the past threaten to unravel both families.
Beekeeper's Apprentice
The Twentieth-Anniversary Edition of the First Novel of the Acclaimed Mary Russell Series by Edgar Award-Winning Author Laurie R. King.
An Agatha Award Best Novel Nominee - Named One of the Century's Best 100 Mysteries by the Independent Mystery Booksellers AssociationIn 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly engaged in the study of honeybees in Sussex when a young woman literally stumbles onto him on the Sussex Downs. Fifteen years old, gawky, egotistical, and recently orphaned, the young Mary Russell displays an intellect to impress even Sherlock Holmes. Under his reluctant tutelage, this very modern, twentieth-century woman proves a deft protégée and a fitting partner for the Victorian detective. They are soon called to Wales to help Scotland Yard find the kidnapped daughter of an American senator, a case of international significance with clues that dip deep into Holmes's past. Full of brilliant deduction, disguises, and danger, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, the first book of the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes mysteries, is "remarkably beguiling" (The Boston Globe).
Big Meal (acting edition)
Black Grief/White Grievance
How race shapes expectations about whose losses matter
In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence--the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege. Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy. She connects today's Black Lives Matter protests to the use of lynching photographs to arouse public outrage over post-Reconstruction era racial terror, and she discusses Emmett Till's funeral as a catalyst for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. She also traces the political weaponization of white victimhood during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Calling for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Hooker argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons and to different ends.Black Hour
