General Books

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths' closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers--Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few--and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.

"Gaudy Night stands out even among Miss Sayers's novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself." --Times Literary Supplement

The great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction's most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers's work, praising her "great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and wonderful eye for detail." The third Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Gaudy Night features an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. Gaudy Night takes Harriet and her paramour, Lord Peter, to Oxford University, Harriet's alma mater, for a reunion, only to find themselves the targets of a nightmare of harassment and mysterious, murderous threats.

Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes to win Omnidawn's Open Poetry Book Contest. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize.

Good Bones is a collection of modern poetry that speaks to the world we live in. Maggie Smith contemplates the past and our future, life and death, childhood and motherhood. She writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. Smith takes in the dark world around her with a critical eye, always searching for the hidden goodness: compassion, empathy, honesty. "There is a light," she tells us, "and the light is good." Smith skillfully reveals the layers of the world around us through lyric language and vivid imagery: "For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake." These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world. We come away from this collection hopeful about making the world a better place, a place to share with future generations. As Smith tells us in Good Bones, "This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful."