Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence In Chain Gang All Stars, two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own.   The Freeing of Melancholia Bishop She felt their eyes, all those executioners. “Welcome, young lady,” said Micky Wright, the premier announcer

Winner of the PEN Open Book Award Winner of the Lambda Literary Award A New Yorker Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A Brittle Paper Notable African Book of the Year Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize Acclaimed poet Hafizah Augustus Geter reclaims her origin story in this “lyrical memoir” (The

By award-winning technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal Jeff Horwitz, a behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business, how it distorted the way we connect online, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out. “Jeff Horwitz has written a blockbuster expose of Facebook, the notoriously secretive social media giant

From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Ruth J. Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South

The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to “a mind spread out on the ground.” In this visceral memoir, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced. Elliott’s deeply personal writing details a life

Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster; and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.   IN GUAM, even the dead are dying. As I write this, the US

Material World is a celebration of the humans and human networks, the miraculous processes and little-known companies, that combine to turn  raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: from the ground up.   1 Homo Faber This story begins with a bang. An explosion of

Dr. Joy Buolamwini, the self-described “Poet of Code,” goes beyond the news headlines about racism, colorism, and sexism in Big Tech to tell the remarkable story of how she uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—evidence of racial and gender bias in tech—and galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice

After his father’s death, Esau McCaulley went back through his family history, seeking to understand the community that shaped him: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class. With profound honesty

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is a poet’s account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family’s escape from genocide. One A Phone Call from Beijing I keep returning to the first day of 2013. That evening, I received an unexpected call from Ilham Tohti, an economics

In Solito, a young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine.   Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the PEN/Open Book Award Finalist for

Two-time world champion debater and former coach of the Harvard debate team, Bo Seo tells the inspiring story of his life in competitive debating and reveals the timeless secrets of effective communication and persuasion.   1. Topic How to find the debate On a Monday morning in January 2007, a couple of months after my graduation