Resistance Reading

You will not find a book more startling in its revelations, or more dramatic in its exposure of the lies and crimes hidden for centuries by the rich and powerful. At the heart of the story is a boy born after a brief affair between the young Michelangelo and an African slave girl: his name is Aly, and he recounts his amazing tale as an old man while looking back for the meaning of his life, and awaiting the assassins who would eventually take it.

Award-winning poet Martín Espada gives voice to the spirit of endurance in the face of loss.

In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. “El Moriviví” uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto Rico: “May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.” Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” urges us to “melt the bullets into bells.” Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean “actor,” finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s “numberless unknown heroes.”

1984
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever…“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting histor…

The Performance of Becoming Human
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. 2016 National Book Award Finalist. Following in the path of his acclaimed collections THE BOOK OF INTERFERING BODIES (Nightboat, 2011) and IN THE MURMURS OF THE ROTTEN CARCASS ECONOMY (Nightboat, 2015), Daniel Borzutzky returns to confront the various ways nation-states and their bureaucracies absorb and destroy communities …

A Fighting Chance
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works—and really doesn’t—in A Fighting Chance As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher—an ambitious goal, given her …

Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
Jezebel’s sexual lasciviousness, Mammy’s devotion, and Sapphire’s outspoken anger—these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual cr…

Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! In his first major book on the subject of income inequality, Noam Chomsky skewers the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism and casts a clear, cold, patient eye on the economic facts of life. What are the ten principles of concentration of wealth and power at work in America today? They’re simple enough: reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign the economy, shift the burden onto the poor and middle classes, attack the solidarity of the people, let special interests run the regulators, engineer election results, use fear and the power of the state to keep the rabble in line, manufacture consent, marginalize the population. In Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky devotes a chapter to each of these ten principles, and adds readings from some of the core texts that have influenced his thinking to bolster his argument. To create Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky and his editors, the filmmakers Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott, spent countless hours together over the course of five years, from 2011 to 2016….

A Colony in a Nation
This title will be released on March 21, 2017. New York Times best-selling author and Emmy Award–winning news anchor Chris Hayes argues that there are really two Americas: a Colony and a Nation. America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure—wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segre…

TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald
For anyone wondering what life will be like under President Trump, this biography offers a probing account of the man behind the hype. Available for the first time in a decade, with a new introduction by the author, this entertaining look inside the world of Donald Trump is chock full of rip-roaring anecdotes, jaw-dropping …

Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
The ascension of Vladimir Putin–a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB–to the presidency of Russia in 1999 should have been a signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years–as America and the world’s other leading pow…