Politics and Prose Presents

Blockers. It wasn’t a compliment. In the new Washington, it was the worst thing you could be—especially if you worked in the federal government and wanted to keep your job. A Blocker was a holdover, an impediment, someone who didn't get the message—and, most of all, someone who didn't belong. Michael Lewis found seven of them. Blockers is the story of people who believed they had a calling...

The story that inspired the acclaimed motion picture Worth, told by the man behind the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a moving saga of national tragedy and healing. Now with the author’s reflections on how today’s hyper-partisan America needs to unite to face our greatest challenges. Just days after September 11, 2001, attorney Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by Congress to administer the federal 9/...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the untold story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington “Chatelain teaches us how to tell fuller, truer stories. This is the model for recovering what we have been quick to forget.”—Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses There is no shortage of footage immortalizing t...

The chilling and revelatory story of how Russia’s confrontation with the West went global. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced a rupture with the United States and Europe not seen since the Cold War. As a result, Russia refocused its entire state machinery on one purpose: To outlast the West. Russia foreign policy analyst Hanna Notte uncovers how Russia reinvented itself, outmaneuvering s...

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and...

From Jennifer Welch, the host of the wildly popular “I’ve Had It” podcast and a trusted voice in new media, comes a piercing, incisive, no-holds-barred take on the rising threat of theocracy in America and a fresh vision for how we can take back our country. As a progressive atheist from a Bible Belt red state, Jennifer Welch has a unique perspective on the intersection of religion and politics in...

At the funeral of Charles Maddox, Theo Brown hears testimonies about his dead best friend’ s full, rich, glamor-filled life— stories that make Theo wonder if he really knew Charles, and if Theo himself has really lived. Trying to make up for his thirty-seven humdrum years, eager to help Charles’ s grieving sister, and wanting to find out what happened to his friend, Theo leaves his native Washingt...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road comes the heart-wrenching journey of a family facing an unthinkable destiny, whose flawed genetic code might hold the long-sought key to a cure for dementia. In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to col...

An acclaimed reporter takes us on an unforgettable journey, capturing the human capacity for love and connection against all odds. We live in an era defined by crisis—whether it be war and displacement, climate collapse, or growing inequality, and how the powerful profit from violence and exploitation. Celebrated foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the frontlines, uncovering...

10 portraits of Israelis from all backgrounds, depicting the war-torn landscape of recent Israeli history: complicated, polarized, lively, argumentative, and—increasingly—adrift. Renowned journalist Ruth Margalit revisits 10 profiles of Israeli politicians, cultural figures, and iconoclasts spanning a decade of her reporting for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine to create a powerful m...

It’s 1915. War rages in Europe while Armenians in the Ottoman Empire find themselves unfairly blamed for a major military defeat. Cooped up at home, fourteen-year-old Arakel tries to ignore rumors of arrests and beatings of Armenians by focusing on the journey with his two best friends, one Turkish and the other Armenian, on the Silk Road to China in two years, after high school, certain war will...

A passionate and illuminating account of soul, the hard-won wisdom shepherded by Black people throughout generations How did enslaved Africans turn America’s infamous failure into the greatest moral occasion of modern Western life? In this book, Christopher Freeburg answers that question with one word: soul. It was soul, Freeburg believes, which drove Black individuals and communities, grappling w...

An inspiring account of how the US government built a start-up development program to fight AIDS called PEPFAR, which saved more than twenty-six million lives and created a new blueprint for results-oriented American foreign aid. In 2002, more than two million Africans died of AIDS. Militaries reported HIV infection rates of more than twenty-five percent. Nearly four in ten pregnant women in some...

From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could...

“I can’t teach you, but I can show you.” With these words, Kentucky balladeer Doc Hopkins shared his musical knowledge with a willing student, summoning an independent streak deeply embedded in the American character. His words capture the informal creativity and colloquial practice that marks folk tradition as it extends from the countryside to the city and back again. Stephen Wade recounts creat...

When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s acc...

A powerful and authoritative account of how the Biden administration fueled atrocities in Gaza, from an award-winning foreign affairs journalist. Following Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack, Israel launched an offensive of staggering violence in Gaza, saying it targeted militants while regularly striking hospitals, schools, and homes. Critically acclaimed journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed offers exten...

We’re living in an age of deep political anger and frustration. Where did it come from? All the Wrong Moves offers a new, eye-opening answer, rooted in history, business, and the author’s firsthand experience, that reveals the true origins of America’s current political crisis. In All the Wrong Moves , Anthony Scaramucci charts how both political parties, over three decades, made a series of catas...

In a lyrical and profoundly moving memoir, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad reclaims her extraordinary journey from the embers of devastation to a fight for freedom—and for what comes next when a young girl’s flame cannot be extinguished.  In 2014, Nadia Murad was living in northern Iraq when her world was shattered. Fighters from the so-called Islamic State attacked her village, massacring...

Ke Huy Quan’s Hollywood adventure began when he was twelve years old, a mere five years after his family escaped Communist Northern Vietnam and settled down to a relatively peaceful life in L.A.’s Chinatown. After attending an open call audition on a whim, he was unexpectedly swept up in the wild world of filmmaking: learning to swim from Harrison Ford on the set of  Indiana Jones and the Temple o...

From the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor (“John le Carré’s nonfiction counterpart”—The New York Times) comes the ultimate true-life Cold War thriller: the story of a Russian double agent with a terrible secret—and the key to stopping a nuclear apocalypse.  The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the A...

From the New York Times best-selling author, a tragic history of the United States’ war on terror across four presidential administrations. 2026 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, the most devastating attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. The resulting war on terror cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. And yet despite its blunders, this campaign has kept America safe from...

A gripping, major new history of the explosion of the “Titanic of the Skies,” the rise of Nazism and the beginning of World War II For thirty-seven seconds on May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg lit up the sky over Lakehurst, New Jersey in an indelible conflagration that shocked the world and brought the airship era to a close.  In this definitive account, acclaimed historian Catherine Grace Katz brings t...

The definitive, sure to be headline-making, investigation into how Putin successfully mounted a decade-long covert war on the United States and how Donald Trump aided and abetted the operation and upended America and the world. How Russia Won tells the little-understood yet crucial story of how Vladimir Putin waged a secret campaign to subvert and weaken the United States—and how Trump, his MAGA m...

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had o...