Politics and Prose Presents

From the  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Escape Artist,  an extraordinary true story of resistance, heroism and betrayal. When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth. Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gest...

History Matters   brings together selected essays by beloved historian David McCullough, some published here for the first time, written at different points over the course of his long career but all focused on the subject of his lifelong passion: the importance of history in understanding our present and future. Edited by McCullough's daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and his longtime resear...

In the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one's reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief...

Joe McGinniss was a paradox: a brilliant writer whose dazzling achievements were overshadowed by personal demons. At age twenty-six, he became the youngest living person to top the  New York Times  bestseller list, for his book  The Selling of the President  about Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. Shortly after, he walked out on his wife and their three young children. His oldest son, Joe McGinni...

On February 11, 2024, NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, & the league’s two most powerful owners, Jerry Jones & Robert Kraft, looked down at the spectacle before them. What they saw was the sport’s championship game, the Super Bowl—now a de facto national holiday—being played in a shiny new $2B stadium, home to the first franchise based in Las Vegas, after the league’s embrace of nationwide...

In this darkly funny gothic tale, a reclusive mother and her saturnine daughter move into a haunted building brimming with eccentrics—and secrets. Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments—a former sanatorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Among the living: the Mermaid Lady, who performs in a nightclub...

Myriam Gurba has lived in California her entire life, with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscape as refracted through the languages and memories of her ancestors. In  Poppy State ,  California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, par...

In  1929 , the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded--one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin. With unparalleled access to historical records and newly unc...

If you're channel surfing and happen upon Leland Vittert during his nightly national cable show on NewsNation, he comes off as a poised journalist prying nuggets from guests. If you watched him for years as an anchor at Fox News Channel, you saw him on the battlefields of the Middle East, the anchor desk, and the White House North Lawn. No one, including friends and co-workers, has ever known...

Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the '70s and '80s, certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in jour...

Joanne Molinaro is everyone's favorite storytelling vegan cook. On her platform, The Korean Vegan, she's known for her personal narrative voiceovers, which accompany mouthwatering videos of her making everything from Kimchi to Korean-inspired pasta dishes. Whether it's a reflection on her relationship with her father over a plate of noodles or a story about learning to love her body as...

In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow--only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up--doctors, engineers, scientists--had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had...

"The story of my life is the story of my stories," writes Susan Orlean in this extraordinary, era-defining memoir from one of the greatest practitioners of narrative nonfiction of our time.  Joyride  is a magic carpet ride through Orlean's life and career, where every day is an opportunity for discovery and every moment holds the potential for wonder. Throughout her storied career, h...

Winner of the Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award,  In the Garden of Memory  is a memoir on the family of Peter Osnos. Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland's most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors.  In the Garden of Memory , her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of one of the country&#39...

Liberals With Attitude  documents the sixteen months in 1991-92 between the brutal beating of Rodney King by four police officers that was captured on a home video camera and the resignation of LAPD chief Daryl Gates. Gates was reviled by the local Black and civil liberties communities because of the pattern of racism and brutality in the department, and he was uniquely powerful because of the str...

This event will be in partnership with  Free DC  and the  SNCC Legacy Project . Police Against the Movement  shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abu...

In its duration, geographical reach, and ferocity, World War II was unprecedented, and the effects on those who fought it and their loved ones at home, immeasurable. The heroism of the men and women who won the war may be well documented, but we know too little about the pain and hardships the veterans endured upon their return home. As historian David Nasaw makes evident in his masterful recontex...

In 1922, Charles Garland, a young idealist, rejected a million-dollar inheritance, opting instead to invest in a future where radical ideas like economic equality and social justice could flourish. Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund, though dwarfed by the charitable foundations of industrial titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller, would become a crucible for progressive thought. The men and...

'Our cuisine, with its grits and black-eyed peas, crab cakes, red rice, and endless variations on the staple foods of the region, casts a spell that, if you're lucky, gets passed down with snapping string beans at the table and chewing cane on the back porch.' - Michael W. Twitty In the introduction to this groundbreaking recipe collection, acclaimed historian Michael W. Twitty declare...

A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It's challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist's block with his painting and h...

For centuries charlatans have been bamboozling victims. But today, charlatanry is more lucrative and global than ever. Using the power of digital technology, our age's charlatans have spun a worldwide web of exploitation on an unprecedented scale. In  Charlatans , global affairs experts Moisés Naím and Quico Toro investigate how charlatans fool us and why they've become so influential toda...

Jews met antisemitism on landing in New Amsterdam in 1654 when Peter Stuyvesant tried to expel them. The founding of the US changed little, as negative European stereotypes rooted into American soil. They faced restrictions on holding office, admission to schools, and employment in industry, while their synagogues and cemeteries were vandalized. Recently, white nationalists chanted "Jews will...

The Wayfinder   is an epic, sweeping novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu'i Tonga Empire. At its heart is Kōrero, a young girl chosen to save her people from the brink of starvation. Her quest takes her from her remote island home on a daring seafaring journey across a vast ocean empire built on power, consumption, and bloodshed. With the grandeu...

Words are the currency of culture--and never more than today. From  selfie  to  doomscrolling  to  rizz , our hyper-connected digital world coins and spreads new words with lightning speed and locks them into mainstream consciousness with unprecedented influence. Journalist and bestselling author Stefan Fatsis embedded as a lexicographer-in-training at America's most famous dictionary publishe...

This anthology of poetry by the members of the Capitol Hill Poetry Group celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding. Jean Nordhaus, who along with Shirley Cochrane founded the group on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. in 1975, is still a member. This group of both long-term and newer members, who are the authors included in this book, currently includes the author as follows: Patricia Gray, Ch...