Politics and Prose Presents

Teo Anand, former ne'er-do-well second son of the Anand Tech empire and current solar fugitive, has just crash-landed on the Moon after escaping the latest attempt on his life. But if anyone can help exonerate him, it's his best friend, bold Korean space pilot Ocean Yoon. Falsely accused of murdering his family, Teo is running out of both time and options. But loyalties are uncertain in th...

Crafted during the reign of Augustus Caesar at the outset of the Roman Empire, Virgil's  Aeneid  is a tale of thrilling adventure, extreme adversity, doomed romance, fateful battles, and profound loss. Through its stirring account of human struggle, meddling gods, and conflicting destinies, the poem brings to life the triumphs and trials that led to one of the most powerful societies the world...

On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when white NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris, 10 years old at the time, felt the aftershocks of the tragedy in her community well beyond the four walls of...

Following on his exquisite  Stones , Kevin Young's new collection, written over the span of sixteen years, shapes stories of loss and legacy, inspired in part by other lives. After starting in the bayous of his family's Louisiana, Young journeys to further states of mind in "All Souls," evoking "The whale / who finds the shore / & our poor prayers." Another central...

“Compulsively interesting and beautifully written—there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it.” —Zadie Smith Baldwin: A Love Story  tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his coll...

More than at any time since World War II, liberalism is under pressure, even siege. On the right, some have given up on liberalism. They hold it responsible for the collapse of the family and traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority, and widespread immorality. On the left, some are turning their backs on liberalism. They think that it lacks the resources to handle the prob...

"Why do you write?" the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her read...

Sifting through layers and layers of myth and legend--from nineteenth-century dime novels like  Deadwood Dick , to HBO prestige dramas to the casino billboards outside of present-day Deadwood--Peter Cozzens unveils the true face of Deadwood, South Dakota, the storied mining town that sprang up in early 1876 and came raining down in ashes only three years later, destined to become food for the imag...

In  The Parkinson's Plan , two doctors on the cutting edge of Parkinson's research detail the steps necessary to prevent, slow, and treat this debilitating condition. They show readers how to prevent the disease through the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the lifestyles we live. They introduce the "Parkinson's 25," the most detailed checklist ever cre...

The Second Emancipation , the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a "modern-day Copernicus." The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom--positions this liberation at the cent...

During his fourteen years as the head of the NFL Players Association, DeMaurice Smith was a front line advocate for football players through some of the most tumultuous crises in NFL history: Colin Kaepernick's protests, Deflategate, a lockout, two collective bargaining agreements, and more. But after witnessing the league's troubling response to discrimination and racial unrest, both with...

The local news crisis in the U. S. is at a turning point. The bad news is that too many local newspapers are continuing to shrink or disappear, and understaffed television and radio stations cover too little of their communities. The good news is that some newspapers have been saved, and hundreds of non-profit digital local and state news media have sprouted across the country, nurtured by nationa...

The Boys in the Light   follows the parallel journeys of Company D and Eddie Willner, the author's father, as they are caught up on two sides of World War II. At sixteen, Eddie Willner was among the millions of European Jews rounded up by Hitler's Nazis. He was forced into slave labor alongside his father and his best friend, Mike, and spent the next three years of his life surviving the d...

The excoriating stories in Mark Doten's brilliant first collection dissect the pathological narratives that shape our culture and country. Narrated by a crosscutting array of White people, Doten's stories spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time. They run the political spectrum from "well-...

On May 17, 1954 the landmark case  Brown v. Board of Education  determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Heralded as a massive victory for civil rights, the decision's goal was to give Black children equitable access to educational opportunities and clear a path to a better future. Yet in the years following the ruling, schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods we...

Politics and Prose is pleased to announce the third in a series of discussions meant to keep our community informed and engaged during this exceptional period in our nation’s political history.  As millions across our region and country suffer from the Trump Administration’s evisceration of federal government services, disregard for the rule of law, and attacks on democratic institutions, states a...

Over a decade ago, Katie Simon began seeking out stories of people who faced sexual challenges after sexual trauma--just as she did. Simon interviewed dozens of survivors, and her investigation yielded diverse responses from people of all backgrounds, ultimately confirming that there is no single path toward healing. Simon's research led her to life-changing findings that sexual assault surviv...

On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into Paris claiming to be a famous German actress and proceeded to seduce the cultural elite with her undeniable charisma and strangely enticing enigmatic aura. She persuaded fifty artists --Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Georges-Henri Rouault, Fernand Léger and Suzanne Valadon among them-- to immortalize her in paintings and sculptures...

In "Machine City," a college student's role in a friend's movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In "Slide to Unlock," a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in "Weird Menace," a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a co...

Introduction to Afrofuturism   delivers a fresh and contemporary introduction to Afrofuturism, discussing key themes, understandings, and interdisciplinary topics across multiple genres in Black literature, film, and music. From Afrofuturism's origins to the present, this critical volume features scholarly works, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction which illuminates on the contributions of...

For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been remo...

The building of the atomic bomb is the most audacious undertaking in human history: a rush by a small group of scientists and engineers in complete secrecy to unlock the most fundamental power of the universe. Even today, eighty years later, the Manhattan Project evokes boldness, daring, and the grandest of dreams: bringing an end to World War II in the Pacific, a conflict that already had stretch...

Sleeping in the Courtyard  shines a light on works by a group of diverse contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers living in Kurdistan and in diaspora. Featuring poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic work by both emerging and well-established writers, this collection recognizes the complex web of physical and lingual displacement of the Kurdish people. It presents work originally written...

This event is in partnership with  The Atlantic . Amid the ongoing decimation of media, Jacob Goldberg, a culture writer in New York, knows what will save him: a podcast. And not just any podcast, but something that will demonstrate his singular thoughtfulness in an oversaturated, competitive market. When Jacob learns the true, tragic circumstances behind the mysterious death of Seth, one of his b...

After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum's vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang's ope...