Politics and Prose Presents

This event is in partnership with the  1882 Foundation’s Talk Story program . The 1882 Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising public awareness about Asian American history and the continuing impact of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act–the only piece of legislation to bar a specific group from entering the United States. Since 2013, the Talk Story Series has been one of the 1882...

For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work--and why it matters. To grap...

Ella Jenkins is one of the most influential musicians you've never heard of--her songs "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song" and "Who Fed the Chickens?" are classics in the world of children's music. In a career spanning more than sixty years, she recorded forty albums, won a lifetime-achievement Grammy, and became the best-selling individual artist in the h...

What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? Nathan Hensley turns to Victorian literature to uncover a prehistory of this deeply contemporary sense of powerlessness. For many in nineteenth-century Britain, their world seemed so scarred by human rapacity that restoring it seemed beyond the powers of any one individual. Like George Eliot's characters in  Middlemarc...

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as "baptism on repeat." Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the h...

Ages before the dawn of modern medicine, wild animals were harnessing the power of nature's pharmacy to heal themselves.  Doctors by Nature  reveals what researchers are now learning about the medical wonders of the animal world. In this visionary book, Jaap de Roode argues that we have underestimated the healing potential of nature for too long and shows how the study of self-medicating animals c...

For many decades, a sacred myth has ruled the minds of policymakers and business leaders: free markets, untouched by the soiled hands of government, bring us prosperity and stability. But it's wrong. American policy makers, on the right and the left, have spent much of the past century actively shaping our markets for social and political goals. Their work behind the scenes and out of the headline...

Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in 1950s Washington, though few knew it. Reporting directly to senior U.S. officials--his work largely hidden from Congress and the public-- Wisner masterminded some of the CIA's most daring and controversial operations in the early years of the Cold War, commanding thousands of clandestine agents around the world. Following an early career marked...

For decades America's colleges and universities have been working to increase racial diversity. But they have been using the wrong approach, as Richard Kahlenberg persuasively shows in his highly personal and deeply researched book. Kahlenberg makes the definitive case that class disadvantage, rather than race, should be the determining factor for how a broader array of people "get in.&qu...

The stories in  Origin Stories   take as their subject the sources of love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, artistic ambition, restiveness, and shame. Their characters perceive more than they can explain, want more than they can have, and contend with the bounty and frugality of their relationships. In "This Isn't the Actual Sea," a woman considers that her friend's failure and sudden success ha...

Elon Musk has cast himself as the savior of humanity, an altruistic force whose fortune is tied to noble pursuits from halting our dependence on fossil fuels to colonizing Mars. Once frequently heralded as a modern-day Edison, Musk has taken up a new place in the public consciousness with his growing desire to disrupt not just the automotive and space industries but the policies that shape our nat...

From prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of America's first great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs Barnes. Raised in a Philadelphia slum shortly after the Civil War, Barnes rose to earn a medical degree and then made a fortune from a pioneering antiseptic treatment for newborns. Never losing sight of the working-class neighbors of his youth, Barnes be...

In  The Age of the   Borderlands , acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architect...

Are you going through a period in your life when things feel "off"? Do you struggle to find joy in happy moments? Are you walking around feeling numb? Do you feel restless when you aren't busy or empty when you are sitting still? We all know what can't-get-out-of-bed depression looks like. But there's another, lesser-known side of depression that is hidden. Those of us with H...

Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic, as iconic as Walt Disney or Charles Schulz. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, a curator and writer...

At his desk one day, prominent Washington commentator Adam Zweig receives a text message. " Btw want to give you a heads-up abt some breaking news ," it reads. " Call soonest ." These are the early rumblings of an eventual media storm generated by small-town reporter Valerie Iovine, who has gone public with her account of sexual harassment at the hands of esteemed editor and li...

For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received their country's highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic and controversial Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his soldiers on the islands to starvation and surrender but whose vow to return echoed around the globe. The other was the gritty...

The Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970 fundamentally altered the political, social, and cultural landscapes of major cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and changed the country as well. By the late twentieth century, Black people were mayors, police chiefs, and school superintendents, at parity or overrepre...

This event is in partnership with  Solas Nua . Set in a remote village in the north of England,  Open, Heaven   unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other's lives. James  -- a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old  -- is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himse...

Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the famil...

After decades of enduring his mother's physical and psychological torment, after years of trying in vain to set boundaries, Eamon Dolan took a radical step: he cut his mother out of his life. No more phone calls, no more visits, no more contact. Parting with his abuser gave him immediate relief and set him on a path toward freedom, confidence, and joy like none he had ever felt before. In  The...

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, young--young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day - partner,...

Q&A for the End of the World  is a new series of poems about science fiction movies from the 1950's and 1960's, including such classics as "Godzilla" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Written alternately by the two authors, the book's twenty poems act as a call-and-response for each movie. The poems address facets of film technique, pop culture, race, gender-...

Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, yet soulful, they were 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American. They upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life. They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a comm...

In this ode to the earth and all its living creatures, French Djiboutian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi sounds the alarm about our imperiled planet, where "the Sahel rises in you, in me / the Red Sea boils in you, in me / Nunvut is melting in you, in me." This translation by Nancy Naomi Carlson preserves the rich musicality of the original French, as well as its frequ...