Politics and Prose Presents

When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city's squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes. Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atua...

Reaching back over a century of struggle, liberation, and gutsy play,  Shattering the Glass  is a sweeping chronicle of women's basketball in the United States. Offering vivid portraits of forgotten heroes and contemporary stars, Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford provide a broad perspective on the history of the sport, exploring its close relationship to concepts of womanhood, race, and sexu...

It is virtually impossible to turn on CNN, read the Wall Street Journal, go to a hospital, attend a university, or browse a bookstore without encountering a sea of Indian names and faces. In her new book,   Indian Genius: The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America  (Harper360; February 28, 2025), author and journalist Meenakshi Ahamed provides fascinating portraits of the Indian Americans at the fore...

This event is in partnership with  Solas Nua .  Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs,  The Paris Express  is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament h...

Tony Malik is a half-Irish, half-Arab New York-based FBI agent, specializing in money flowing from drug and arms deals. The novel opens in shocking fashion, and Malik's life changes radically. A long-term relationship ends, and his job is on the verge of being taken away from him. During this period he learns more about his roots and becomes interested in his father's past and family--his...

Told as a series of conversations,  Optional Practical Training   follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience--a period known as Optional Practical Training--so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a p...

In  The Pacific Circuit , the award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century. Oakland's stories encompass...

It was a quiet way to announce a revolution: In an obscure 2019 case that the Supreme Court refused to even hear, Justice Clarence Thomas raised the prospect of overturning the legendary  New York Times   v. Sullivan  decision. Though hardly a household name,  Sullivan  is one of the most consequential free speech decisions, ever. Fundamental to the creation of the modern media as we know it, it h...

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone. Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an i...

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In  Doggerel , Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic--but equally rich--lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and...

Without fail, almost every writer--new or experienced--has faced dire questions of permission and story ownership: there is something that they want to write about, that they need to write about. Yet: they can't. They have been warned not to. They might be paralyzed with shame, threatened with shunning, chastened into silence. Even if what they need to write about has defined them and their wo...

Northern Ireland, 1975. Violence has erupted on the streets of Belfast. After years as a sleepy, guerilla army, the IRA is clashing with Loyalist gangs and heavily armed British soldiers. But the Troubles have spilled beyond the small island: An ocean away, in the heart of Philadelphia's Irish enclave, a teenage girl finds a letter in her mailbox. Inside is a bullet, and the message is clear: ...

In 1789 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, looking for a sign, a signal, an answer to an enigma that has haunted him since childhood: Was Bach murdered by a famous oculist? And years later, was Handel a victim of the same doctor? Allegro  follows his investigation, from the salons of London to the streets of Paris, recreating an enthralling and turbulent...

Joan Didion opened  The White Album  (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delus...

In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there's more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Behind the scenes, Laurie's...

Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat  El Capitan  was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. &...

This event is in partnership with  The Atlantic.  In recent years, Olga Khazan had been spiraling toward an existential crisis. Though she treasured her loving relationship and her dream job, her neurotic personality often left her snatching dissatisfaction from the jaws of happiness. While her overachieving had always been a professional asset, Olga lately felt like her brittle disposition could...

All or Nothing   takes readers on a journey accompanying Donald Trump on his return to power as only Michael Wolff, the foremost chronicler of the Trump era, can do it. As Trump cruelly and swiftly dispatches his opponents, heaps fire and fury on the prosecutors and judges who are pursuing him, and mocks and belittles anyone in his way, including the president of the United States, this becomes no...

Founded in 1970, NPR is America's most powerful broadcast news network. Despite being overshadowed by the larger and more glamorous PBS, public radio has long been home to shows such as  All Things Considered ,  Morning Edition , and  This American Life  that captivate millions of listeners in homes, cars, and workplaces across the nation. NPR and its hosts are a cultural force and a trusted v...

Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth--not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island's seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects people from the violence of the their former liv...

How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution?  -  Why do women live longer than men?  -  Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer's?  -  Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet?  -  Is sexism useful for evolution?  -  And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when...

Andrew Mellon, one of the most accomplished businessmen of his era, is almost unknown today. To this shy, diffident (but brilliant) man fell the daunting task of collecting the war debts from European governments still devastated by World War I and struggling to recover economically. Dealing with the U.S. Congress and the heads of foreign governments on the world stage became one of the great adve...

In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration lite...

Politics and Prose is pleased to announce the first in a planned series of discussions meant to keep our community informed and engaged during this exceptional period in our nation’s political history.  With the help of a distinguished group of panelists, our initial event will examine the recent challenges to individual rights and liberties posed by some early Trump administration actions. These...

In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the "Wagner Group" faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for "tough measures" against insurgencies yet spar...