Politics and Prose Presents

An authoritative history of the radical environmental movement in the United States,  No Option But Sabotage  explores how far activists are willing to go to defend the planet in the face of repression and the escalating climate crisis. After 9/11, the radical environmental movement was considered the number one domestic terror threat by the U.S. government. But by the end of the decade the moveme...

Award-winning photographer and journalist J. Lester Feder shows us  The Queer Face of War  in this first-ever visual and oral history of a queer community in war. This remarkable collection of stunning portraits and moving profiles captures the many ways queer people can be vulnerable in armed conflict—and the many ways they feel especially called to fight. In its siege of Ukraine, Russia forged a...

This multilayered work follows a group of Guantanamo detainees from a single Middle Eastern country, Kuwait, portraying their lives before their capture, to their experience at Guantanamo, to their ultimate release and the lives they have been challenged in remaking after returning home. It is an intimate look at real men held for years without charge and without hope. Eric L. Lewis has represente...

The first-ever Black history to center queer voices, this landmark study traces the lives of LGBTQ+ Black Americans from slavery to present day Gender and sexual expression have always been part of the Black freedom struggle In this latest book in Beacon’s award-winning  ReVisioning History  series, Professors C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost unearth the often overlooked history of the Black queer...

With style and straight talk, musician and changemaker Lachi flips disability and neurodivergence into an empowering identity, a cultural movement, and an innovation engine What if the most taboo parts of our identity—the parts we’re taught to mask—are exactly the ones that hold our greatest power? Lachi is an award-winning singer and leader who awakens the world to this truth: Disability has long...

Pulitzer Prize–winning former Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson tells our nation’s torturous racial history through his own family’s story, starting with his great-grandfather’s freedom from slavery and threading his way to his own narrative and reaching today’s Black Lives Matter movement, asking whether this time will be different. On March 27, 1829, a wealthy white planter and entrepren...

For readers of Annette Gordon-Reed and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the shocking untold story of the British royal family’s centuries-long investment in slavery and continued profiting off its legacy—from Elizabeth I to the present—and the monarchy’s culpability in the racial injustice that gave birth to the United States.   For centuries, Britain has told itself and the world that it is an abolitionist n...

A big-hearted, wise, unceasingly buoyant novel about a woman who, after escaping a bruising marriage, theorizes that happiness is possible solely with the eradication of all romance--only to find a love that could change her life forever Sylvie Broder was taught early to embrace joy. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors whose greatest priority was enjoying the life they'd snatched back fro...

From the Oscar-nominated filmmaker comes a complex and sweeping historical novel about Henry Ford — the Elon Musk of his day, in more ways than one — and his attempt to rule not only an automotive empire but the rambunctious city of Detroit. It is an epic tale ranging from the 1920s through the second World War, featuring violent labor disputes, misbegotten jungle expeditions, a tragic race riot,...

NPR investigative journalist and the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, Cheryl W. Thompson explores the stories of the 27 Tuskegee Airmen – the Black pilots who fought for America in WWII – who went missing in combat, the lives they lived, the reasons their planes went down, why the remains of all but two were never found, and the impact their disappearances had on their families and communities. In 1...

The real succession story of the Murdoch empire is more shocking than the fictional TV series. When Rupert Murdoch made a fateful decision about who should inherit his media colossus, he believed that pitting his children against each other would produce the most capable heir. Twenty-five years later, that gamble would tear apart one of the world’s most powerful families and trigger a multi-billio...

From a seasoned political journalist, an eye-opening examination of Tucker Carlson’s rise through conservative media and politics, and his ideological transformation over the past thirty years, tracking the concurrent shifts in the political and media landscapes which have both influenced and succumbed to the hyperpartisan politics of today. To many, Tucker Carlson is synonymous with modern conser...

A propulsive debut novel following a has-been reality TV star and a disgraced producer who get one last shot at redemption on a show set on a remote island, only to discover that the plot twists are beyond what they ever imagined. Everyone gets the story arc they deserve. Kent Duvall, a faded reality show winner, just wants another chance at glory—to find his way out of his depressing life and bac...

As the first volume in the new series  Art & , this book signals a bold new vision for a more dynamic study of art Each essay in this groundbreaking volume—the first in an exciting new series from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts—engages aesthetic and cultural debates that situate research on the arts at the intersection of various disciplines, including architecture, film, lit...

Since 1925, the Library of Congress has presented one of the most prestigious and innovative concert series in the United States. Philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge founded the series with the purpose of sharing music of the highest caliber with the American people. Her vision was clear: concerts would be free and open to all, the finest touring artists and ensembles would appear, and both...

The definitive true “Southern Gothic” account of the life, crimes, conviction, and execution of Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, the charismatic, brutal, well-liked, remorseless South Carolina serial killer who was dubbed the Charles Manson of the South—written by the prosecutor who brought him to justice. Of the hundreds of murder cases that noted South Carolina attorney Dick Harpootlian has prosecuted,...

The definitive history of U.S. defense strategy. Much of the history of U.S. defense over the course of 250 years has been a story of success. Insulated by two oceans and mostly friendly neighbors, but constantly ambitious abroad, America has dared mighty things and often achieved them, argues defense analyst Michael O’Hanlon. After growing into a continental power, largely through force of arms,...

A stunning new work from universally acclaimed Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Moving from Pakistan’s dazzling chaotic cities to its lawless feudal countryside,  This Is Where the Serpent Lives   powerfully evokes contemporary feudal Pakistan, following the...

Blunt, irreverent, and at times wittily subversive,  Opera Wars   spotlights opera’s colorful and sometimes warring personalities, increasingly fierce controversies over content, and the battles being waged for its economic future. Drawing on interviews with dozens of opera insiders—as well as her own experience as an award-winning librettist, trained vocalist, opera company director, and arts com...

Why institutional neutrality is nothing but an illusion.    Can a university ever truly be neutral in today’s social and political climate? Pushing against the tide of universities increasingly pledging to stay neutral about contentious issues, law professor Brian Soucek argues that their promises are doomed to fail—universities can’t help being opinionated. In  The Opinionated University , Soucek...

Chloe Yelena Miller’s  second full-length poetry collection,  Perforated , is about the grief of private and public losses. Architecture and light frame loss through the lens of motherhood, mortality and love from the United States to Italy. Covid, immigration, climate change and school shootings sound alarms in Perforated. Woven through the collection is “New York City,” a long poem broken into s...

A bold manifesto arguing that there is a clear precedent for paying reparations to atone for America’s original sin of slavery, offering a compelling legal strategy to achieve this goal—from the acclaimed author of  The Whiteness of Wealth. The idea of reparations is not a new or original one; it is one that is baked into American history. When the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862 wen...

In this moving memoir, an acclaimed poet and novelist tells the remarkable story of the year when her life and her future were irrevocably changed, turning an impossibly difficult chapter of her life into a beacon of sisterhood, love, and growth On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles of away, Griffiths’ clo...

An illuminating, hilarious, and practical guide to 99 of the most terrifying ways to die and how to avoid them from an emergency medicine doctor. Dr. Ashely Alker is a self-described death escapologist—or, in more familiar terms, an emergency medicine doctor. She has seen it all, from flesh-eating bacteria to the work of a serial killer to the more mundane but no less deadly, and her work outwitti...

A moving cultural history of disability—and a powerful call to action to change how our medical system and society supports those with complex chronic conditions.   From lupus to Lyme, invisible illness is often dismissed by everyone but the sufferers. Why does the medical establishment continually insist that, when symptoms are hard to explain, they are probably just in your head?   Inspired by h...