American Essays

A widely-read Washington Post columnist takes a deep dive into what the end of the baby boom means for American politics and economics. Philip Bump, a reporter as adept with a graph as with a paragraph, is popular for his ability to distill vast amounts of data into accessible stories. THE...

The year 1971 exists everywhere in Bangladesh-on its roads, in sculptures, in its museums and oral history projects, in its curriculum, in people's homes and their stories, and in political discourse. It marks the birth of the nation, it's liberation. More than 1000 miles away, in Pakistan too...

From the acclaimed author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas, a scathing collection of his incisive commentary on our cruel times—perfect for this political moment. What does a middle-class democracy look like when it comes apart? When, after forty years of economic triumph...

From Susan Orlean—acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book—Rin Tin Tin is “an unforgettable book about the mutual devotion between one man and one dog” (The Wall Street Journal). He believed the dog was immortal. So begins Susan Orlean’s...

Audie Award Finalist for best inspirational book! IMAGE AWARD (Native Daughters of the Golden West) "The Mission Walker is a marvelous book, a moving meditation on the relationships between courage and faith, endurance and transcendence." Randall Sullivan, Creator, The Miracle Detective, Oprah...

Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history...

From the collaborators behind the modern business classic All the Devils are Here comes a damning indictment of American capitalism—and the leaders that left us brutally unprepared for a global pandemic In 2020, the novel coronavirus pandemic made it painfully clear that the U.S. could not...

Acclaimed across the world, prescribed in over 100 universities and colleges, and included in part in The Century's Greatest Reportage (Ordfront, 2000), alongside the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel and John Reed, Everybody Loves a Good Drought is the established classic on rural...

An irresistible delight, this hilarious and heartwarming essay collection gathers essential tales about growing up in the South, the pitfalls of date night, and why no one should ever tell a Black girl how to Black Girl. Black women always find a place to meet: in the natural hair aisle, at...

"Citizen Kane does Adventureland." —The Washington Post The outlandish, hilarious, terrifying, and almost impossible-to-believe story of the legendary, dangerous amusement park where millions were entertained and almost as many bruises were sustained, told through the eyes of the founder's...

Continuing the pitch-perfect critiques begun in The Great Movies, Roger Ebert's The Great Movies II collects 100 additional essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send readers back to films with a fresh set of eyes and...

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale.

Noam Chomsky’s backpocket classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky, "propaganda is to democracy as the bludgeon...

“One of the year’s must-reads.” –ELLE “[A] provocative, heart-breaking, and frequently hilarious collection.” –GLAMOUR “Essential, vital, and urgent.” –HARPER’S BAZAAR In the vein of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist and Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, but...

Zero at the Bone begins with Wiman's preoccupation with despair, and through fifty brief pieces, he unravels its seductive appeal. The book is studded with the poetry and prose of writers who inhabit Wiman's thoughts, and the voices of Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and others join his own.

Was Savarkar really a co-conspirator in the Gandhi murder? Was there a pogrom against a particular community after Gandhi's assassination? Decades after his death, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar continues to uniquely influence India's political scenario. An optimistic advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity...

The real story behind El Salvador's MS-13 gang and how they have perpetuated three generations of conflict and led to scores of migrants seeking a new life in the United States. Born in Los Angeles, the gang MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a civil...

“Nervous takes the focus from the abstract and does what doctors (and historians) failed to do: makes her story, her pain, and her life as real as any history that proceeded. Nervous gives face and weight to those forgotten women whose suffering has become little more than anecdotal...

See the difference, read Maya Angelou in Large Print * About Large Print All Random House Large Print editions are published in a 16-point typeface This wise book is the wonderful continuation of the bestselling Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now. Even the Stars Look Lonesome is Maya...

"This book will change you." --Chicago Tribune White Girls is about, among other things, blackness, queerness, movies, Brooklyn, love (and the loss of love), AIDS, fashion, Basquiat, Capote, philosophy, porn, Eminem, Louise Brooks, and Michael Jackson. Freewheeling and dazzling, tender and true...