American Essays

As big and exciting as the next century, this is a novel of real life at our giddy, feverish, topsy-turvy edge of the millennium. Turn of the Century is a good old-fashioned novel about the day after tomorrow--an uproarious, exquisitely observed panorama of our world as the twentieth century...

Before the White House and Air Force One, before the TV ads and the enormous rallies, there was the real Barack Obama: a man wrestling with the momentous decision to run for the presidency, feeling torn about leaving behind a young family, and figuring out how to win the biggest prize in...

From the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling award-winning author of Serena and The Cove, thirty of his finest short stories, collected in one volume. No one captures the complexities of Appalachia—a rugged, brutal landscape of exquisite beauty—as evocatively and indelibly as author and...

A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature but the entire literary world...

One of America's preeminent thinkers provides the clearest statement yet on the nature and magnitude of the political and economic dangers posed by America's new monopolies. Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we...

WHAT IS IT THAT DRIVES THE SUCCESS OF AMERICA AND THE IDENTITY OF ITS PEOPLE? ACCLAIMED WRITER AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE JACK HITT THINKS IT’S BECAUSE WE’RE ALL A BUNCH OF AMATEURS. America’s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical...

Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things.

In this part-memoir, part-manifesto, an acclaimed poet interprets Black radical literary traditions to reimagine freedom through refusal. Over the past decade, Camonghne Felix has been at the center of American politics, working in strategy, communications, and as a speechwriter. Throughout it...

From New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa, a sweeping human history of El Paso, revealing violence, power, and privilege at play in America's most famous border town. El Paso has been called the “Ellis Island” of America’s southern border, a mountain pass cum border town cum bifurcated...

A reissue of Greg Tate's classic, out-of-print collection of essays, with a new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new foreword by Questlove. From one of the most original, creative, and provocative culture critics comes an eye-opening collection of essays and tales about American music and...

Back in print after two decades, the story of Hollywood’s most exclusive hotel and its star-studded guest list Raymond Sarlot bought the Chateau Marmont in 1975, but what was originally a business purchase became a love affair as he delved into the hotel’s incredible history. From its perch...

“Slender but weighty. . . . What is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness.”— Boston Globe From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an...

An urgent exposition of the pervasive human trafficking that lies just beneath the surface of the US economy—from the stories of its survivors The years of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought to light the exploitation of workers. In this moment of heightened visibility, Unbroken Chains demands...

Encompassing themes of race, education, fame, law, and America’s past and future, these essays are James Alan McPherson at his most prescient and invaluable. Born in segregated 1940s Georgia, McPherson graduated from Harvard Law School only to give up law and become a writer. In 1978, he became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But all the while, McPherson was also writing and publishing nonfiction that stand beside contemporaries such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion, as this collection amply proves.

“A must-read for today’s politics” (San Francisco Chronicle), the brilliant and provocative essays that established National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh as one of the most important commentators on America’s class problem are collected in one searing and insightful volume. In Bone...

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "[W]ith so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."

The first ever collection of John Edgar Wideman’s most influential essays and articles, five decades of cultural and literary criticism that paint a vivid portrait of America’s changing landscape and chronicle the emergence and evolution of a major presence in fiction. “A towering figure...

“Fun, engrossing, and significant. . . . History in Davis’s hands is loud, coarse, painful, funny, irreverent—and memorable.”—San Francisco Chronicle Here, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its debut as a New York Times bestseller, is the revised, updated, and expanded edition...

Morgan Siler is one of Washington, D.C.'s most powerful K Street law firms, its roster of clients stocked with multi-billion-dollar corporations. Through the obsessive efforts of its founder's son, Peter Morgan, his father's old-fashioned business has been transformed into a veritable goliath, embracing bankruptcy and merger divisions that Archibald Morgan had deemed ungentlemanly.