Essays Anthology

An electric and intimate story of 1970s gay Atlanta through its bedazzling drag clubs and burgeoning rights activism. Coursing with a pumped-up beat, gay Atlanta was the South's mecca—a beacon for gays and lesbians growing up in its homophobic towns and cities. There, the Sweet Gum Head was...

A fresh exploration of American feminist history told through the lens of the beauty pageant world. Many predicted that pageants would disappear by the 21st century. Yet they are thriving. America’s most enduring contest, Miss America, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2020. Why do they...

Named a must-read by the Chicago Tribune, O Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and The L Magazine Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers will be available in summer 2018. Rebecca Makkai’s first two novels, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, have...

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 CROSSWORD JURY AWARD FOR NON FICTION* More than half of India is under the age of twenty-five and the country is set to have the youngest population in the world by 2021. But India's millennials are nothing like their counterparts in the West. In a world that's marked...

"Since time immemorial, India has been an ocean bed over which numerous stories have flowed and enriched the world. Storytellers from Tulsidas to Rohinton Mistry have added their magic to this magnificent repository. Inspired in part by Somadeva’s Kathasaritasagara, William Radice collects...

What does it mean to be an engaged American in today's divided political landscape, and how do we restore hope in our country? In a collection of "civic sermons" delivered at gatherings around the nation, popular advocate for active citizenship Eric Liu takes on these thorny questions and...

A lost nineteenth-century literary life, brilliantly rediscovered--Letitia Elizabeth Landon, hailed as the female Byron; she changed English poetry; her novels, short stories, and criticism, like Byron though in a woman's voice, explored the dark side of sexuality--by the acclaimed author of The...

A brilliant biography of one of India’s greatest poets Mirza Mohammad Asadullah Khan Ghalib began writing poetry in Persian at the age of nine and the pre-eminent poet of the time, Mir, predicted a great future for the precocious genius when he was shown his verse. But success and material...

Spanning politics and art, music and baseball, Cuba on the Verge is a timely look at a society’s profound transformation—from inside and out. Change looms in Cuba. Just ninety miles from United States shores yet inaccessible to most Americans until recently, Cuba fascinates as much as it...

Stories navigating the commplicated terrain of race in America, from acclaimed writers like Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, Sandra Cisneros, Sherman Alexie, and Amy Tan The editors who brought us Unsettling America and Identity Lessons have compiled a short-story anthology that focuses on...

A fascinating story of growing up as a gay fan of comic books in the 1960s, building a fifty-year career as an award-winning writer, and interacting with acclaimed comic book legends Award-winning writer Bill Schelly relates how comics and fandom saved his life in this engrossing story that...

The acclaimed author of Occupied City, Tokyo Year Zero, and The Red Riding Quartet now gives us a stunning work of fiction in twelve connected tales that take up the strange, brief life of the brilliant twentieth-century Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Haunting and evocative, brutal and...

Dispatches from Arizona—the front line of a massive human migration—including the voices of migrants, Border Patrol, ranchers, activists, and others For the last decade, Margaret Regan has reported on the escalating chaos along the Arizona-Mexico border, ground zero for immigration since...

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles...

A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”. The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters...

Part memoir, part testimonial, and part life guide, Stand by Your Truth mixes Rickey Smiley’s down-home humor with the values he learned from being raised by three generations of elders, steeped in the Baptist church, and mentored by some of the most celebrated comics in the entertainment...

The bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a wondrous collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories. Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and...

Loose Woman Seductive, earthy, and at times confessional, Sandra Cisneros's vibrant collection of poetry celebrates the females aspects of love--from the reflective to the overtly erotic--in a voice recognizable from her powerful works of fiction. These poems offer narratives as formally elegant...

In The Italian Quartet, Sara Marcello, a writer with roots in Italy, is invited to the island villa of Ugo and Olivia Bellini, two wealthy and worldly antiquarians. In this place of myth, belonging as much to Homer and Prospero as to the present, Sara discovers that she is at the center of...

Will climate change force a massive human migration to the Northern Rim? How does our sense of morality arise from the structure of the brain? What does the latest research in language acquisition tells us about the role of culture in the way we think? What does current neurological research...