New Releases

Tyra Banks’s America’s Next Top Model was a cultural phenomenon with more than six million weekly viewers at its peak. Over its fifteen-year run, the show captured the glitz of the early aughts as well as its most toxic attitudes—from the glamorous but often questionable photo shoots to the cutting feedback from its highly respected if out-of-touch judges. Watching ANTM now, it feels impossible to imagine a show like this airing today, and as its fans have grown up, they’ve also begun to reckon with the enduring ways that the show has affected their body image and self-esteem.

This powerful reference book is a must-have for sculptors, painters, sketch artists, and visual creators of all levels. Faces: A Multicultural Art Portfolio features over 100 striking portraits representing people from a wide range of ethnicities, ages, and cultural backgrounds. Each face is carefully selected to showcase diverse bone structures, expressions, skin textures, and emotional depth—making this collection an invaluable tool for mastering anatomy, studying expression, and fueling creative inspiration.

“Sewing 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Sewing for Everyone” is your ultimate guide to mastering the timeless art of sewing. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refresh your skills, this book provides everything you need to begin your sewing journey with confidence. Inside, you’ll discover: Essential Tools and Techniques: Learn the basics of hand and machine sewing, threading needles, and creating perfect stitches. Fabric Fundamentals: Explore fabric types, preparation methods, and how to choose the right materials for your projects.

Slaves to Fashion is a cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art world. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.

Carol Connors has lived her dream and she shares her remarkable success story in her wild ride memoir Elvis, Rocky & Me. As an entertainer Carol has done it all with her singer/songwriter talents recognized with two Oscar, five Emmy, one Grammy and two Golden Globe nominations, along with a wall in her home proudly decorated with the gold and platinum records she’s received.

Saturday Morning Forever: The Cartoon Network Effect is a soul-charged, nostalgia-laced journey through the cartoons that shaped a generation. From the suburban scams of Ed, Edd n Eddy to the emotional myth-building of Steven Universe, JJ unpacks the emotional, spiritual, and subconscious weight behind the madness.

This new edition of Well… There You Go Again! The Humor That Shaped America captures nearly every quip, joke and anecdote told by Ronald Reagan during his presidency. It’s a virtual clinic on how to use humor as a persuasion tool. It’s also very funny. Even Democrats will laugh. From quips about taxing and spending to jokes about economists, bureaucracy and government regulation, the collection is as pertinent today as ever. Humor has become a lost art in politics. People should learn to disagree without personal attacks and hostility.

Discover the soulful journey of 1960s and 70s soul music in Soul Music: The Heartbeat of the 60s and 70s and Its Lasting Echoes. This captivating book explores the rise of soul, its cultural significance, and its profound influence on modern music genres like hip-hop, R&B, and pop. From Motown’s polished hits to Stax’s gritty grooves, dive into the stories of legendary artists like Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown, whose anthems defined an era of civil rights and cultural revolution.

Today it's routine to take photos from an airplane window, use a camera underwater, or watch a movie or view an X-ray. But the photographic innovations more than a century ago that made such things possible were experimental, revelatory, and sometimes dangerous. In Flashes of Brilliance, New York Times photo editor Anika Burgess engagingly blends art, science, and social history to reveal the most dramatic developments in photography from its birth in the 1830s to the early twentieth century.

In 1981, David Bowie and Queen both happened to be in Switzerland: They met and made "Under Pressure." Recorded on a lark, the song broke the path for subsequent pop anthems. In Under Pressure, Max Brzezinski tells the classic track's story, charting the relationship between pop music, collective politics, and dominant institutions of state, corporations, and civil society. Brzezinski shows that, like all great pop anthems, "Under Pressure" harnesses collective sentiments in order to model new ways of thinking and acting.

Since the inception of mainstream art history, Blackness has been distinctly ignored. In Reframing Blackness, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt, Alayo Akinkugbe challenges this void. Exploring the presentation of Black figures in Western art, Blackness in museums, Blackness in feminist art movements, as well as Blackness in the curriculum, Alayo unveils an overlooked but integral part of our collective art history.

There are moments throughout our lives when we discover an artist, an album, a film, or a cultural artifact that leaves a lasting impression, helping inform how we understand the world, and ourselves, moving forward. In No Sense in Wishing, Lawrence Burney explores these profound interactions with incisive and energizing prose, offering us a personal and critical perspective on the people, places, music, and art that transformed him.