Politics and Prose Presents

Following his captivating and popular A Hundred Lovers, Hofmann’s new collection is a queer coming-of-age, tinged with myth: poems that bring us into a fever dream of antiquity and desire at its limitsRecognizing the fragility of the body and soul in a world of threat, these startling poems stem from a central boyhood memory—the author’s near-drowning in a swimming pool on Crete. The observant child was troubled that none of the statues he saw had arms—and then it was his father’s arms lifting him from the water, saving his life.Hofmann balances elegance and brutality as he explores the fables of that childhood as well as the contours of sex and relationships in modern cities, in order to write his own personal history of love and survival: “Masculine arms lifted me. / Masculine arms held me while I slept.” The poems navigate risks, abandonments, and rescues, moving through a series of mazes that become a labyrinth of erotic awakening, with quick turns and dangerous diversions. In poems that alternately sear and crush delicately, we wander the ruins where the self is lost and broken and ultimately reclaimed: at the dark center, in the heart of the past.A triumphant follow-up to the fetching catalog of lovers in Hofmann’s last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.Richie Hofmann is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous books, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Yale Review.Master craftsperson, renowned feminist poet and activist Robin Becker explores a number of themes in this bountiful selection of new and selected poems.Midsummer Count collects the best work of Robin Becker, considered by many to be the foremost feminist poet of her generation. With selections from each of her previously published books and nearly thirty new poems, readers enter Becker’s lifelong exploration of childhood, animals, cherished places, complex friendships, and romantic intimacy. A life-affirming current yokes these narratives across time, even as a sister’s early suicide haunts the decades. In blank and free verse, in couplets, quatrains, and sonnets, the poet wrestles formal tensions, creating a present-day idiom for beauty, grief, and compassion. Lovers of Becker’s work and those new to it will find in Midsummer Count a master class by one of today’s most dynamic poets.Robin Becker is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including The Black Bear Inside Me and the Lambda Award winner All-American Girl, both published in the Pitt Poetry Series. A liberal arts research professor emerita in English and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she lives in central Pennsylvania and southwestern New Hampshire.PURCHASE BOOKS: https://politics-prose.com/richie-hofmann-robin-becker

WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY TRIVEDI SCIENCE BOOK PRIZEAward-winning author and leading neurologist Masud Husain shares seven fascinating cases of brain disorders from across his career - and shows what they can teach us about our own brainsWhat makes us who we are?Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create, change and can even restore our identity. Husain introduces us to a man who ran out of words, a woman who lost all inhibitions and another who believed she was having an affair with the man who was really her husband.These compelling human dramas reveal how our identities are created by different functions within the brain. It will ignite new ideas about who we really are - and why we act in the ways we do.Masud Husain is Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford. Unusually, he works across departments of neuroscience, brain imaging and psychology to understand cognitive functions in both healthy people and patients with brain disorders. Masud is Editor-in-Chief of Brain, a leading international journal of neurology. First established in 1878, Brain is widely considered to be the most influential publication in the field, with its monthly editorials being a key source of authoritative perspectives. @MasudHusain masudhusain.org.Husain is in conversation with Dr. Peter Turkeltaub, a neuroscientist and board-certified cognitive neurologist focusing on stroke neurorehabilitation. Dr. Turkeltaub’s clinical efforts are devoted to post-stroke language and cognitive impairments, primarily aphasia. He is part of an interdisciplinary care team at the Aphasia Clinic at MedStar NRH that makes recommendations for optimizing recovery from post-stroke aphasia.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781837261109?ic_referral=DqlT-hJ37nSwiAHWa81I7rfYCJu2htpil_K2z_L7lYcwMxi4tXnMFC3joqHEV9eLI7IcmBoOLDcrv88dx6USby52ryyvmCub6UGTjc7woMbfykJYZzhK1Yq2vKZg0jbdC0gJv3A

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Literary HubThe best in short fiction from around the world, from celebrated anthologist and author John Freeman and award-winning novelist Rabih AlameddineIn The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages, and sensibilities come together in a globe-spanning and long overdue tour of modern fiction. In “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” Haruki Murakami brings us a man who believes a giant amphibian is enlisting him to protect his city from an impending earthquake. In “War of the Clowns,” Mozambique’s Mia Couto sketches a perfect allegory for our divided culture. In the predecessor story to her iconic novel The Vegetarian, Han Kang depicts a protagonist quietly undergoing an unlikely transformation. A Colm Tóibín character thinks, “I do not even believe in Ireland,” while Carol Bensimon reflects from Brazil, “All great ideas seem like bad ones at some point.” Salman Rushdie brings us to unsettled rural India, Olga Tokarczuk to an ugly woman exhibit at the circus, Abdellah Taïa to the queer Arab world, Ted Chiang to a far-off galaxy.The United States is far from the center of the literary universe. This anthology is reminiscent of iconic director Bong Joon Ho’s line about overcoming “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” to enter a new world of film—the work of thoughtful and accomplished translators opens the door wide for those curious about what lies beyond the Western canon and classroom. Writers from six continents, ranging from new voices to literary icons, each offer a window into a distinct point of view, both transcending and illuminating their place of origin. They offer not only captivating prose, but a reminder of the power of the imagination across space and time.Rabih Alameddine has written nine books that have been translated into more than twenty languages. His most recent awards include the 2019 Dos Passos Prize, the 2021 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He divides his time between his bedroom and his living room.Alameddine is in conversation with Paxima Mojavezi, an Iranian-American author and journalist. She has been writing short stories for nearly three decades, and four of her short story collections have been published in Persian since 2000. The story “Forty-Eight Steps” is one of the stories from her second book. She has also published two nonfiction booksPURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593834138?ic_referral=iALJlJDoo7xiPvFiIGdCD6HlkicS4YTc5VAezVYrrTcwM0S79NMRgPrsRwcxVrw9z2K8GfmBpbR_Gc51ZnPRlqDi8uqtNXYErksLv6m71B7oEalpGstZHBlQHSn638WRIbSgz2A

Tread Upon- by turns tender and furious, and wholly original--attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich's Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where "even one blade is a place," the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.Christopher Kondrich is a poet and writer whose third book, Tread Upon, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in April 2026. He is also the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), which won the National Poetry Series and was selected by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. His poetry appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.David Baker is the author many books of poetry, including Transit (2026), Whale Fall (2022), and Swift: New and Selected Poems (2019); his Never-Ending Birds was awarded the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is coeditor of Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly (2025). Baker’s work appears in APR, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and is included in the landmark anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Baker is Emeritus Professor at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio. He served for many years as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.Kondrich and Baker are in conversation with Sandra Beasley, who is the author of four poetry collections: Made to Explode, winner of the Housatonic Book Award; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize,; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, the John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, and six DCCAH Artist Fellowships. She is also the author of the memoir Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, and the editor of Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C. She serves as the poetry editor for Blair, a nonprofit press based in Durham, North Carolina.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781556597244?ic_referral=FgMxNKER8rD8kBv4ilfyXUP-a1F_s5es3SRtntU3cF0wM-mhx2RyFGFEldJIiexHRVr1YVGUUl2jp93u4DQQ4iOepboH8JCtm4YAxknfy87oVoiz3yNwot5EijkAExIoO7WoN_c

“An indispensable book, as intellectually provocative as it is emotionally wrenching.”—Greg Grandin¸ author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the MythAlthough the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In a work distinguished not only by its original research but by its “passionate prose” (James F. Brooks), historian Linford Fisher demonstrates how the enslavement of Indigenous people began in the years just after 1492, ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas. Although largely erased from the public consciousness, Native enslavement continued for centuries to become a colossal phenomenon that affected nearly 600,000 Native?Americans in North?America?alone, revealing the shocking truth that American colonizers enslaved Natives in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans.From Virginia to California, from New England to Barbados, Stealing America traces the history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession, detailing how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that subsequently plundered Indigenous land and stole the labor of Natives from nations like the Cherokee, Navajo, Nisean, and many others. “This double theft,” Fisher writes, “was central to the origins, growth, and eventual success of the English colonies and the United States—not just initially but throughout all of American history.”In this expansive narrative, Fisher weaves together accounts of major episodes in American history including early colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War with lesser-known stories of Native enslavement and land loss. Fisher upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.Nearly fifteen years in the making, this magisterial volume not only uncovers a five-century genocidal history but also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America emerges as a saga of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience, one that reframes American history at its core.Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. The author of The Indian Great Awakening and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations project, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.Fisher is joined in conversation with Mishy Jacobson, a Politics & Prose bookseller.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324094951?ic_referral=4ihiOdI-sYuLYY0mCksox8A_5Gx8zFw4eYHd0j1lGOMwM5yluLzJgbd-yUJqQJ_6y_VRlOyZpDJRAuJBPyHhXNqnE8MEPV0D-MzRSFDbBtdnHknWt07E-AQyVbneaP_CtPj-xLo

Author and historian Garrett Peck traces Willa Cather’s adventures in the Southwest and how they influenced her best book.Six months before she died, Willa Cather called her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop her “best book.” The Atlantic magazine concurred, including Archbishop on its Great American Novels list in 2024. A perennial favorite for people who love New Mexico, the novel tells an unusual story of two French priests and best friends serving on the American frontier before the arrival of the railroad. This Western work of fiction is loosely based on two historical figures, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Bishop Joseph Machebeuf.In The Bright Edges of the World, Garrett Peck explores how Cather’s travels to the Southwest inspired her writing. She visited the Southwest six times between 1912 and 1926, and from these journeys came three novels, the last of which was Death Comes for the Archbishop. Through Cather’s letters, postcards, articles, and interviews, Peck traces how integral travel was to Cather’s imagination while highlighting the vital contribution that Cather’s longtime partner, Edith Lewis, made to the story. The Bright Edges of the World is richly illustrated to highlight Cather and Lewis’s extensive Southwestern adventures.Though Archbishop is a work of fiction, Peck explores how Cather wove some of the most legendary people in New Mexican history into her novel, such as Archbishop Lamy, Kit Carson, and Padre Antonio José Martínez, while subtly hinting toward the complexity of Pueblo Indian and Navajo (Diné) faith. Archbishop is a multicultural novel that reflects the diversity of New Mexico’s people.Death Comes for the Archbishop remains a timeless book of friendship on the American frontier and an inspiration for people who, as Cather wrote, “have gone a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the Archbishop.”Garrett Peck is an author, historian, and tour guide in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author of nine books focusing on American history. He leads the Willa Cather’s Santa Fe tour and many other excursions around New Mexico.Peck is in conversation with Bob Attardi. Bob’s career in books, music, and public programs started here in Washington, D.C. in 1986 at Olsson’s Books and Records. A few stops along the way included Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and 15 years with the National Geographic Society. Bob is currently the Director of Programs at Politics and Prose. His team creates classes, salons, bus trips, and travel opportunities for our book community. We hope that you will join us! PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780826369253?ic_referral=gTl2iC9QVnubLvjOHM93ELtfR4VEiWS1u5NgQL5lx3kwM5Ob_ZGxCNLQOTQdiDJxreFjhC4kdR-4JM0I6YulSTelhDK89NitAP-SdCV2G0iAf_OgUFI7jlMDvvwdzdQj0k_rLJk

Democracy is fracturing—and one woman may hold the key to saving it.This electrifying new thriller from former CIA officer and TikTok sensation Brittany Butler is the perfect geopolitical thriller for fans of David McCloskey and Alma Katsu.When a wave of Russian cyberattacks ignites a disinformation firestorm, the United States is pushed to the brink of a civil war. State governments defy Washington. Militias rise. As trust crumbles and chaos spreads, the CIA races to expose the source behind such unrest before democracy collapses from within. Brilliant, relentless, and haunted by her mother’s disappearance, Ava was recruited for a moment like this. Dispatched to infiltrate Russia’s foreign intelligence service, her mission becomes personal when she locks onto her target, Konstantine, a charismatic SVR officer whose shadowed past intertwines with her own. What Ava uncovers is more insidious than she feared. With the country unraveling, she must navigate a minefield of deception. Her only anchor is Ben, a veteran counterintelligence officer with complicated romantic feelings for Ava. But in a world where nothing is as it seems, trusting the wrong person could be fatal.Ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, The Patriot’s Daughter is a fresh new take on the international spy genre.Brittany Butler is a former CIA targeting officer with years of experience recruiting spies and dismantling terrorist networks overseas. She brings rare authenticity to her fiction, drawing on her time in the field to illuminate the moral complexities of espionage. Her debut novel, The Syndicate Spy, explores how female operatives navigate religious and cultural divides to fight for peace. Brittany lives by the ocean with her husband, their three sons, and their beloved dog, Gus. Her highly anticipated second novel, The Patriot’s Daughter—set for release in early 2026—tells the gripping story of a young woman’s quest to uncover the truth about her mother, a decorated intelligence officer accused of being a double agent for Russia. As past and present collide, the novel explores betrayal, legacy, and the cost of loyalty in the shadowy world of espionage.Butler is in conversation with K.T. Nguyen, a former editor at Glamour magazine. Her psychological thriller YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID received the Agatha and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. In a starred review, Booklist described it as “a twisty horror-filled thriller” and an “incredibly compelling debut.” Selected as a Best Book by People Magazine and Elle, YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID is now available in paperback. When she's not writing, K.T. enjoys practicing Krav Maga and rooting for the Mets. A graduate of Brown University, she lives just outside of Washington, D.C.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798892423885?ic_referral=2kMAJWO9T_t-LWF3XI4wgkmN6soCvZ0RMSwUa4a8EDUwM955WxIykckBYFthZKdlDotZBmdj9Ph7Jw7OWJxsb7HncihMmN4poGspHZPYwDjH1SHEl9hsQ2vk7nxlcsO-oTnxNjQ

How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction—until America’s opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of patients. Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it’s also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult to access. And yet, the medications at the center of this treatment—and the private industries that distribute them—generate roughly sixteen billion dollars each year, on par with national sales of coffee and pet food. In Addiction, Inc., historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success—and a public health disaster. Urgent, eye-opening, and deeply human, Addiction, Inc. reveals how, over the past fifty years, the United States built an addiction treatment system that made recovery harder instead of easier, and what it will take to change its course.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. The recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Smithsonian magazine, and other publications. She lives with her husband and children outside Washington, DC.Dufton is in conversation with Tim Shenk, a historian of modern American politics at George Washington University. His latest book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, was named one of the best books of 2024 by the New Republic, and his previous book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, was chosen as one of the best political books of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal. A former editor of Dissent, he was named GW’s best professor by the university’s student newspaper, the Hatchet, in 2024.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780226750064?ic_referral=1qaEbzGqvs_K-OxBXARPqrvExQyFEaqgNjaMZG0TUB8wM0oD-DZGWs8A-zr0bl9U8EWPoMCi2XVlNTWojz6RfrXFqPnWJZ5ABbaEPiLWzTRrNnWrckBEqfUoOkV-HkucY-aGDoA

In The Soldier’s House, Helen Benedict tells the story of an Iraq War veteran who saves the lives of his assassinated Iraqi interpreter’s widow and child by bringing them to his home in upstate New York. For the soldier, this is a way of making amends for his interpreter’s death. But the widow finds being rescued by the enemy both humiliating and compromising. This is a compassionate tale that examines whether redemption and forgiveness are even possible in the wake of war. Like Benedict’s related novels, Wolf Season and Sand Queen, both of which feature some of the same characters that appear in The Soldier’s House, this book breaks new ground. In the light of the current wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the worldwide controversies over refugees, The Soldier’s House is particular timely and poignant.Helen Benedict has been writing about refugees and war for many years, both in her three most recent novels, The Good Deed, Wolf Season and Sand Queen, and in her 2022 book of nonfiction, Map of Hope & Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece. A recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict is also the author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. Her writings inspired a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of those sexually assaulted in the military and the 2012 Oscar nominated documentary The Invisible War. She is a professor at Columbia University in New York.Benedict is in conversation Mary Kay Zuravleff, the award-winning author of American Ending, inspired by both her grandmothers and her coal-mining grandfathers. Her third novel, Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book, was praised by People magazine for its "impressive intelligence and sly humor," and the New York Times called her second, The Bowl Is Already Broken, "a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world's bickering and scheming." She is the recipient of the American Academy of Art's Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts.She has taught writing at American University, the Chautauqua Institution, Johns Hopkins and George Mason Universities, and she has written and edited extensively for the Smithsonian. Her essays and short stories have appeared in such venues as The Daily Beast, American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, This Is What America Looks Like, and Why I Like This Story. She was born in Syracuse, New York, raised in Oklahoma City, educated in Houston and Baltimore, and has made Washington, DC, her home.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781636282787?ic_referral=8EfHcezIKZCL1a85jE-2GxewMsd0ddVmaOQUX0W12McwM0TpjeLjwYtaaAMU-YUQNl6fVTVU2gfBA6GWHbq7xvy7vuUrU3fiYRDdyEs4pO_sOdlf_xP4IsNXHPf01NEEWC-PA2I

This event will be in partnership with The Atlantic.An invigorating guide to fighting back—part philosophy, part history, and part manual for living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian driftHow do we push back in a world where political leaders wield fear and intimidation? Where digital technology dehumanizes and flattens us? We need role models, and in this engaging book, acclaimed writer Gal Beckerman goes looking for them. Drawing on the stories of dissidents from around the globe and across time, from Socrates to Ai Weiwei, and thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, Beckerman reveals the defining characteristics these extraordinary figures share, a set of attributes and practices for anyone navigating the pressures of modern tyranny.Structured around ten qualities—among them, Be Pessimistic, Be Funny, Be Reckless, and Be Immortal—this illuminating, surprising book blends intellectual history, biography, and cultural criticism. It charts a dissident’s journey from the solitary moment of recognizing the truth, through the risks of speaking it, to the legacy that can outlast a life. What makes dissidents tick? And how might we change when we encounter them?Urgent and inspiring, Beckerman’s book shows that dissidence is a human capacity we can all cultivate, a refusal to betray one’s inner voice, no matter the cost. In a polarized America and a world sliding toward authoritarianism, we need dissidents—not only the jailed and martyred, but also those of us who face small daily compromises of conscience. How to Be a Dissident lights the way.Gal Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, a New York Times notable book, and When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, which won the Sami Rohr Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. He has a PhD from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.Beckerman is in conversation with Adam Harris, podcast host at The Atlantic. He is the author of The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right. Before joining The Atlantic in 2018, Adam was a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education covering federal higher-education policy and HBCUs. At The Atlantic, he writes about politics and education.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217089215?ic_referral=q7vhcK8R7fQym1UWChNy0W1D-jDpGNZ5imraDFKYbYYwM8qhk0xZdI5K2NNB4DpHr_K-MVaigndkcr5kiJ34nHfbArIaiOnl1XNEfVYW2H4nnWzxYFX_nBHKH4vCs7K0yRWPg5I

Sara Hall shares the story of her record-breaking career and her unconventional path to motherhood via adoption, all while battling insecurities, injuries, and doubters.Sara Hall has been a fixture atop American distance running for more than two decades: first as a national high school champion, then as an NCAA star at Stanford University, and later, as the only pro runner to ever win U.S. titles in the mile and the marathon. She's held the American record in the half marathon, clocked the fastest marathon in the U.S. by a woman aged 40 or older, and represented her country in ​multiple World Championships.But success has never come easy. Fear of failure set in during high school. In college, Sara competed through a results-obsessed culture that carried into her professional career. She battled anxiety and imposter syndrome, alongside outside pressure to quit the sport and instead devote herself to supporting her husband, Olympic marathoner Ryan Hall, and later, her kids. Yet Sara never gave up on the dream of reaching her potential.Fueled by faith, family, and an unbridled love of exploring her limits, Sara has proven the doubters wrong at every turn. When she and Ryan adopted four daughters from Ethiopia, motherhood only made her faster, running personal bests year after year and landing on podiums at the world’s most competitive races. Along the way, she discovered that choosing love over fear allowed her to take risks. She let go of results and embraced the pursuit of excellence instead.For the Love of the Grind is a love letter to running, and the story of Sara’s growth as an athlete, wife, and mom. Through her unflinching honesty and keen introspection, readers will be inspired to chase their dreams, to reimagine what might still be possible, and to embrace their own love of the grind.Sara Hall is a professional runner, wife to American marathoner Ryan Hall, and mom of four daughters adopted from Ethiopia. She has been competing professionally for over twenty years and been nationally ranked for almost three decades. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona with her family.Hall will be in conversation with Lahaina Mae Mondoñedo, the co-founder of Every Person Running Club, a DC-based running community built on inclusivity and camaraderie. A marketing and events professional, Lahaina is passionate about amplifying unheard voices and creating memorable experiences that connect people. When she’s not organizing events or crafting campaigns, she’s likely running on the National Mall or Navy Yard boardwalk or taking a workout class, embracing the athlete’s mindset that drives her in every aspect of life.Joining Hall and Mondoñedo for a panel discussion are Iwona Kesting and Brittany M. Greene. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250404282?ic_referral=BcGOSTJhLExSWu388yExmfYbDqJtBHgprSfEdywKBw0wMw2xdUJ3tyDsLPHlh0QxFMKNf-honsAsujWpg-I1dq-SVwKaXfNqFGZYvTITu3EoawgKNiP9gYVJkGuajJtWN1DqYG8

A deeply moving photographic and narrative history of a southern waterway that the enslaved were forced to build for mercantile shipping—but which they used to escape slavery.Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida.In this book, Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history.Virginia Richards is an award-winning documentary photographer, historian, and environmental lawyer.Richards is in conversation with Dr. Frederick Knight, an expert on early African American and African Diaspora history. He is the author of Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (Penn Press, 2024), which argues that elders were central to African American community formation through Reconstruction. His first book Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) traces how Africans, though carried across the Atlantic against their wills, drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780262051712?ic_referral=PgfJiMhP25sfn-lXBTY4w84RkvIkHDIQUCiZdvFjsOAwMxNXhyM9ymjGnmDq57QFHkXt79WZn70hnGXMr2gjpWA3FwMffIwWtfQikoXxXlubBcPRJMb2X7IKOdOLzGk_FTLWeT4

A myth-busting glimpse into the inner workings of the Supreme Court, revealing what we get wrong about the Roberts Court, what the justices' clerks gossip about, and how to fix a court in crisis—from the popular ABC news pundit and top legal podcaster"Isgur has all your answers in these smart, snappy, clear-eyed pages.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel AdamsMost people get the Supreme Court all wrong. A smattering of high-profile decisions have popularized a simplistic idea of the Court and its justices. Yes, six of them were appointed by Republicans, and only three by Democrats. So, how does that 6-3 conservative majority explain why in the 2024-25 term, conservative Brett Kavanaugh was more likely to agree with liberal Elena Kagan than conservative Neil Gorsuch? Or why the court threw shade at Florida’s attempt to ban drag shows?To truly understand the Court, argues Sarah Isgur, you have to look beyond partisan politics—the “X-Axis.” The wisest court watchers apply another measuring stick, the “Y-Axis," where the nine justices span from order-loving institutionalists to true chaos agents. Once you appreciate these overlapping and even competing impulses, the Court begins to look a lot more like a 3-3-3 split than 6-3.The ultimate insider, Isgur takes readers on a deep dive inside the Supreme Court: how cases land at the Court’s doorstep, which justices attend clerk happy hours (and which ones even bother showing up to the office), why conservatives already have buyer’s remorse about Amy Coney Barrett, and how the whole judicial system is kind of a constitutional anomaly. She’ll even help you decide whether you should throw your hat in the ring and go to law school! Blending irreverent humor and incisive commentary, Isgur goes underneath the robes—and shows us what we need to do to preserve the rule of law amid dicey times in this little self-governing experiment we’ve been running for the last 250 years.Sarah Isgur is the editor of SCOTUSblog, a regular on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and co-host of Advisory Opinions, the nation's top legal podcast. She served in the DOJ as the director of the Office of Public Affairs, helped run Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, and clerked for Judge Edith H. Jones of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. She’s a graduate of Harvard Law School and Northwestern University.Isgur is in conversation with Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. He has reported from the White House under four presidents and fourteen press secretaries. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents' Association.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593800928?ic_referral=lrxQ1bCO7L9SVK92BWH69_1BuRvuXI8J-zLsil2HFvAwM4QDndWE26djtJLsu__phGkHD2Or1lcIKFouM4YylJiLZ5Q2eRTo4g4mVSp4BvYbtvaqpC31QhC1C6rC5SpssyWfhTk