The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state.

As this 25th anniversary edition—featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author—makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

"[A]ccessible and intellectually rich…Essential reading to understand the economic state of the nation." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The celebrated legal scholar and author of The Color of Money reveals how neoliberals rigged American law, creating widespread distrust, inequality, and injustice.

With the nation lurching from one crisis to the next, many Americans believe that something fundamental has gone wrong. Why aren’t college graduates able to achieve financial security? Why is government completely inept in the face of natural disasters? And why do pundits tell us that the economy is strong even though the majority of Americans can barely make ends meet? In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa Baradaran, one of our leading public intellectuals, argues that the system is in fact rigged toward the powerful, though it wasn’t the work of evil puppet masters behind the curtain. Rather, the rigging was carried out by hundreds of (mostly) law-abiding lawyers, judges, regulators, policy makers, and lobbyists. Adherents of a market-centered doctrine called neoliberalism, these individuals, over the course of decades, worked to transform the nation―and succeeded.

They did so by changing the law in unseen ways. Tracing this largely unknown history from the late 1960s to the present, Baradaran demonstrates that far from yielding fewer laws and regulations, neoliberalism has in fact always meant more―and more complex―laws. Those laws have uniformly benefited the wealthy. From the work of a young Alan Greenspan in creating "Black Capitalism," to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s efforts to unshackle big money donors, to the establishment of the "Law and Economics" approach to legal interpretation―in which judges render opinions based on the principles of right-wing economics―Baradaran narrates the key moments in the slow-moving coup that was, and is, neoliberalism. Shifting our focus away from presidents and national policy, she tells the story of how this nation’s laws came to favor the few against the many, threatening the integrity of the market and the state.

Some have claimed that the neoliberal era is behind us. Baradaran shows that such thinking is misguided. Neoliberalism is a failed economic idea―it doesn’t, in fact, create more wealth or more freedom. But it has been successful nevertheless, by seizing the courts and enabling our age of crypto fraud, financial instability, and accelerating inequality. An original account of the forces that have brought us to this dangerous moment in American history, The Quiet Coup reshapes our understanding of the recent past and lights a path toward a better future.

In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man’s late-night encounter with a police officer—the titular “man in blue”—becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: “It’s a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself.” In “Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum,” the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an “infant’s small mouth” as well as the “sad calculator” that was “built to subtract from and divide a town.” In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the “other” and locates us squarely within these personae.

From the creator of Brown Badass Bonita comes a “powerful and necessary guide toward self-discovery and metamorphosis” (Dr. Mariel Buqué) that can help transform not only your life but the lives of everyone in your community.
 
Almost every Latina has heard the phrase calladita te ves más bonita—you look most beautiful when you are silent. It's a message rooted in machismo passed from generation to generation, and one that poet and Latine therapist, Kim Guerra, grew up on.

In Badass Bonita, Guerra tells a story of coming into her own power, and guides readers through the process of finding their own. Rejecting what she was taught as a girl, she learned to use her voice and the more she listened to that inner niña, the more she unearthed her inner guerrera. Vowing never to be calladita again, she now teaches Latine women to find their voices, healing the stories and emotional wounds that have kept them silent.
 
Tackling tough conversations around machismo, mental health, trauma, and intersectional identities, Badass Bonita is a guide that will help readers:
* Understand underlying sources of wounds and trauma,
* Shift from self‑silencing and into revolutionary self‑love,
* Build confidence and bring positive change to relationships, family and community.

Lyrical and accessible, written in Kim’s signature poetic, Spanglish style, Badass Bonita is perfect for readers of My Grandmother's Hands and Este dolor no es mío, — for mothers, daughters, therapists, and mujeres poderosas everywhere ready find their wings.

This deluxe edition is printed with stenciled edges!

In this Southern gothic horror novel, four unlikely allies in a small town investigate a local teen's disappearance, and what they discover festering at the core of their community is far more sinister and ancient than they could’ve ever imagined. For fans of She is a Haunting, True Detective, Mexican Gothic, and Midsommar.

When Dawson Sumter goes missing, all he leaves behind is a smattering of blood in room 4 of the debt-ridden motel owned by Neera Singh's family. Disappearances like this aren't uncommon in the rural Georgia town of Carrion, especially every thirteen years when a periodical cicada brood returns from underground, shrieking their deafening screams.

For Neera, Dawson is another reminder that in this corner of the South, the rich only get richer, and the poor―well, nothing good comes their way.

Neera sets out to investigate Dawson’s whereabouts―if he even still lives―along with three other teens: Isaiah, son of a prominent judge and clandestine true crime podcaster; Reid, son of the wealthiest man in the region; and Sam, estranged daughter of the local hitman. As they find themselves entangled in a messy web of secrets and lies, they discover the riches of the adjacent Lake Clearwater community may have a terrifying source of power dating back to the town’s founding and an ancient urban legend about three devils, each more sinister than the next. How deep does the rot go, and can they find a way to escape its reach?

Raised in the steamy bayous of New Orleans in the early 1900s, LeRoi "King" Tremain, caught up in his family's ongoing feud with the rival DuMont family, learns to fight. But when the teenage King mistakenly kills two white deputies during a botched raid on the DuMonts, the Tremains' fear of reprisal forces King to flee Louisiana.

King thus embarks on an adventure that first takes him to France, where he fights in World War I as a member of the segregated 369th Battalion—in the bigoted army he finds himself locked in combat with American soldiers as well as with Germans. When he returns to America, he battles the Mob in Jazz Age Harlem, the KKK in Louisiana, and crooked politicians trying to destroy a black township in Oklahoma.

King Tremain is driven by two principal forces: He wants to be treated with respect, and he wants to create a family dynasty much like the one he left behind in Louisiana. This is a stunning debut by novelist Guy Johnson that provides a true depiction of the lives of African-Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century.

A definitive edition of the landmark book that forever changed our understanding of the Civil War’s aftermath and the legacy of racism in America

Upon publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s now classic Black Reconstruction offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction—and of American democracy itself. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on the nation’s post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow.

Black Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship that, in the wake of the censorship of Du Bois’s characterization of Reconstruction by the Encyclopedia Britannica, was written to debunk influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured the historical record. “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself,” Du Bois argued, “has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.” In setting the record straight Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an “indispensable book,” a magisterial work of detached scholarship that is also imbued with passionate outrage.

Presented in a handsome and authoritative hardcover edition prepared by Foner and co-editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black Reconstruction is joined here for the first time with important writings that trace Du Bois’s thinking throughout his career about Reconstruction and its centrality in understanding the tortured course of democracy in America.

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. 
 
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

A Best Book of the Year: BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly

A Coretta Scott King Honor Book

Three-time Newbery Honor author Jacqueline Woodson explores race and sexuality through the eyes of a compelling narrator

Melanin Sun has a lot to say. But sometimes it's hard to speak his mind, so he fills up notebooks with his thoughts instead. He writes about his mom a lot--they're about as close as they can be, because they have no other family. So when she suddenly tells him she's gay, his world is turned upside down. And if that weren't hard enough for him to accept, her girlfriend is white. Melanin Sun is angry and scared. How can his mom do this to him-- is this the end of their closeness? What will his friends think? And can he let her girlfriend be part of their family?

The first full-length monograph of Houston-based visual artist Jamal Cyrus (born 1973), this publication features an overview of Cyrus’ practice of cobbling modern artifacts that trace the evolution of Black identity as it migrates across the African Diaspora, Middle Passage, jazz age and civil rights movements from the 1960s to now.
Published to accompany Cyrus’ first career survey exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum, the catalog includes materially diverse and conceptually charged textile-based pieces, assemblages, performances, installations, paintings and works on paper produced in the past two decades, including his ongoing Pride Records installation series.

Together, these multidisciplinary artworks demonstrate Cyrus’ commemoration, translation and reactivation of sociopolitical struggles in African American history—forging a revised chronicle of histories, hybridity and redemption.

Dear Black woman, you are not alone.

God has not disregarded your pain and suffering. God sees you. God knows you. God understands.

In Black Woman Grief, Natasha Smith unearths a painful reality that is tangled within our nation’s roots and DNA: trauma, loss, and grief are embedded in the lived experience of the Black woman in the United States. Smith talks about grief that is specifically applicable to Black women, providing them with affirmation and a safe place to exhale. Yet, amid a broken world and broken systems that have weighed down Black women for generations, Smith reminds us that there is hope because the kingdom of God is at hand. In Black Woman Grief, Natasha Smith

* takes us readers through narrative and biblical truths
* provides a space made by and for Black women to be seen and understood by God
* encourages Black women to live a God-filled life in a grief-filled world

Invasive. Possessive. Assertive. Truce Wright is an ambitious man on a mission. Nothing in life is off limits to him. Whatever he wants, he gets….even if it’s someone else’s.

Displeased. Submissive. Captivating. Sanai Lee is a risk taker. Her boldness creates an exit for fear. What she didn’t know she needed comes in the form of a Truce.

What happens when you follow your heart and let him come over when your man is not there?

Welcome to Indigo Falls…

Troubled, Beset by problems or conflict. Kylo Lewis. A boss. A menace. Directly beside his name in the dictionary, you’ll find the word unhinged. Under the layers is a sweet little boy that longs for healing. Kylo craves what he never had, Joy.

Innocent, not guilty of a crime or offense; not responsible for or directly involved in an event yet suffering its consequences. Innocent Doucet is everything but her name. She, too, is a boss that faces both mental and physical adversity. Behind closed doors, she craves security and peace.

Enough, is what Kylo and Innocent have to be. Being written off at a young age is a matter these two can relate to. Certain lines were never meant to be crossed, but sometimes red flags resemble rollercoasters. The “terrible twos” phase has nothing on the trouble this duo is bound to create. Their similarities could be their strength or ultimately lead them toward their downfall. Can troubled souls really tie? Will their bond cause the most beautiful train wreck? What happens when twin flames conjoin? 

Love. The Streets. Identity.

Black love. A love built on something true. A love so pure. A God sent love, is what Kaivon Lewis and Harlee Rivers found within one another.

Something worth fighting for. After two extremely beautiful years, the duo’s past starts to interlock with their future. Greed and bitterness from both sides, forces the hand of someone close. The domino effect it causes is one that neither, Kaivon nor Harlee, can shy away from.

Kaivon Lewis is the definition of making something out of nothing. As the highest paid defensive back in the NFL, he was given the opportunity to create a better life and leave all he knew in his growing years. The streets. They are a way of life for some, but now an option for Kaivon. It was once how he survived and protected. It is still his to manage. His secret attachment is not one he can easily cut ties with. His natural instinct is to protect and provide. When duty calls, he answers, especially when the ones he love are a factor. Whatever Kaivon loves, he is All In for.

Harlee Rivers is a successful nail artist, dominating in an industry that was never created for women that resemble her. Harlee is the backbone for everyone else around her, except herself. When tragedy struck, claiming the life of her Granny, her battle with anxiety doubled. Harlee quickly learns that what fills, spills. The battle to regain self-love and overcome anxiety is a struggle but fortunately, she’s both a lover and fighter. Harlee is All In and determined to conquer whatever comes her and her family’s way.

The duo can only pray that love is enough. The struggle to disconnect from what is familiar, could be the same thing that destroys everything. Three things are the determining factors. All three can give them the highest of highs and lowest of lows. When combined, one or all three could lead to a tragic demise. Can Kaivon and Harlee juggle them all? Will the Big Three be the very thing to take them down?

Love. The Streets. Football.

It’s Rodeo season in Millers Pointe and everything isn’t left on the dirt. Stakes are high, the nights are wild, and love is the ultimate ride.

Two people…
Two different objectives…
One ultimate goal…

Gideon “Gee” Powers has one hundred and eighty days to secure his rightful place as head of the family.

Rhian Barnes has one hundred and eighty days to complete a bucket list.
One night in Sin City blurs the lines and two become one.

When it comes to Jabari Hicks, competition is non-existent. With a keen focus on securing a championship ring, Jabari’s only compettion is himself. On the court he is deadly, off the court he’s a protector and as a Lord, he’s fierce and loyal.

Kinnidi Trent has a light that illuminates the dark spaces of her mind, but she can’t completely shine until she lands in a place of peace. When she escapes the restraints that stifle her creativity and happiness, Kinnidi finds herself in the right place at the right time.

Tattoos and tortured souls. Loyalty and protection.

The game is like love full of passion teamwork and moments that take your breath away.

For Nyla Holmes, life is never easy. Two steps forward always end up turning into ten steps back.

As the coldest female barber in Elite Cutz, Nyla wants to own her own shop. She plans for years and has set her sights on the perfect building. Disappointment settles in once again when she finds out that her dream has to be put on hold. The one person Nyla believes will never hurt her does the unthinkable.

Aarick Landry knows what success looks and feels like. He’s the VP of the credit union and an active member of his fraternity alumnae chapter. Aarick also understands that life can sometimes be harder on some than others. His mother has struggled with addiction his entire life.

Nyla and Aarick are total opposites but after a few chance encounters they quickly discover one similarity-they need another.

A captivating exploration into the transformative power of saying yes to God’s call, even when it leads to unexpected paths—and into a wildly more fulfilling life.

“This is a powerful testimony of what happens when you surrender to God’s call and trust Him with the process. Brenda’s story will stir your spirit and remind you that obedience to God isn’t always easy, but it’s always worth it.”—Crystal Renee Hayslett, actor, producer, singer, host of Keep It Positive, Sweetie podcast

Stepping into the unknown is scary. But what if saying yes despite your fears leads you to a life beyond your imagination? In The Journey of Yes, pastor and podcast host Brenda Palmer shares how everyday obedience freed her from fear and led to profound purpose. Through intimate anecdotes, insightful reflections, and practical guidance, she illuminates the incredible gift of saying yes to God, who leads us through all of life’s opportunities and challenges.

Drawing from scripture and her own personal odyssey—from leaving a dream career and moving across country to giving up financial security and status to follow God's call—Palmer empowers you to conquer fears, embrace vulnerability, and embark on a remarkable journey of self-discovery. She illuminates the paradox that while obedience may come at a cost, it unveils a world of unimaginable blessings and spiritual abundance. As you join her on this journey of faith and obedience, you'll learn that God’s purpose for your life is much grander than material gifts or achieving goals, but about the giver of life Himself.

Palmer’s inspiring revelations and storytelling equip you with a renewed sense of purpose and encouragement to live a life of wholehearted devotion and surrender. Because by saying yes to God, you will uncover a life of infinite possibilities, joy, and lasting fulfillment.

On a bus moving across a rural landscape, town to dusty town, three young strangers are escaping with their lives. One has committed a crime for which there will be retribution. The second is staggering from a sudden loss. And the third is running from a haunted past.

These three will find each other and attempt a new way forward. But the talons of the past have dug deep and the wounds have not yet healed. Moving back and forth in time, from the fragile bonds of this new relationship to the lives they lived before, The Ones We Loved tenderly reveals characters whose way of loving is inherited and channeled into the lands they inhabit, the people they care for, and the present they cling to.

Written in the rhythms of oral retellings practiced by Zimbabwe’s Shona ethnic group, where the narrative is a call and response with the listener, this is a remarkable story blending fable and fiction, and honoring the ecstatic joys and profound heartbreaks of life and love.

In this follow-up to Kicks, dynamic duo Van G. Garrett and New York Times bestselling artist Reggie Brown reunite to celebrate kids who wear glasses, or specs, and all the amazing, stylish things they can do and be while being true to themselves—in spectacular fashion!

You shouldn’t pick SPECS carelessly. No rough-and-ready, unsteady, speedily selected pair of glasses will do.

This is a love letter to glasses. But not just any glasses. Only the shiniest, flyest, you-est specs you can find—the ones that let you see things in a whole new way!

In this playful and joyful ode to specs of all kinds, young readers follow one girl on her journey of acceptance and join the fun of picking the perfect pair of glasses. 

In less than a decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat went from being a teenage graffiti artist to an international art star. His meteoric rise to fame coincided with the outrageous excess of the heady ’80s art boom. A fixture of the downtown scene, with its explosive mix of music, fashion, art, and drugs, he soon became involved with some of its most celebrated personalities, including Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Madonna. 

Basquiat fulfilled that cynical aphorism: Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. But Basquiat did more than that: he left a beautiful corpus. With each passing year, the remarkable energy, perspicacity and originality of his work increases in power. 

In a world where Black Lives Matter and the imperative need for diversity are among the driving forces of our time, Basquiat’s success in the 1980s white art world, and his ongoing universal celebrity, have made him a significant role model for generation of artists to come. 

From the rise and fall of the graffiti movement, to the East Village art scene, to the art dealers and out-of-control auction houses, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, the definitive biography of the young painter, is a vivid portrait of both the artist and his time. 

Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art includes 12-14 photographs.

A spiky, edgy collection of five sly yet sensitive stories spotlighting clear-eyed and “difficult” women who are navigating their identities as workers and women in contemporary Japan—a feminist, anti-capitalist modern classic published outside Asia and in English for the first time.

The Dilemmas of Working Women is Fumio Yamamoto’s darkly witty look at modern Japanese women who are ambivalent about their lives and jobs. In “Naked,” a woman who’s simultaneously lost her business and her husband finds that it is surprisingly comfortable to stay at home sewing stuffed animals, even if it makes her a “loser” in the eyes of society. In “Planarian,” a young woman recovering from breast cancer tells her friends and boyfriend that she would prefer to be the titular worm to organically regenerate her body. Each of these spiky women—as well as the three other protagonists in this groundbreaking work—chafes against social expectations that equate work with worth and demand women squeeze into the confining and sometimes dehumanizing role of employee in a world built by and for men.

First published in Japan in 2000, The Dilemmas of Working Women struck a nerve with Japanese readers and became a bestselling literary sensation, selling nearly half a million copies and winning the prestigious Naoki Prize in Literature. A quarter of a century later, this brilliant modern classic—available for the first time outside Asia and in English—remains deliciously funny and astonishingly relevant.

Translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom

Joining the growing Black creative movement currently refashioning horses and cowboy imagery, a thoughtful, probing exploration of the shared history of Blackness and horses which reveals what its image can teach us about nationhood, race, and culture.

Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life.

In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines. Alternatively playful and critical, meditative and biting, these essays navigate time and place—from the shadows of racetracks where jockey culture and the ubiquity of “equestrian chic” was born, to the reclamation—or, in Lil Nas X’s word, yeehawification—of the image of the cowboy, to the fraught connections of equestrian sport to slavery, US militarization, and European colonial domination. At heart, Kalli probes a central question: What does it mean for Black people to ride and tend horses in the context of a culture that has also used horses against them?

Throughout these essays, Kalli reflects on the experience of being the only Black member of the equestrian team at Columbia University, and how the aesthetics, ethos, and practice of horse stewardship contributed to their understanding of gender, sexuality, and radical community building. Mounted moves beyond the reductive stereotypes that dominate our perceptions of “horse people”—the swaggering masculinity, snooty elitism, and assumed whiteness—to reveal how Black people relate to the image and physical presence of the horse in nature and culture, considering violence, sexualization, power, migration, and more through its image.

Hammons' body prints, flags and found-object sculptures come together in this artist's book documenting his thought-provoking conceptual exhibition

This post-exhibition catalog revisits David Hammons’ 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. A singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction, this publication illustrates the most expansive exhibition of this legendary artist’s work to date.
Said critic Jonathan Griffin of the original exhibition, "Alongside finished artworks, including framed examples of Hammons’s sublime drawings made with bounced basketballs and powdered Kool-Aid, there are plenty of apparently ad hoc, readymade interventions, installations in which it is unclear where one ends and the next begins. … Hammons, it seems, wants his viewers to relax, historiography be damned."
Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of 20 and began making his body prints several years later. He studied at Otis Art Institute with Charles White and became part of a younger generation of Black avant-garde artists loosely associated with the Black Arts Movement. In Los Angeles, Hammons was a cofounder of Studio Z, a group which included Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Joe Ray and others. Hammons has lived in New York since 1978.