PRE-ORDER:ON SALE DATE: Oct 6, 2025

A gripping tale of education, violence, and hope, in which one man's dream for a better future collides with a community on the edge of transformation.

Set in 1842, this novel foregrounds a Haiti that is grappling with the weight of an onerous debt imposed by France, forcing its citizens to pay reparations to French colonists in exchange for diplomatic recognition of the first Black republic of the Americas. In the town of Boën, a prosperous notary, Ludovic Possible, decides to take a bold step to secure the future of his community. He opens a schoolhouse where local children can learn both artisanal skills and the essential ability to read and write. For Ludovic, education represents the best chance for the people of Boën to rise above their hardships and build a prosperous future—especially for Aïda, a quiet and enigmatic girl whose mother’s marvelous stories captivate him.

The tranquility of Boën is soon shattered, however, by a series of duels that pit families, neighbors, and even animals against each other. As tensions rise, Ludovic’s vision for a better future is threatened by the escalating violence. In Duels, Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey introduces readers to a rich and unforgettable cast of characters—Aïda, Ludovic, Balthazar Possible, Pépé the Tempest, and many others—who find themselves at the crossroads of a nation on the brink of transformative change.

A Harper Perennial Deluxe Modern Classic

The bold, funny, and poignant autobiography from one of American literature’s greats, now beautifully packaged as a Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition

“Warm, witty, imaginative. . . . This is a rich and winning book.”—The New Yorker

“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows with a harp and a sword in my hands.”—Zora Neale Hurston

First published in 1942 at the crest of her popularity as a writer, this is Zora Neale Hurston’s imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature’s most compelling and influential authors. Hurston’s powerful novels of the South—including Jonah’s Gourd Vine and, most famously, Their Eyes Were Watching God—continue to enthrall readers with their lyrical grace, sharp detail, and captivating emotionality. First published in 1942, Dust Tracks on a Road is Hurston’s personal story, told in her own words. The Perennial Modern Classics Deluxe edition includes an all-new forward by Maya Angelou, an extended biography by Valerie Boyd, and a special P.S. section featuring the contemporary reviews that greeted the book’s original publication.

Love and revolution in a crumbling world order.

Roma has a steady job, a mortgage, and a surrogate family in Queens. But as she moves through her daily routines, the powerful Empire that rules her world bares its teeth elsewhere—crushing freedom movements across the planet, including the Punjabi farmers’ uprising where her younger brother struggles on the frontlines.

Roma’s life is upended when her older brother entrusts her with a strange gift: an ordinary-looking plant that manifests a sophisticated bioengineered technology. The ‘cell’ opens a portal for an extraterrestrial spirit-body bearing news of a liberated future–and the potential to hack AI warfare—propelling Roma and her family into the core of a rising resistance.

As dreams and dialectics converge, Roma meditates on the role of faith—ruminating on mystic poetics and anticolonial legacies while yearning for a bewitching woman whose heart will only ever belong to the revolution.

From the Slutty Vegan herself, a collection of ninety-one delicious, guilt-free, plant-based recipes that you will love to indulge in from the comfort of your own home.

When Pinky Cole opened her first Slutty Vegan food truck in 2018, she was inspired by her love of vegan comfort food. Now, after having expanded to restaurants, a bar, and a philanthropic organization, Cole is ready to bring her best recipes straight to you.

With mouth-watering photographs and easy-to-follow instructions, Eat Plants, B*tch celebrates Cole’s belief that it’s fun and accessible to cook and enjoy irresistible vegan comfort food. From Avocado Egg Rolls to her Black Pea Cauliflower Po’​Boy or Oyster Mushroom Parm and everything in between, it won’t be long before you will also be declaring Cole’s timeless mantra: Eat Plants, B*tch!

An arrestingly beautiful, award-winning novel about separation, migration, and love left behind.

Alone and adrift in Barcelona, an unnamed narrator is haunted by the death of her teenage brother, Diego. Diego, the little boy she helped raise in Mexico while their mother struggled to make a living in Spain. Diego, who loved Vampire Weekend and dreamed of becoming a pilot. Diego, who hated Madrid as much as she did.

Now, his ashes in hand, she must return to Mexico. Plagued by memories, she recounts their young lives leading up to tragedy in blistering detail: the acute loneliness that accompanied their emigration; the siblings’ first separation, when she left for Barcelona to make her own way in the world; her activism against labor abuses, which is threatened by her tumultuous relationship with an entitled lover; and the final, heavyhearted confrontation with her brother. Caught between rage and heartbreak over the loss of Diego, she pieces together a story of alienation, but also of surprising courage and hope.

Masterfully translated by Megan McDowell, and shot through with flashes of dark humor, Eating Ashes boldly confronts both the intimate and systemic struggles faced by migrants striving to build a life worth living. Already an international sensation across Europe, this novel cements Brenda Navarro as a breathtakingly unique and vital voice in literature.

Discover how to create memorable meals using affordable, good-for-you ingredients with 85 delectable recipes that celebrate the comfort of eating at home, from the founder of the bestselling superfood brand Golde.

“A powerful invitation to return to ourselves through the act of everyday cooking. Trinity reminds us that nourishment is not only about what’s on the plate but also how we arrive there through small, intentional rituals, honest ingredients, and the gentle cadence of real life.”—Aran Goyoaga, James Beard–nominated creator of Cannelle et Vanille and author of The Art of Gluten-Free Bread

Eating at Home provides a welcome shift from hurried meals and hectic evenings. Golde founder Trinity Mouzon Wofford shares 85 inviting, healthful recipes to bring more calm, connection, and nourishment into your household routine. Inspired by the meals Trinity makes with her own family, Eating at Home pairs affordable ingredients with gentle guidance to turn everyday cooking into a moment worth savoring.

Good-quality, simple food is health food, and the ingredients you cook with are as important as the gentleness you bring to the process. In Eating at Home, Trinity Mouzon Wofford’s 85 simple, healthful recipes embrace affordable, local produce, lean on approachable techniques without fuss or formality, and celebrate her family’s multicultural culinary heritage, including:

• $0 Scrap Stock
• Soft Dashi Scrambled Eggs over Rice
• Bitter Greens with Black Vinegar
• Sweet Rosemary Cornbread
• Olive Oil and Matcha Day Cake
• Salted Butter Sesame Shortbread

We’ve never been so collectively starved for moments of pause, and Eating at Home is a manifesto for taking pleasure in the act of cooking, and more than that, pleasure in the act of taking time to enjoy your food. With gentle, unhurried recipes, techniques that are easy and forgiving, and sidebars with advice for bringing wellness practices into quotidian moments, Eating at Home is an invitation and a reclamation: of our time, our nourishment, and our sense of connection to the people with whom we break bread.

African futurism, gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction—Dumas’s stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America.

Henry Dumas’s fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity, the present and the ancestral. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests. Humming with life, Dumas’s stories create a collage of mid-twentieth-century Black experiences, interweaving religious metaphor, African cosmologies, diasporic folklore, and America’s history of slavery and systemic racism.

Selected by Kirkus for "Best of 2021: Our Favorite Nonfiction"

It is impossible to imagine New Orleans, and by extension American history, without the vibrant and singular Creole culture. In the face of an oppressive white society, members of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle built a community and held it together through the era of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow terrorism. Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood follows Ludger Boguille, his family, and friends through landmark events―from the Haitian Revolution to the birth of jazz―that shaped New Orleans and the United States.

The story begins with the author’s father rescuing a century’s worth of handwritten journals, in French, from a trash hauler’s pickup truck. From the journals’ pages emerged one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets. Although Louisiana law classified them as men of color, Negroes, and Blacks, the Economie brothers rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all.

A descendant of the Economie’s community, author Fatima Shaik has constructed a meticulously detailed nonfiction narrative that reads like an epic novel.

A revelatory look at the life, work, and legacy of the legendary choreographer Alvin Ailey
 
Alvin Ailey is one of the most celebrated choreographers of the twentieth century. The creator of iconic works such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and Cry, he is widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958 when he was just twenty-seven years old. Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of dancers and choreographers. This expansive volume situates Ailey within a broader social, creative, and cultural context, looking at the artists who influenced and collaborated with him, the spaces and scenes he frequented, the dynamic themes within his dances, and how his vision and work changed contemporary dance.
 
Essays by artists, scholars, and critics cover topics ranging from the Black church, the South, and the Great Migration to nightclubs, musical influences, and queerness. With more than four hundred images including photographs of works Ailey choreographed, archival materials such as notebooks, sketches, letters, and never-before-published behind-the-scenes photos, and conversations about the legacy of the company with Sylvia Waters, Judith Jamison, and Masazumi Chaya as well as several contemporary dancers and scholars, this study offers an unprecedented full picture of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists and the way his work continues to inspire today’s generation of dancers.
 
Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art  
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025)

For readers of Vanessa Miller, Sheila Williams, Victoria Christopher Murray and Tracy Chevalier, the story of an unconventional woman who overcame adversity to create enduring tributes in stone to her race and times. The life of pioneering Black Neoclassical sculptor Edmonia Lewis – from the Civil War-era Midwest to Boston’s abolitionist circles, to Rome’s expatriate community – is resurrected in this stunning debut biographical novel.

“I plan to be a sculptor, to memorialize forever the great men and women of my race, and those who have fought for our cause.”

At the age of 8, orphaned, precocious Wildfire seems fated to a life of toil selling her handmade crafts to Niagara Falls tourists alongside her Ojibwe aunts. But Wildfire’s older half-brother, Samuel, has been making other plans for his gifted sibling. Soon, she is set on a new trajectory—and with it comes her birth name, Edmonia, and a revelation about her true origins.

Ensconced at the home of a trusted benefactor while Samuel makes his fortune in California, Edmonia flourishes—despite her abhorrence for etiquette lessons. Privately nurturing artistic ambitions, she advances through the abolitionist’s prep school and lands at Oberlin College. But at Oberlin lies a devastating trap: Edmonia is accused of poisoning, nearly fatally, two friends, with tainted wine.

What ensues is a headline-making trial, a vicious attack by a white mob—and a bold journey that will lead Edmonia from a crucial introduction in Boston to a vibrant community of celebrated expatriate women artists in Rome, and encounters with such distinguished figures as President Ulysses S. Grant, Pope Pius IX, and Frederick Douglass.

Still, Edmonia’s success is plagued by stinging critiques, potent racism, and haunting self-doubt. She must decide, too, whether to abandon her romantic entanglements, or devote herself to bringing to life her visions of beauty and justice—and hopefully, forge her place in a rapidly changing world.

Join us for a special night for educators!  Come build community alongside teachers, librarians, and school leaders while stocking your classroom and school libraries using a special 15% discount.  We'll also be giving away free Advanced Reader Copies of recently published books!

Light bites and cocktails will be provided by our friends at ChòpnBlọk.  

From “Egg” to Z—crack open a global culinary adventure for babies and toddlers!

This adorable, plate-shaped alphabet board book from the author of Noodles, Please! introduces your youngest reader to the alphabet in a delightful and tasty journey across 20 different countries and cultures.

Eat the alphabet as you discover 26 egg-based dishes from countries around the world. From Nadan Mutta to Tunisian Shakshouka, this food board book will have young foodies and their grown-ups wowed by all the amazing ways you can use a simple egg.

• As you read, look for the name of each dish in both English and the native language of the country it comes from.

• This giftable die-cut alphabet book is shaped to mimic a dinner plate on each page.

• Vibrant illustrations of 20 different egg dishes from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, India, Australia, and the Middle East

Whether you’re a lifelong fan of frittata or a tiny emerging foodie, this children’s board book will have you screaming for more Eggs, Please!

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair offers a provocative reframing of the abortion issue in post-Roe America.

In a series of 28 brief arguments, Blair deftly makes the case for moving the abortion debate away from controlling and legislating women’s bodies and instead directs the focus on men’s lack of accountability in preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Highly readable, accessible, funny, and unflinching, Blair builds her argument by walking readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile than women), the unfair burden placed on women when it comes to preventing pregnancy (90% of the birth control market is for women), the wrongheaded stigmas around birth control for men (condoms make sex less pleasurable, vasectomies are scary and emasculating), and the counterintuitive reality that men, who are fertile 100% of the time, take little to no responsibility for preventing pregnancy. 

The result is a compelling and convincing case for placing the responsibility—and burden—of preventing unwanted pregnancies away from women and onto men.

Texas Institute of Letters Award finalist for Best First Book of Poetry

In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Reyes Ramirez explores living in America as a first-generation American of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, living among conflicting histories.

Through the voices of an astronaut, a tennis player, a drag queen, family members, an alternate version of the self, and even a turtle, these propulsive poems embody the many marginalized voices demanding to be remembered in a nation that requires erasure of histories.

Colonizing languages and subverting forms, rerouting histories, and finding the mundane made extraordinary, El Rey of Gold Teeth breaks open notions of destiny, in humorous and devastating ways, to reimagine the past and present a new future where lack transforms to abundance, where there will be many answers to every question. Reyes Ramirez's debut poetry collection plays in spaces of both elegy and joy, and introduces a vibrant new talent.

Acompaña a la abuela un sábado en la tarde a visitar a Yamaya al río Hudson.

Todos los días, la abuela extraña el océano en Puerto Rico. Pero los sábados, cuando el sol está alto en el cielo, la abuela y su nieta recorren Harlem hacia la 12 Avenida camino a un lugar mágico: al río Hudson.

Ahí, van a celebrar al río que trajo a millones de americanos a sus costas, y al espíritu de una religión antigua y de un amor familiar pasado de generación a generación.

Esta historia es en un relato reconfortante inspirado por un río icónico, un amor expansivo intergeneracional, recuerdos y la curiosidad infantil que inspiran en sí.

National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival’s so-called “celebration of life.” Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun blends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.

Selah Bailey, an anxious, risk-averse, homebody determined to finally become the main character in her own story, created a "F*ck It List" filled with goals and experiences to force her out of her comfort zone and introduce her to a life outside of her front door.

Realizing she'll need a partner to help complete her more adventurous goals by the deadline, she goes on a few dates in hopes of breaking her dry spell with no luck.

After what may be the worst date ever, she meets Greyson in the elevator of her building.

She soon finds herself running out of time to complete the list and seeks an arrangement with anyone tolerable-though a certain neighbor comes to mind.

Greyson is everything she wasn't prepared for and could be the perfect hero for her story. Except falling in love is against the rules and she should probably leave the house to find it.

Greyson Park is a business oriented extrovert, who's fully content with the life he's built for himself amid his divorce. For the past 7 years, he's prioritized making the best out of everyday and keeping things casual in his love life.

As the creator of a wildly successful dating app, he's become quite the modern day matchmaker. While he loves seeing others in love, he doesn't forgive himself for the past and believes romance isn't in the cards for a second time.

After what may be the most awkward night ever, he meets Selah in the elevator of his building.

He soon finds himself needing a believable date for his ex's wedding to silence the noise about him not moving on and works out an arrangement with his neighbor.

Selah is everything he didn't know he needed and could be the one who introduces him to a life outside of work. Except falling in love is against the rules, and he should probably use his app to find it.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

In a story full of style, sass, and significance, a young boy goes on a quest for the perfect Easter church outfit, inspired by elders from his community. Along the way learns about the importance of Easter traditions to his family, his ancestors, and the Black church. Elijah is on a mission to find the perfect church outfit for Easter. But when failed attempts at his town’s stores leave Elijah disappointed, an important conversation with Deacon Brown and Mother Green about tradition, culture, and clothing gives him the courage to create his own Easter masterpiece: a patchwork of perfection that tells his story with style. Families at Easter will appreciate seeing the themes of church and Black culture throughout Elijah's quest, in this sweet yet important story about a young boy's journey toward an understanding of those who came before him. An afterword from the author delves into the traditions and culture of Black communities at Easter and the historical importance and significance of Easter clothing and style.

One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903–1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle. Making her way in predominantly male circles while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists, Baker was a national officer and key figure in the NAACP, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In this definitive biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker’s long and rich career, revealing her complexity, radical democratic worldview, and enduring influence on group-centered, grassroots activism. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide throughout the twentieth century.

The end of my marriage was the beginning of my happily ever after.

What happens when you hear your husband putting dents in your mattress with another woman?

Leave and never look back!

Easier said than done when you're a stay-at-home mom, share two kids with the no-good cheater, and have a savings account that laughs in your face on the daily.

I want out and agree to an outrageous separation agreement to avoid a showdown in court with a man standing on his wallet, waiting for me to fall. The mission is next to impossible, but I would rather attempt a full split on a hibachi grill after a Brazilian wax than stay in a marriage I should've ended years ago.

Morgan, my best friend, offers a gorgeous townhouse her family owns to get me back on my feet. Eight months rent-free equals one step closer to Divorced AF.

I didn't expect moms gone wild at my divorce party, but one fruity cocktail led to me staying out past my bedtime and the steamiest dream with a man straight from fantasies.

Every kiss, every caress, made me feel worshipped. Adored.

When Morgan offered this Georgetown home, she failed to mention it belongs to her younger brother, one of DC's most eligible bachelors. He's very fine, not a dream, and back early from time away in London.

Now, we're staring at each other, dumbfounded and turned on.

Ella Gets the D is a standalone divorce romantic comedy perfect for lovers of cinnamon roll heroes, a tired mom getting her groove back, tacos, and lots of spice (we kick the door wide open). This isn't your fluffy rom-com. Somebody might catch a case.

An offering to be with, and to turn toward, the feelings from which we instinctively recoil.

We have learned how to suppress our pain and deny its presence, but when we fight against our internal turmoil, glimmers of peace are short-lived. Rejecting our suffering is not a sustainable solution because trauma is held in the body. In this book, Nityda Gessel invites readers on a journey toward lasting freedom, with insights and experiential practices that marry the wisdom of Buddhist psychology, yogic teachings, and Indigenous understanding with somatic psychotherapy and neuroscience.

When we heal, our actions and attitudes are not hijacked by our nervous systems as easily. We begin to feel more comfortable in our bodies; more at peace, awake, and free. With Gessel’s invitation, readers will learn to look out into the world, and see more than their own trauma reflected back.

From spiritual guide and teacher Aycee Brown, a warm and inviting handbook to discovering wholeness by embodying your truth and embracing your power.

When Aycee Brown was a child, her connection to spirit made her feel like an outcast, until her grandmother helped her see this burden as a gift. Now, Aycee helps readers—as well as clients and “Is My Aura on Straight?” podcast listeners—map their journey from trauma to wholeness.
Rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach, Aycee teaches us which healing modality to use, when. Embarking on a soul journey, readers will explore different parts of themselves and step into their own story by exploring the canyon, or shadow self, through the following modalities:

* Knowing Your Story—The Embodiment of Validation
* Psychic Channeling—The Embodiment of Anger
* Astrology—The Embodiment of Self
* Numerology—The Embodiment of Alignment
* Mediumship—The Embodiment of Truth
* Metaphysics—The Embodiment of Choice
* Human Design for Liberation—The Embodiment of Change
* I Am—The Embodiment of Destiny (Internal Family Systems therapy)

As readers engage with these practices, their intuition grows stronger and paths are revealed. With Aycee holding our hand, we can connect to our truth and realize our wildest dreams. We become more capable of having healthy relationships, finding joy in our lives, and maintaining loving connections with those we have lost.
Embody Your Magic invites the conversations you’ve been waiting to have and reveals the psychic magic within you.

From award-winning author Candice Iloh and New York Times illustrator Bea Jackson comes a warmhearted picture book celebration of traditional Nigerian home cooking and the surprising joys of trying new things, from the perspective of a boy on the autism spectrum.

Emeka's favorite food is jollof rice. He eats it every day. "Emeka, come and try this egusi!" Mama and Papa urge. But orange rice is what Emeka knows. He doesn't want anything different.

Then one day, Emeka comes home from school to find Mama in the kitchen waiting for him to help her cook egusi. One by one, new things go into the pot. There are so many colors and smells and sounds! And Emeka is a great helper. Could it be that trying something new might actually be...good?

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

Reared in Houston (Freedmen’s Town), Texas, Emmett J. Scott was a journalist, newspaper editor, government official, author, and chief of staff, adviser, and ghostwriter to Booker T. Washington. Called “the power broker of the Tuskegee Machine,” Scott was a Renaissance man, scholar, and political fixer. However, his life has not received a full examination until now.

Built upon fifty years of research, Maceo C. Dailey’s Emmett J. Scott offers fascinating detail by describing Scott’s role in promoting the Tuskegee Institute. Before his 2015 death, Dailey had nearly singular access to the Scott papers at Morgan State University, which have been officially closed for decades. Readers will finally be exposed to Scott’s behind-the-scenes contributions to racial uplift and will see his influential role in advancing not only the Tuskegee Institute but also the Booker T. Washington agenda.

Editors Will Guzmán and David H. Jackson Jr. lend their own expertise in bringing Dailey’s lifetime project to fruition. Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, a close friend of Dailey’s, provides a timely foreword. Former Black Panther Party chairwoman Elaine Brown, Scott’s granddaughter, reflects on his impact and her relationship with the Scott family in the afterword.

Taken together, this work of biography is an impressive reference and an essential endeavor of recovery, one that restores to prominence the life and legacy of Emmett J. Scott.

From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy

When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?

Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.