"Hello there, sunshine!"

Every morning, young Tabitha wakes up and greets the sun. She loves how it brings everyone JOY. But one day she wakes up and the sun is missing! So Tab hops on her strawberry shortcake bike with her puppy in tow and makes it her business to find the sun.

Can she do it? Or will Tabitha find out that sometimes the shine we're looking for is inside of us?

A perfect pick for fans of What Do You Do with an Idea?, You Matter, and Just Because, Brown’s debut is a marvelous read-aloud and a great gift that will remind the youngest reader to always stay positive. 

A transportive, highly personal cookbook of 100 West African-influenced recipes and stories from Top Chef finalist Eric Adjepong.

“Sankofa” is a Ghanaian Twi word that roughly translates to the idea that we must look back in order to move forward. In his moving debut cookbook, chef Eric Adjepong practices sankofa by showcasing the beauty and depth of West African food through the lens of his own culinary journey.

With 100 soul-satisfying recipes and narrative essays, Ghana to the World reflects Eric’s journey to understand his identity and unique culinary perspective as a first-generation Ghanaian American. The recipes in this book look forward and backward in time, balancing the traditional and the modern and exploring the lineage of West African cooking while embracing new elements. Eric includes traditional home-cooked meals from his mother, like a deeply flavorful jollof rice and a smoky, savory kontomire stew thick with leafy greens, alongside creative dishes influenced by his culinary education, like a sweet summer curried corn bisque and sticky tamarind-glazed duck legs.

Full of stunning photography shot in Ghana and remembrances rooted in family, tradition, and love, Ghana to the World shows readers how the unsung story of a continent’s cuisine can shine a powerful light on one person’s exploration of who he is as a chef and a man.

Combining vivid storytelling, astonishing imagination and careful research, this is the ultimate collection of African folklore, with 50 entertaining tales and commentary from noted folklorist Helen Nde, presented in a beautiful, foiled gift package.

From creation myths and foundation legends to fascinating stories of human relationships and amusing animal tales, these stories provide a diverse look at the countries and cultures across the African continent. Noted folklorist Helen Nde also provides marvellous context for history and colonial influences for the stories.

Read 50 stories that take you north to Egypt, west to Sierra Leone, east to Somalia, south to South Africa and many places in-between. Discover the geographical and cultural variety of the continent with stories such as:

* FROM ALGERIA: "The Story of the First Man and Woman", who meet when they struggle over access to a well, but go on to have 100 children and start the human race.
* FROM SUDAN: "Okwa and the River Maiden", a tale about the great-grandson of the first man who seeks the river spirit's approval to marry two river maidens, half women and half crocodiles.
* FROM ZIMBABWE: "The Moon and His Wives", a story about the first man who pleads with the creator to become mortal and go to earth, where the first star becomes his companion.
* FROM GHANA: "How Goat Caused a War" by tricking the Supreme Being and giving his holy message to the wrong prince.
* FROM TANZANIA: "The Singing Kaguru Birds", who offer help and riches to poor folk in exchange for a strict rule or even a trick.

Carefully researched and vividly retold these stories represent a vital and fresh perspective on African Folktales for anyone interested in folktales, mythology and storytelling from around the world.

"The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is, shockingly, little more than a footnote in history . . . Miller's book, thankfully, reverses that egregious oversight . . . we viscerally learn how this vibrant Black community fought devastation with resilience, faith, and grit." --Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Two sisters. One unassuming haven. Endless opportunities for grace.

Sisters Margaret and Evelyn Justice have grown up in the prosperous Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma--also known as Black Wall Street. In Greenwood, the Justice sisters had it all--movie theaters and entertainment venues, beauty shops and clothing stores, high-profile businesses like law offices, medical clinics, and banks. While Evelyn aspires to head off to the East Coast to study fashion design, recent college grad Margaret plans to settle in Greenwood, teaching at the local high school and eventually raising a family.

Then the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre upends everything they know and brings them unspeakable loss. Left with nothing but each other, the sisters flee along what would eventually become iconic Route 66 and stumble upon the Threatt Filling Station, a safe haven and the only place where they can find a shred of hope in oppressive Jim Crow America. At the filling station, they are able to process their pain, fill up their souls, and find strength as they wrestle with a faith in God that has left them feeling abandoned.

But they eventually realize that they can't hide out at the filling station when Greenwood needs to be rebuilt. The search for their father and their former life may not give them easy answers, but it can propel them--and their community--to a place where their voices are stronger . . . strong enough to build a future that honors the legacy of those who were lost.

For numerous migrants who ventured westward in the twentieth century in search of greater opportunities, the glitter of California often proved to be mere fool’s gold—promising easy riches but frequently resulting in dispossession and displacement. Poet Wendy M. Thompson is descended from two of these migrant waves—post-1965 Chinese immigrants and Black southerners of the Second Great Migration—whose presence has permanently transformed the region.

In this arresting debut poetry collection, Thompson traces the past and present of California’s Bay Area, exploring themes of family, migration, girlhood, and identity against a backdrop of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Traveling down both familiar highways and obscure side streets, her poems map a region where race, class, and language are just some of the fault lines that divide communities and produce periodic tremors of violence and resistance.

Confronting assimilationist myths of the American Dream, Black California Gold depicts a setting that is less a melting pot than a smelting pot, subjecting different ethnic groups to searing trials and extreme pressures that threaten to break them down entirely. Yet, it also celebrates the Black residents of the Bay Area who have struggled to sustain home and hope amid increasingly desperate conditions.

Celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Maya Angelou in this stunning 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle

Step into the world of iconic American writer, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou as you piece together this intricately detailed, beautifully illustrated jigsaw.

From the autobiographical book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to her work with Martin Luther King Jr., learn about Angelou's change-making career, as well as her early life and far-reaching legacy. The World of Maya Angelou will explore her life story and important themes in her work, with significant friends, collaborators and key milestones illustrated, accompanied by a fold-out poster with more information detailing what you can spot.

1000-PIECE PUZZLE: this detailed illustration is packed with real people and places to seek and find. The completed puzzle measures 48.5 x 68 cm (19 x 27 in.)

PERFECT LITERARY GIFT: celebratea well-loved and inspiration figure who made an incredible impact on the literary world and beyond

INCLUDES A PULL-OUT POSTER: discover Maya Angelou's life story and explore the people and places that had the most impact on her life. Written with The Caged Bird Legacy, who continue celebrate and champion Angelou's life and work

BESTSELLING SERIES: 'The World Of...' jigsaws are a fun way of celebrating the lives and works of creative greats. Also available in the series: The World of Frida Kahlo, The World of Jane Austen, The World of the Brontës, The World of James Joyce and more.

LAURENCE KING has been capturing imaginations and inspiring creativity in new and unexpected ways for over 30 years, with playful and eye-catching games, gifts and books

Cold Thief Place speaks of the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself by way of confessional poems.

This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life—three times on three different continents—and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it's possible to truly know one's parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a greencard marriage in order to live a "normal life." One of the myths of America is that Americans are newly formed, defiant of authority, and free from old-world traditions.

This book speaks to dark side of this myth: of the legacies that my parents wished to escape but instead carried with them: their distrust of government and their desire for an authoritarianism similar to the kind they had fled. Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point-of-view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American—that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to.

The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot in this brilliant debut, which tells the story of a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer. By midsummer reality hits, taking her—and her project—to Tehran.

The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she and her best friend—a poet-turned-marketer named Adam—have turned their noses up at other peoples’ riches. But two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just "marry rich."

But our protagonist, whose PhD thesis compared Eastern and Western views of marriage in film and literature, takes the idea seriously. She makes a spreadsheet and outlines a goal: 100 dates with people of all genders and a marriage proposal in hand by the official start of the fall semester. What follows is a whirlwind summer packed with dating: martinis sans vermouth with the lazy scion of an Eastside construction empire; board games with a butch producer who owns a house in the hills and a newly dented Porsche; a Venmo request from a “socialist” trust fund babe; and an evening spent dodging the halitosis of a maxillofacial surgeon from Orange County.

Only a tragedy in Tehran and an overdue familial reckoning can alter the narrator’s increasingly manic trajectory and force her to confront the contradictions of her life in Los Angeles. And as doubts begin to creep in about her marriage project, it suddenly seems possible that the eligible prospect she’s been looking for has been beneath her nose the entire time.

For fans of Kaveh Akbar and Elif Batuman, Liquid delivers a modern tale of romance, loss, and belonging like no other. Mariam Rahmani’s gorgeous high-wire satire explodes off the page with verve and originality in this riveting spin on the classic romantic comedy.

Mrs. Z's class is holding a variety show, and everyone has signed up to demonstrate their special talent! Everyone that is, except Ayana Ndoum. She's good at reading, but someone's already reciting a poem out loud. She's good at synchronized swimming, but they can't get a pool onstage. What could her talent be?

Before she can figure it out, she has an even bigger problem to deal with: Why is her dad at school?

Turns out her dad-a professor who gets excited about schedules and has lots of goofy sayings-is a variety show volunteer! He talks to everyone and asks too many questions. It's embarrassing for Ayana, who likes to be quiet and help from the sidelines. And with her dad taking up the spotlight, will she ever find her own way to shine?

“In this taut psychological thriller, one woman’s desperate quest for answers reveals just how far she’s willing to go for love—or revenge. I devoured this book . . . utterly engrossing!”—Liv Constantine, New York Times bestselling author of The Next Mrs. Parrish

She’s been ghosted. But she won’t be forgotten.

Claire is excited to drop off a surprise workday lunch for her fiancé, Noah. It’s their anniversary, after all. But when the receptionist tells her that no one with Noah’s name works there, Claire thinks there must be a mistake.

Noah isn’t picking up her calls. Her texts go unanswered. It turns out Noah has a different life . . . one with a beautiful girlfriend, a beautiful house. Claire was never really in the picture.

Desperate to speak to Noah and convince him to return to their dream life, Claire plunges into a nightmarish journey of obsession that submerges her deeper into the murky waters of her own past—a past dominated by a manipulative mother who shattered her sense of self.

Will Claire break free from the ghosts that haunt her? Or will they become more costly than any of Noah’s lies?

A heartfelt picture book about one child's experience in foster care that reminds all kids that—just like a garden—love from the right source will help them bloom.

Lamar has lived in seven homes in three years and has never stayed anywhere long enough to put down roots. As he watches his new foster mom tend to her garden each day, he soon joins her with cautious curiosity. Together, they plant, they weed, they water . . . until one day Lamar's anger and feelings of uncertainty lead him to destroy the garden.

But through his foster mother's love and care, Lamar discovers that just like her garden, he is wanted, he is loved, he has been planted, and he will bloom.

Written by a licensed social worker, Planted with Love illustrates that a loving home and a loving adult can provide a safe place for any child to grow and thrive.

Read Melody's Diary to discover her story set in Detroit during the Civil Rights Movement. This title is a part of American Girl's exciting new series featuring the diaries and journals of girls throughout history!

Melody can't wait to sing her first solo at church, and she wants it to be special. What song should she choose? She gets advice from her big brother, who has his sights set on becoming a Motown star, and she gets inspiration from the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Melody's also inspired by her older sister, who's home from college with new ideas about marches and protests and making things fair.

When Melody experiences discrimination for herself, she decides to stand up and speak out about civil rights, too.

As her solo approaches, an unimaginable tragedy leaves her silent. Can Melody find her voice to speak up for those who can't?

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!

From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.

A visual celebration of Black women and their gardens, filled with inspiration, stories, and the healing magic of gardening, based on the popular Instagram account BlackGirlsGardening.

Through first-person narratives and arresting photography, this unique gardening book profiles women who demonstrate how a gardening practice has the power to heal, empower, educate, and connect. Thirty-one compelling personal stories about creating backyard, flower, and vegetable gardens, participating in community gardens, and gardening with kids are included. Sidebars offer advice on composting, pest control, must-have tools, greenhouse gardens, and more.

In a beautiful, chunky package that can be read cover to cover or displayed on a coffee table, Black Girls Gardening makes a lovely gift for aspiring and practicing Black women gardeners, first-time homeowners, parents who garden with their kids, and women of all ages who enjoy sinking their hands into the soil.

GARDENING AS EMPOWERMENT: With stories on starting a garden from seed, building your own vegetable and flower beds, growing your own food, connecting with a community, and showing your kids the power and joy that come from these experiences, this uplifting book demonstrates how gardening empowers women and green thumbs of all ages and levels. 

HEALTH BENEFITS: Gardening is good for you, and it’s a lifelong hobby! Spending time outside is an excellent way to relieve stress and anxiety, and gardening is an accessible and increasingly common pastime that provides respite from our indoor, online, sedentary lives. This book celebrates gardens as a sanctuary, a source of solace and joy, and a place for self-discovery and connection.

CELEBRATES DIVERSITY: This uniquely inspiring nature and gardening book highlights stories from Black, biracial, and multiracial women, an underrepresented audience in mainstream gardening, nature, and outdoor media.

Perfect for:
* Self-care gift or self-purchase for Black women, ages 18 - 50+
* Gift-giving for Mother’s Day, birthday, housewarming, or retirement
* Women gardeners and aspiring green thumbs
* Garden admirers and nature enthusiasts
* First-time homeowners who want to plant a garden
* Followers of @BlackGirlsGardening
* Fans of Nature Swagger, Wild at Home, My Beautiful Black Hair, She Explores

A passionate vice principal and a guarded science teacher compete for a grand prize, only to realize their budding relationship might be the real jackpot.

Brianna Rogers has been told a time (or six) she needs to stop jumping into things head first. But when the principal rescinds his approval for a library upgrade, deciding to spend the money on a football field instead, she sees red. Literally. Brianna throws her hat in the ring and joins a team of teachers who will spend their summer in a Mars simulation. As the sister of an astronaut, this should be easy, right? What she didn’t count on was the last-minute addition to the team—Roman Major: science teacher, son of the principal, and too handsome for his own good.

Roman and Brianna have been hot and cold all year, and living in close quarters intensifies their animosity and attraction. Brianna is sure he’s been sent by his father to sabotage them, foiling their chance at prize money that will cover all of the school’s actual needs. But each day, Roman proves himself to be a dedicated teammate—and Brianna finds herself falling harder and harder. While it’s clear the feeling is mutual, she can’t shake the sense that he’s hiding something. As the simulation nears its end, Brianna realizes she may have to make an impossible choice, between the school she’s dedicated herself to, and the man who has won his way into her heart.

Set in the blockbuster and award-winning universe of League of Legends: Arcane and written by award-winning author C. L. Clark, discover a thrilling epic fantasy novel where Ambessa Medarda truly learns what it means to be a Chosen of the Wolf.

Medarda over all.

Ambessa Medarda: Warrior, general, mother. She is a woman to be feared, and the Medardas are unrivaled in their pursuit of glory. She has led conquests and armies. She has slain legendary beasts. She has made grave sacrifices in her ascent up the ranks. And for this she was rewarded: She entered the realm of death and was granted a vision of herself upon the throne of the vast Noxian empire.

But before she can lead her empire, she must become head of her own clan. Yet the title is contested by her cousin and former confidante, Ta’Fik. He knows the bloody sins of Ambessa’s past. And he knows he cannot allow her to rise.

They will fight a war for the very soul of the Medardas.

But the war won’t be fought on battlefields alone. Ambessa’s daughter, Mel, can deftly break through the walls around anyone’s heart, and she’ll put her talents to use for her mother. Yet despite Mel’s strength, Ambessa sees only a child who lacks her killer instincts. Mel knows she can be the leader Ambessa wants her to be, if only she gives her time.

With her family betraying her, enemies closing in on all sides, and unseen forces moving in the shadows, every day proves more dangerous than the last. But Ambessa will not bow. She will burn the world down to claim her place in it.

A girl takes on a series of identities to survive, shrouding herself in layers of secrets, until years later when she is forced to reckon with her past.

On an ordinary day in an upscale Atlanta suburb, Maya is making breakfast for her two sons, when her husband drops a red-and-blue striped envelope on the counter and asks a devastating question: Who is Sunny?

Maya is sent reeling back to her childhood in Guyana―a time when Sunny was her only name. Unbeknownst to her husband, Maya is not who she claims to be. The letter, from her long-lost sister Roshi, now threatens to expose her true identity and shatter the seemingly perfect existence Maya worked so hard to build.

As she frantically weighs the impact of the truth on her future, Maya relives the details of her childhood journey to America from Guyana–and the traumatic events that forced her to leave her past behind. Through the eyes of Maya’s innocent and scared younger self, we discover the power of hope, empathy, and the possibility of beginning again.

Sensual and semi-fantastic, this erotic novel by José Donoso―for the first time in English―is a thrilling and unsettling exploration of identity via sexual desire

All of a sudden, Blanca Arias has it all. The daughter of middling Nicaraguan diplomats posted to Madrid, she marries, at the age of 19, the equally young and passionate Marquess of Loria, her darling Paquito, heir to one of the largest fortunes (and most august titles) in Spain. Paquito, as if on cue, dies of diphtheria, leaving his young widowed Marquise alone, free, and inconceivably rich.

Donoso’s luxurious and disturbing work details the sexual awakening of the Marquise of Loria as her white-gloved chauffeur shuttles her from tryst to tryst. But it’s not all Patek Phillipes and pink champagne: Blanca’s mother-in-law Casilda is scheming with her gang of sycophants to take back “their” fortune from this newly-minted Loria, and there’s no low they won’t sink to to get it. The mysterious presence of Luna, a Weimaraner pup who infiltrates Blanca’s chambers and hypnotizes her with his lunar gaze, twists this glittering elegy to the literary erotica of 1920s Madrid into something more: a psychological thriller and a profound investigation into the surfaces that the fortunate gild and polish to hide the darkness that lies beneath.

As exuberant as it is explicit―and elegantly translated into English for the first time by Megan McDowell―The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria―shows the Boom-era master Donoso in a lighter mode, and the result is irresistible.

Much is known about what Europeans did in Africa, yet very little is known about Africa's history before its colonisation. In this surprising exploration, Max Siollun uncovers societies that were not part of a backward 'Dark Continent', but which instead had rich lore to rival the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Pre-colonial West Africa had a mesmerising cast of revolutionaries, intellectuals, innovators, and villainous assassins. These include the family that overthrew three different 1000-year-old empires, the royal court official who engineered the death of four kings, and the young enslaved boy who became the first Black bishop in history, befriending Queen Victoria along the way.

This story of a dynamic and artistic people is a vital read for those who want to discover a forgotten era of West Africa.

Max Siollun is a historian and author. He has written four acclaimed books on Nigeria’s history, most recently What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule,
which was shortlisted in BBC History Magazine’s Books of the Year. He has written for the New York Times, Guardian, Independent and Foreign Policy.

Doggerel is a revelatory meditation on Blackness, masculinity, and vulnerability from one of poetry’s boldest voices.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic―but equally rich―lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and skillfully deploys the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, in conversation with artists such as Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.

Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us “how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)―and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.

“. . . every story becomes a multiplication,

If the naming is filled less with names than

With the best parts, the barking & everything

Else, because who among us hasn’t been

As mangy as a rescue, even on our best

Days, desiring mostly to be loved.”

―from “Rings”

A passionate debut cookbook celebrates Caribbean food, its legacy preserved―and, ultimately, transformed―by the kinship of those who share food.

As the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Marie Mitchell cooks to understand and celebrate recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation. In Kin, her hotly anticipated debut cookbook, she shares dishes from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Accompanied by gorgeous photographs, many shot in the Caribbean, the book’s 80 recipes blend influences from South Asia, Africa, and Latin America in crispy Saltfish Fritters, Honey Jerk Wings with Fluffy Cassava Fries and Hot Pepper Sauce, garlicky Mojo Roast Pork, Sweet Tangy Coleslaw, and Creamy Tomato Curry. Her breads, desserts, and drinks evoke the islands and are stunningly easy: coconut bread buns, a Ginger Drizzle cake, Summer Rum Punch. Marie’s food is subtle and playful, layering different notes and spices carefully to create delicate, rewarding flavors perfect for home cooks.

full color photographs, illustrations, and chapter openers throughout

From Charlamagne Tha God, host of the morning radio phenomenon The Breakfast Club, and founder and CEO of iHeartRadio’s Black Effect Podcast Network, a rundown on how small talk from small minds have taken over our world, and the BIG conversations needed to climb our way back.

For over a decade, Charlamagne Tha God has cohosted iHeartRadio’snationally syndicated morning radio show The Breakfast Cluband has proven his power as a culture mover and thought leader, by being his completely authentic self on-air. From his famous “You ain't black” moment with President Biden, to heartfelt chats with cultural icons like Sean “Jay-Z” Carter and Judy Blume, to viral classics with Kamala Harris and Soulja Boy, his incredible reach and impact on American culture continues to grow.

In Get Honest or Die Lying: Why Small Talk Sucks, Charlamagne takes full command of his new perch, broadening his scope and embracing his life roles as a cultural curator, social commentator, job-creator, mental health advocate, and Girl Dad in ways we’ve never seen before. In his signature irreverent style, he looks at the world through his own lens, concluding that many of our divisions, our unhappiness, and our dissatisfactions stem from our failure to have meaningful conversations with each other. With lessons pulled from his past, and an eye on the future, Get Honest or Die Lying: Why Small Talk Sucks makes us laugh, cry, and think as Charlamagne shares his thoughts on growth, empowerment, and evolution in our fast-changing world. In short—it’s time to stop lying to each other, and ourselves.

Fame, money, social media, politics, hip-hop culture, and fatherhood, he takes it all on here. This master of seeing through the BS even calls it on himself, as he delivers his most insightful and heartfelt work yet—his call to stop the insanity while we still can.

The incendiary, sensual poems of Essex Hemphill, now in a new landmark selection

For three decades, the legacy of writer, editor, performer, and activist Essex Hemphill has been lovingly sustained through xeroxed copies of his few published works. They are as potent now as they were in the 1980s. With tenderness and rage, Hemphill's poems unflinchingly explore the complex, overlapping identities of sexuality, gender, and race, the American political landscape, and his own experiences as a black gay man during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Love is a Dangerous Word contains selections from Hemphill's only published full-length collection, Ceremonies―named one of the 25 most influential works of postwar queer literature by the New York Times―alongside rarely seen poems from magazines and chapbooks. It serves as both an introduction to Hemphill’s poetic prowess and a treasure trove for those who have long awaited his return to the literary spotlight.

Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse in The New Yorker

Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology.

The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drinks,” “Night Shift”), allowing poets from different eras to talk back to one another in the same space, intertwined with chronological groupings from the decades as they march by: the frothy 1920s and 1930s (“despite the depression,” Young notes), the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, like Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), the political ’60s and ’70s, the lyrical ’80s and ’90s, and then the 2000s’ with their explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, greater depth and breadth. Inevitably, we see the high points when poems spoke directly into, about, or against the crises of their times—the war poetry of W. H. Auden and Karl Shapiro; the remarkable outpouring of verse after 9/11 (who can forget Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”?); and more recently, stunning poems in response to the cataclysmic events of COVID and the murder of George Floyd.

The magazine’s poetic influence resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection, exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems”: the ones you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.

An irreverent and deeply-felt debut novel about a family confronting a past that is both keeping them together and preventing them from breaking free.

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies.

First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose who stayed in Tehran during the revolution. She lives in a shabby apartment, paranoid and alone. Except when she is visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter who takes her debauchery with a side of purpose, and yet somehow manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters left for America in 1979: Shirin, a charismatic yet outrageous event planner in Houston who considers herself the family’s future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist-turned-housewife languishing in the chaparral-filled hills of Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter Bita, the self-righteous but lost law student spending her days in New York City eating pancakes and quietly giving away her belongings.

When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family’s brittle status quo is cracked open. Shirin embarks upon a grand but half-baked quest to restore the family name. But what does that even mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Will they ever realize that life is more than just an old story?

These are five women who are pulled apart and brought together by revolution. Here is their past, present, and future. By turns satirical and philosophical, traveling from the 1940s Iran into a splintered 2000s, The Persians is a mordantly funny, heartbreakingly sad, and profoundly searching portrait of a family in crisis at the turn of the century, an American family saga reinvented.

The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.

An elegantly inventive debut novel that offers a sharp new take on the immigrant story in post-9/11 America

Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience―a period known as Optional Practical Training―so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel―to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT―looking for a room to rent, starting her job―she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.

Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.

Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of power.

“Original, vital, and unputdownable.”—Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic newspaper columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers. Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

A thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.

This striking exhibition catalog celebrates the late artist whose deeply emotional works intermingled realism with abstraction to address complex themes of identity, race, and community. American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015) believed ‘painting does something to your soul that nothing else can. It is visceral and immediate.’ Drawing on art history, personal archives, anonymous photography found in Los Angeles’ flea markets, and his own imagination, he compiled a ravishing body of figurative paintings that explore a range of Black life. Alongside his celebrated paintings, Davis made drawings, collages, and sculptures, and co-founded the Underground Museum. This elegantly designed volume documents the span of Davis’s career and attends to his commitment to representation in the art world and community engagement at the Underground Museum. Alongside new scholarship from writers, artists, and musicians like Tina M. Campt, Claudia Rankine, Marlene Dumas and Jason Moran, this catalog features high-quality reproductions of Davis’s more widely-known works as well as previously unseen archival material. A vital resource for understanding the depth and significance of his practice, this beautiful publication reveals how humanity, humor, imagination, and above all, people, were the epicenter of Davis’s work.

From award-winning author and creative writing professor at Tulane University comes an intimate and powerful memoir exploring inherited trauma, family secrets, and the enduring bonds of love between mothers and daughters.

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar.

Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.”

Interwoven with Bernice's personal journey is her family's history, beginning with her four-times enslaved great-grandmother Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1822 Hancock County, Georgia. Her descendants survived Reconstruction and Jim Crow, joined the Great Migration, and mourned Dr. King’s assassination during the Civil Rights Movement. These women's wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down like Louisa's handmade quilt.

A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls is an extraordinarily moving portrait of a life shaped by family, history, and the drive to be something more.