A fierce exposé of the resistance to believing Black people and its devastating effects throughout American history.

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion―their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.

Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.

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Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time.

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next.

The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.

A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays

In the past two decades, few writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion.

This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to take another look at Flannery O'Connor and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations of our troubled times.

With an eye toward the past and the present, Smith examines what it means to identify with our contemporary world and the history that frames it.

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A revealing, humorous, behind-the-scenes memoir from Kenny "The Jet" Smith—superstar basketball commentator, host of top-rated Inside the NBA, and two-time NBA champion. Smith reveals memorable inside stories of his playing and broadcasting careers, focusing on the star players, coaches, and mentors who inspired him along the way.

Kenny Smith was a star at the University of North Carolina before his storied NBA run, in which he won two championships with the Houston Rockets. His tremendous popularity skyrocketed when he joined TNT’s new show, Inside the NBA, which has thrived for twenty-four years and won multiple Emmys, receiving enormous acclaim for the insight, humor, social commentary, and unrivaled basketball coverage from Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ernie Johnson, Jr. Kenny is known to fans for his laser-sharp analysis and eloquent observations of the basketball scene and culture.

In this honest and profound memoir, Kenny writes chapters about each of the extraordinary people who taught him invaluable life lessons. He illuminates the personalities, affections, and quirks of friends such as Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Charles Barkley and Kobe Bryant, among others, and what he learned from each of them. He writes about his legendary UNC coach, Dean Smith, and other indelible role models through his career. And he interweaves poignant material about his upbringing in Queens, New York, his parents, his children, and his marriage, explaining the rich knowledge he obtained from the important figures around him. Kenny is also a strong, intelligent voice on race, as his fans and TV viewers will know. Ultimately this is a revealing, humorous, and powerful memoir, offering a candid glimpse inside the rarified world of elite sports and broadcasting, with inspiring takeaways.A revealing, humorous, behind-the-scenes memoir from Kenny "The Jet" Smith—superstar basketball commentator, host of top-rated Inside the NBA, and two-time NBA champion. Smith reveals memorable inside stories of his playing and broadcasting careers, focusing on the star players, coaches, and mentors who inspired him along the way.

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One of the most dynamic and globally recognized entertainment forces of our time opens up fully about his life, in a brave and inspiring book that traces his learning curve to a place where outer success, inner happiness, and human connection are aligned. Along the way, Will tells the story in full of one of the most amazing rides through the worlds of music and film that anyone has ever had.

Will Smith’s transformation from a fearful child in a tense West Philadelphia home to one of the biggest rap stars of his era and then one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood history, with a string of box office successes that will likely never be broken, is an epic tale of inner transformation and outer triumph, and Will tells it astonishingly well. But it’s only half the story.

Adapted from Clint Smith's #1 New York Times bestselling and universally acclaimed How the Word Is Passed, this must-read narrative takes readers to historical sites across America, exploring the legacy of slavery to help readers make sense of our nation's past and present, and be better stewards of their own future.

Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads young readers through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—offering an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to school, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods (like downtown Manhattan) on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved people has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, this adaptation of Clint Smith’s #1 bestselling, award-winning work of nonfiction offers kids a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country, and shows how they can reckon with the past and present to become better stewards of their future.

From the award-winning actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, two teeming, pungent cross-sections of the American experience.

In the provocative and at times bitterly funny play House Arrest, Smith examines the relationships between a succession of American presidents and their observers in and out of the press. Arcing from Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to Jefferson and Sally Hemings and alive with the voices of such real-life figures as Ed Bradley, George Stephanopoulos, Anita Hill, and Abraham Lincoln, the result is a priceless examination of the intersection of public power and private life.

In Piano, Smith casts her gaze back a century as she follows the tangled lines of race, sex, and exploitation in a prosperous Cuban household on the eve of the Spanish-American War. Deftly and suspensefully, Smith tells a story of ruptured allegiances and ramifying deceptions in which no one—master or servant, friend or enemy—is what he or she pretends to be. Together these two plays are further proof that Anna Deavere Smith is one of the most searing and revelatory voices in the American theater.

Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned maximum security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Sm

“Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.” —Danez Smith, The Guardian

A collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a “masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard” (Poetry Foundation).

The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice.

Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in The Intentions of Thunder—reaffirming Smith’s place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY

Danez Smith is our president

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family―blood and chosen―arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

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Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith’s lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children’s lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up—through the changing world of which we are all a part.

Above Ground is a breathtaking collection that follows Smith's first award-winning book of poetry, Counting Descent.

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Deana Lawson is one of the most powerful photographers of her generation. Her subject is black expressive culture and her canvas is the African Diaspora. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe black identities, through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals.Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an extensive interview with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa.

Deana Lawson is one of the most intriguing photographers of her generation. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. Throughout her work, which invites comparison to the photography of Diane Arbus, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful in black life. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an expansive conversation with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa.