Black Appalachia: Race, Place, and Identity is the long-awaited successor to Blacks in Appalachia (1985), the first modern anthology to examine the socioeconomic, cultural, and political experiences of Black Appalachians. Edited by Cicero M. Fain III, Sheena Harris Hayes, Wilburn Hayden Jr., and William H. Turner, Black Appalachia features more than twenty-five emerging and established scholars and creatives who challenge how we think about the region by finding new answers to persistent questions.

Covering topics such as migration, discrimination, the arts, and the links between memory and place, this book demonstrates that Appalachia's Black residents maintain a significant role in shaping the region. It documents a renaissance of ideas, music, poetry, photography, and food and uses innovative scholarship, perspectives, and fields of inquiry to acknowledge the challenges and complexities of the Black experience in Appalachia, both historically and within a contemporary framework that addresses new realities.

Black Appalachia expands on the still largely untold story of Black America, reframing legacy and history, highlighting marginalized communities, and celebrating their contributions.

For fans of the New Camelot series by Sierra Simone and Kennedy Ryan’s All the King’s Men duet, comes The Illusion of Power. A spicy, contemporary romance that follows future First Lady, Selene Taylor, during the integral months of her husband's campaign for the Oval where she finds herself navigating the embarrassment of his infidelity, the dangers of being a Black woman in proximity to political power, and perhaps worst of all, falling for the two men tasked with protecting her.

Everyone needs to love and be loved - even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.

In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are—whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But toxic masculinity punishes those fundamental emotions, and it’s so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s hard for men to not comply—but hooks wants to help change that.

With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves—and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

Now in its first American edition, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a highly influential exploration of "being" in the Black Diaspora.

Since its first publication in 2001, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking exploration of being in the Black Diaspora, A Map to the Door of No Return, has emerged as a modern classic. The door, in Brand's iconic schema, represents the point of rupture where the ancestors of the Black Diaspora departed one world for another: the place where all names were forgotten, and all beginnings recast. "This door," writes Brand, "is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location . . . Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return."

Through shards of history, memoir, lyrical investigation, and the unwritten experience of so many descendants of those who passed through the door, Brand constructs a map of this indelible region, culminating in an enduring expression, both definitive and seeking, of what it is to live, think, and create in the wake of colonization.

With a new preface by the author, and an afterword by Saidiya Hartman.

Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?

In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.

Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.

While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day.

“Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

Claudia Jones stood at many crossroads. Her world was one of heated battles for Black liberation, of anti-fascism in the build-up to World War II, of national liberation struggles across the Global South, of the US government persecuting her and her comrades for their activism and membership in the Communist Party. And as a Black woman, she was also determined to bring to light how race and gender are embedded in and essential to the struggles of the working class.

At a time when the hegemony of imperialism and capitalism remain strong while new contradictions and signs of struggle arise, Jones' political writings are a lesson in identifying the most urgent tasks for moving socialism, the political project of the working class, forward. From her poetry, to newspaper articles, to pamphlets, to speeches, A Fighting Dream: The Political Writings of Claudia Jones brings her to us as she was: unrelenting, fearless, and a Communist.

Claudia Jones challenges us all to stand with our principles, to build organization, and to clearly see how understanding the intersectional aspects of our struggle is crucial for the liberation of humanity and the planet.

We all feel it, the teetering toward a place in America from which there is no return. The battle to remain hopeful in spite of injustice after injustice. In this powerful story of one lawyer’s fight for his community, both justice and hope are redeemed.

The Greenwood neighborhood of North Tulsa was once a promised land for African Americans, deemed “Black Wall Street.” But on May 31, 1921, the deadliest race massacre in U.S. history sent Greenwood up in flames. At the time, Lessie Randle was just a child running to safety as bullets ricocheted around her. Almost a century later, lawyer Damario Solomon-Simmons knocks on her door asking if she’d be willing to run toward justice this time.

In Redeem a Nation, we follow Solomon-Simmons’s fight for justice, from the courtrooms of Tulsa to our nation’s capital, representing three centenarians: the last survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Documenting a race against the calendar and the courts, Redeem a Nation grapples with the truth about corruption and disenfranchisement in America through this historic legal case for reparations and the deeply moving stories of survivors and descendants of the Massacre.

Yet this isn’t just a story of Tulsa. The community is a microcosm of the continued harm America inflicts through racial violence and economic injustice. The damage of generational poverty and loss of opportunity isn’t some relic of the past. It is happening right now. Redeem a Nation offers a way forward for communities across the nation through systemic change and community love. The Time is now to resist, repair, and redeem a land once promised.

“You think we can win?” Randle asked that day. This story is Solomon-Simmons’s answer.

A gripping, page-turning “masterpiece” (Joe Hill, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman) set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

Gracetown, Florida.

June 1950.

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules, but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a “hallucinatory, haunting, terrifying, and moving” (S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of All the Sinners Bleed) work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.

The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide is Boston Review’s 50th anniversary issue. This milestone issue features many of our longtime contributors, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Vivian Gornick, and Elaine Scarry, and celebrates classics from our archive.  In this issue, historian and Boston Review contributing editor Robin D. G. Kelley revisits Noam Chomsky’s landmark 1967 essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” published near the height of the Vietnam War. The essay’s dissident injunction―that those in privileged positions have a duty to “speak the truth and expose lies”―remains a powerful call to conscience, Kelley argues, but the anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles of even earlier decades reveal its limits, and they show how to refuse and resist complicity in our own age of fascism and genocide. Political philosopher Martin O’Neill, Palestinian human rights lawyer Jennifer Zacharia, and historian David Waldstreicher expand on what this moment requires―of intellectuals, of journalists, and of us all.

Also in the issue, Vivian Gornick reviews Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, Elaine Scarry challenges the wisdom that Plato banished the poets, Brandon M. Terry interviews political scientist Cathy Cohen about social movements and the future of Black politics, Joelle M. Abi-Rached exposes the contradictions of the liberal international order over Gaza, Samuel Hayim Brody reviews three memoirs on the Arab Jewish world destroyed by colonialism, David Austin Walsh explains what Zohran Mamdani’s triumph means for the future of the Democratic Party, and Sandeep Vaheesan looks to the New Deal to assess the “abundance” agenda.

Plus, seven writers reflect on notable essays from our archive in a special anniversary feature:

* Susan Faludi on Vivian Gornick and anti-feminism
* Naomi Klein on William Callison + Quinn Slobodian and the global right
* Jay Caspian Kang on Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and identity politics
* Ryu Spaeth on Merve Emre and the personal essay
* Lea Ypi on Joseph Carens and amnesty
* Nathan J. Robinson on Noam Chomsky and U.S. foreign policy
* Rick Perlstein on Elaine Scarry and democracy after 9/11

A passionate, powerful memoir by a trailblazing Black transgender activist, tracing her life of transformation and her work towards collective liberation.

Born in Augusta, Georgia, to Black Catholic parents, Raquel spent years feeling isolated, even within a loving, close-knit family. There was little access to understanding what it meant to be queer and transgender. It wasn’t until she went to the University of Georgia that she found the LGBTQ+ community, fell in love, and explored her gender for the first time. But the unexpected death of her father forced her to examine her relationship with herself and those she loved. These years of grief, misunderstanding, and hard-won epiphanies seeped into the soil of her life, serving as fertilizer for growth and allowing her to bloom within.

Upon graduation, Raquel entered a career in journalism against the backdrop of the burgeoning Movement for Black Lives, intersectional feminism going mainstream, and unprecedented visibility of the trans community. After hiding her identity as a newspaper reporter, her increasing awareness of the epidemic of violence plaguing trans women of color and the heightened suicide of trans teens inspired her to come out publicly. Within just a few short years of community organizing in Atlanta, Oakland, and New York, Raquel emerged as one of the most formidable Black trans activists in history.

In The Risk It Takes to Bloom, Raquel Willis recounts the possibility of transformation after tragedy, and how complex moments can push us all to take necessary risks and bloom toward collective liberation.