Three years ago, I decided to have my first one-night stand. The plan was simple: research how to do it and meet a man at the bar before nerves playing with my guts got the best of me. I wanted to ring in the new year between a stranger's legs. Someone with good hygiene and exceptional tensile strength to take the edge off of studying mechanical engineering.

Then he walked in.

I'd heard whispers about "a night with Knight," tales of toe cramps and matted hair. Antonio is the biggest player and not the man to relieve me of my pent-up tension. His thick thighs, veiny forearms, and charming smile promised a trip to the hospital.

I shouldn't have followed him back to his condo, but I did.

Dinner turned into a kiss, and that kiss led to accidental humping. That's how we ended up in the emergency room. He had a broken nose, and my wig was stuck on his watch.

Three years and a PhD later, Antonio has cemented himself in my life as my best friend. Moving to the city where my sister lives-and where he plays professional rugby-wasn't a big deal at first. But everything changed when we hugged. His cologne surrounded me, and his eyes stayed locked on mine.

Our friendship is platonic, ironclad after the one-night stand gone wrong. So why can't I shake the feeling that we've barely scratched the surface?

A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us

Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.

Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.

Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.

Nonbinary Life is an invitation to imagine the possibilities of life outside of gender.

To write, to think, to imagine, to agitate, and to love without regard for gender is to lead a non-binary life. In this genre-defying work of autotheory, Marquis Bey proposes a radical refusal: to relinquish gender as a framework we carry - for ourselves and for others - and to embrace modes of being that exist outside of its grasp.

Spanning questions of pronouns, masculinity, love, family, language, and even the Redwood National Forest, Nonbinary Life blends memoir and theory to provide a philosophical meditation on what it means to live beyond the binary

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. 

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […]is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

This joyful five-book beginning reader box set includes the Geisel-Honor title Ty's Travels: Zip, Zoom! plus four more My First I Can Read Ty’s Travels stories. The box has a carry-along handle and a Velcro closure. 

Ty’s Travels: A 5-Book Reading Collection comes in a carry-along case with a Velcro closure and plastic handle, ideal for story time anytime.

Includes five Ty’s Travels books: Zip, Zoom!, All Aboard!, Beach Day!, Lab Magic, and Winter Wonderland. 

All the books in this set are My First I Can Read Books, which means they're perfect for shared reading with a child.?Books at this level feature basic language, word repetition, and whimsical illustrations, ideal for sharing with emergent readers. The active, engaging stories have appealing plots and lovable characters, encouraging children to continue their reading journey.

A multidisciplinary illustrated reader unpacking imperialist representations of Africa by promoting dialogue, memory and everyday practice, and reimagining cultural institutions and the arts—from museums to academia, from architecture to art.

In 2017, curator and art historian Anita N. Bateman and architect and professor Emanuel Admassu initiated research on the traditional positioning and mispositioning of the arts across the African continent. Where Is Africa has been an extended set of exchanges with contemporary artists, curators, designers and academics who are actively engaged in representing the continent—both within and outside its geographic boundaries. By examining artist collectives, new currents in art history and the rise of contemporary art festivals in and about Africa from the past 10 years, the project unpacks the imperialist foundations of cultural institutions and their anthropological fascination with African objects, people and places.

The interviews in Where Is Africa examine African and African-diasporic identities and spaces through questions of positionality in relation to specific disciplinary, cultural and political contexts. The texts address Afro-diasporic aesthetic practices and the curatorial, museological and artistic matrices that confront epistemologies of dominance and exclusion. The commissioned essays and images offer concise methodologies that expand or complicate issues addressed by the interviewees.

Where Is Africa is a conceptual project that accompanies a conceptual place, driven by the desire to dislodge Africa from categorical fixity and the representational logics of nation-states. Africa can never be fully enclosed by the residue of colonial violence or the totalitarian gaze of neoliberalism; instead, it creates infinite malleability, where place and concept are untethered from each other.

Contributors include: Mikael Awake, Salome Asega, Tau Tavengwa, Anthony Bogues, Jay Simple, Eric Gottesman, Rebecca Corey, Aida Mulkozi, Rakeb Sile, Mesai Haileleul, Mpho Matsipa, Naiama Safia Sandy, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Rehema Chachage, Robel Temesgen, Valerie Amani, Meskerem Assegued, Elias Sime, Olalekan Jeyifous, Amanda Williams, Germane Barnes and Mario Gooden.

A Guardian Best Book of the Year

Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Costa Poetry Award

“Exquisite.” ―The New York Times Book Review

“Brave, tender and generous. . . . A haunting study of what we can find in the silences of history when history is recognized as more than a noun, when recognized as something alive and kinetic.” ―Camonghne Felix, author of Build Yourself a Boat

On the heels of his much-lauded debut collection, Raymond Antrobus continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory in All The Names Given, while simultaneously breaking new ground in both form and content. 

The collection opens with poems about the author’s surname―one that shouldn’t have survived into modernity―and examines the rich and fraught history carried within it. As Antrobus outlines a childhood caught between intimacy and brutality, sound and silence, and conflicting racial and cultural identities, the poem becomes a space in which the poet reckons with his own ancestry, and bears witness to the indelible violence of the legacy wrought by colonialism. The poems travel through space―shifting fluidly between England, South Africa, Jamaica, and the American South―and brilliantly move from an examination of family history into the wandering lust of adolescence and finally, vividly, into a complex array of marriage poems―matured, wiser, and more accepting of love’s fragility. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, in which the art of writing captions attempts to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems as well as moments inside and outside of them. 

Formally sophisticated, with a weighty perception and startling directness, All The Names Given is a timely, tender book full of humanity and remembrance from one of the most important young poets of our generation.

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.

A first-of-its-kind guide to pairing wine with foods from Africa and beyond, including a tour of wine regions across the globe and a foreword by Stephen Satterfield, from renowned Certified Sommelier Cha McCoy.

The wine world often says food and wine that grow together, go together, and that spicy, tangy, salty, and sweet flavors are a challenge to pair. But what about foods from regions where wine grapes aren’t prevalent? What about global cuisines—many of which are outside of Europe—that celebrate heat and tang? Don’t these traditional foods deserve the perfect wine pairing? Cha McCoy, Certified Sommelier and owner of The Communion wine boutique, knows that good foods and wines go together and that the cuisines of Africa, Asia, and the Americas are just as worthy of great pours.

In this first-of-its-kind guidebook, Cha McCoy pairs wines with foods from Africa, Asia, and beyond, blending practical information with a side of aspirational armchair travel. Cha shares her journey of learning and connecting with deep culinary traditions and regional cuisines around the world, diving in by continent and then by region or country, from Africa to the Caribbean, from Latin America to the United States of America, and Asia, and exploring their winemaking regions.

Throughout, you’ll see pairing lists and menus to easily find wines to savor with whatever food you’re craving, whether it’s Moroccan Tagine, Jamaican Jerk Chicken, Mexican Elote, Shrimp Po’ Boy, Peach Cobbler, or Pad Thai. Plus, you’ll find 25 recipes for global fare from renowned chefs and mixologists that represent the heritage of each destination, with food accompanied by suggested wine pairing, to complete the meal.

Whether you’re curious about what to eat on your next trip abroad, want to try out a local restaurant, or are looking to explore a new cuisine to cook at home, Wine Pairing for the People will not only guide you on what to eat but how to best highlight the flavor of your meals with successful pairings. Complete with a foreword by Stephen Satterfield, and stunning photographs, maps, and illustrations throughout, this groundbreaking book boldly declares: Wine is for everyone.

From Ana Mendieta to Stephanie Syjuco, a chain of contemporary artists mounts a cross-cultural, multigenerational resistance to Western colonialism

Published with Colby College Museum of Art.

In the late 19th century, independence movements against Spanish colonization were separately gaining momentum on these islands. Following the Spanish–American war of 1898, the US occupied Cuba and exerted colonial control over Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Connecting generations across oceans, Imagining an Archipelago features artists such as Pacita Abad, Zilia Sánchez and Carlos Villa juxtaposed with those who came after them, creating an intertwined commentary. The interpretive framework of an archipelago―an expanse of water containing a chain of islands―emphasizes these 40 artists’ different yet related strategies toward the critique, defiance and navigation of conditions brought on by continental empires. Essays, poetry, artworks and artist discussions in English, Spanish, Filipino and CHamoru provide a platform for solidarity, healing and celebration at the intersections of cultural and political self-determination, indigeneity, migration, climate crisis and resilience.
Artists include: Zilia Sánchez, Carlos Villa, Pacita Abad, Ana Mendieta, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Juan Sánchez, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Juana Valdés, Teresita Fernández, Edra Soto, Miguel Luciano, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Stephanie Syjuco, Amber Robles-Gordon, Maia Cruz Palileo, Martha Atienza, Mariquita ""Micki"" Davis, Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Isa Gagarin, Camille Hoffman, Gisela McDaniel.

This exploration of Black dandy fashion and its representation in art and literature highlights the vibrant, complicated legacy of a recognizable yet constantly shifting style, from its origins in Enlightenment Europe to the contemporary art and fashion worlds
 
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style traces the complex and vibrant legacy of menswear across three centuries of Black culture—from today’s hip-hop aesthetic and popular street trends, through its use during the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement as a symbol of creative and political agency, to its surprising origins as an imposed uniform for servants and enslaved people. Organized by key characteristics of dandyism that resonate across time, including presence, distinction, disguise, and respectability, this fresh interpretation of a centuries-old aesthetic draws on prominent Black voices in fashion, literature, and art—among them, Dandy Wellington, Amy Sherald, Iké Udé, and André 3000. Self-described dandies and high-fashion models feature in a stunning photo essay by artist Tyler Mitchell, who also contributes evocative new photography of garments by contemporary designers such as Virgil Abloh, Pharrell Williams, and Grace Wales Bonner. These works are shown alongside historical attire worn by Black luminaries including Frederick Douglass, Alexandre Dumas père, Muhammad Ali, and André Leon Talley. Scholar Monica L. Miller contextualizes these objects in her text and shows how the evolution of dandy style inspired new visions of Black masculinity that use the power of clothing and dress as a means of self-expression.
 
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(May 10–October 26, 2025)

Catalogue design by Pacific (Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull)