The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America’s unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us.

Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.

America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.

Centered around the major celebrations of America’s milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.

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America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. Democracy in Black is Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s impassioned response. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, it argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap”—with white lives valued more than others—that still distorts our politics today. 

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Begin Again, a politically astute, lyrical meditation on how ordinary people can shake off their reliance on a small group of professional politicians and assume responsibility for what it takes to achieve a more just and perfect democracy.

“Like attending a jazz concert with all of one’s favorite musicians…James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Toni Morrison, and more…Glaude brilliantly takes us on an epic tour through their lives and work.”
―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race

We are more than the circumstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires.

Based on the Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, the book begins with Glaude’s unease with the Obama years. He felt then, and does even more urgently now, that the excitement around the Obama presidency constrained our politics as we turned to yet another prophet-like figure. He examines his personal history and the traditions that both shape and overwhelm his own voice.

Glaude weaves anecdotes about his evolving views on Black politics together with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, encouraging us to reflect on the lessons of these great thinkers and address imaginatively the challenges of our day in voices uniquely our own.

Narrated with passion and philosophical intensity, this book is a powerful reminder that if American democracy is to survive, we must step out from under the shadows of past giants to build a better society―one that derives its strength from the pew, not the pulpit.

The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series.

“Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again

“Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review

From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box,and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America.

For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues.

In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion.

But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

A TIME AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might—together—come to a new view of our shared past

“A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils...Hopeful...Beautiful and haunting.” —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

To Free the Captives touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where Smith’s father’s family comes from, and where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero’s record but difficult prospects as a Black man. Smith considers his life and the life of her father through the lens of history. Hoping to connect with their strength and continuance, she assembles a new terminology of American life.

Bearing courageous witness to the terms of Freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Weaving in an account of her growing spiritual practice, she argues that the soul is not merely a private site of respite or transcendence, but a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions: Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?

She just wanted to fit into Amish Country. . .now she’s standing out!

First novel in The Plain Order Ink Society series, in which Amish writers crack the case of local mysteries.

Sadie Lynch thought inheriting her late Amish aunt’s candle shop was a blessing—a chance to leave her stalled writing career behind and find a fresh start. But running a Plain business when she's not Amish isn’t exactly filling her store with customers—especially when the local minister insists she sell out.

Sadie, who doesn’t want to leave, thankfully meets Wanda—an Amish woman with a secret obsession. As Wanda continues to visit the candle shop, an unexpected partnership blooms when Wanda agrees to help Sadie’s shop in exchange for writing advice.

But the grand reopening of the candle shop takes a deadly turn when the body of the Amish minister is discovered behind the counter. Now Sadie is the only suspect, prompting Wanda and the Plain Order Ink Society to try helping her solve the mystery.

But in this Plain community, secrets burn brighter than flames—and nothing is as simple as it seems.

What if the writing life isn’t about daily word counts―but about daily attention to your whole self?

You don’t need to write every day to be a writer. You don’t need perfect conditions, endless hours, or a life free from doubt. What you need is permission to bring your whole, imperfect self to the page―and practices that nourish your soul as you write.

All of life is the writing life.

Drawing on her experience as a spiritual director working primarily with writers, Charlotte Donlon offers something rare: a book that honors both the craft of writing and the care of the soul. Through contemplative practices, personal stories, and wisdom from writers like Toni Morrison, Margaret Walker, and Kaveh Akbar, she invites you to discover how rest, doubt, grief, and joy all become sacred ground for creative flourishing.

Structured around five essential movements―“Begin,” “Belong,” “Become,” “Behold,” “Bestow”―this book offers practical rituals and gentle companionship for the real conditions of your life. Whether you’re navigating resistance, recovering from burnout, or simply longing for a more sustainable practice, you’ll find permission to write from exactly where you are.

Writers of all backgrounds are welcome here. People of deep faith and profound doubt. Those who write every day and those who write in stolen moments. Published authors and private journalers. This is a sanctuary, not a system―a space where your creative identity isn’t measured by output but nourished by attention.

Spiritual Direction for Writers doesn’t promise to make you more productive. It promises something better: to help you become more fully yourself, on and off the page. Because when writing helps make you a kinder, wiser, and more generous human being―when it opens you to what matters most―you’ve already succeeded.

“Charlotte’s book makes space, supports readers, writers, and listeners, and truly cares about the people who encounter its pages. It is a place to land and rest, a place to be curious, to experiment, to pray, to breathe, to feel, and to embrace the truth of your identity as a writer.”
―Ashley M. Jones, poet laureate emerita of Alabama

From the queen of genre-bending speculative fiction, comes the newest Sauútiverse offering, a mystery like no other, where the investigator is not a detective, but a sound scientist.

In a world where sound is a tangible force, Muso’mi is a maadiregi―an expert in the art of consuming it. At the prestigious Mahadum, she researches the language of silence, seeking to master the gift her mother calls theft. But academic intrigue turns to deadly peril when her friend vanishes after unearthing a hidden truth. Pursuing clues through pools of quietude across worlds, Muso’mi stumbles upon a horrifying discovery: a pattern of carnage left in fields of harvested silence. Now, the hunter becomes the hunted, as her unique expertise draws her into the orbit of a serial killer who understands the power of sound all too well.

Includes a glossary of Bantu, Afrocentric and made-up words from this cross-cultural tale written in gorgeous lyrical language packed with emotion.

James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef finalist and Food & Wine Best New Chef Caroline Schiff believes a sweet treat is the perfect daily ritual, and her book is designed to sweeten life in just the right dose.

Why wait for a special occasion when dessert can be part of every day?

Star chef Caroline Schiff believes a sweet treat is an important daily ritual―something small and simple, or occasionally a showstopper to celebrate big moments. Daily Dessert is her joyful, highly versatile collection of recipes designed to sweeten life in just the right dose.

Sometimes that means one perfect cookie warm from the oven, a snacking cake to last all week, a no-bake refresher on a scorching day, or a cozy pudding for a winter night. Organized by mood and moment, chapters move from Simple Little Sweets (quick, small-batch recipes) to Weekly Snacking Bakes, Sunny Day Sweets, Cozy Day Confections, Dessert for Breakfast, No-Bake Treats, and Celebration Sweets―plus a Basics section with Schiff’s essential doughs, sauces, and toppings.

Recipes are approachable yet irresistible, the kind of things fans already love from Schiff: Hot Butterscotch Pecan Blondies, Upside-Down Clementine Olive Oil Snacking Cake, Raspberry Crème Fraîche Galette, Espresso Crunch Coffee Cake, Gingersnap and Orange Cream Sandwiches, No-Churn Toasted Cinnamon Ice Cream, and her iconic Baked Alaska for a Crowd.

Daily Dessert is an invitation to embrace the joy of sweets as part of everyday life. With Schiff’s playful voice, professional know-how, and unfussy recipes, this book is for everyone―novice bakers, seasoned pros, and anyone who simply believes dessert makes life better.

From award-winning author Rhonda McKnight comes a new story of faith, history, and the power of legacy that merges the romance of The Bookshop Sisterhood with the rich Lowcountry setting of Mary Alice Monroe.

Alexandra Chambers is a writer who has run out of words. Struggling with writer's block and the pressure to secure a new book deal, she wins a week in a writer-friendly cabin through a drawing held at a Lowcountry literacy center.

What she finds is far more than she expected--a vibrant community brimming with inspiration, a past steeped in history and culture, and a man who both intrigues and unsettles her.

Gabe Scott, a bestselling author and the former writer-in-residence, is everything Alex feels she's not--acclaimed, award-winning, and unshakably confident. When their paths cross at the center, his literary brilliance and dedication to helping struggling Gullah students stir feelings Alex isn't ready to confront. Though undeniably attracted to him, Alex wrestles with the fear that her books pale beside his celebrated work.

When a surprising family connection unearths long-hidden truths about her past, Alex is forced to confront a lie that has shaped her life. Guided by the quiet wisdom of Ms. Kate, an elderly Gullah cleaning woman with losses of her own, Alex finds the strength to forgive truths long withheld, embrace her voice, and write the story only she can tell.

Writer in Residence is a rich and layered choice for book clubs eager to explore themes of identity, family secrets, creative reinvention, and the power of place. McKnight's lush Lowcountry setting and unforgettable cast of characters spark meaningful conversation about Gullah Geechee culture, the stories we inherit, and the courage it takes to tell our own truth. An included discussion guide makes it easy for groups to dig deeper into Alex's journey of rediscovery--and perhaps reflect on the hidden roots in their own lives.

Since the first African American denomination was established in Philadelphia in 1818, churches have gone beyond their role as spiritual guides in African American communities and have served as civic institutions, spaces for education, and sites for the cultivation of individuality and identities in the face of limited or non-existent freedom.

In this Very Short Introduction, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. explores the history and circumstances of African American religion through three examples: conjure, African American Christianity, and African American Islam. He argues that the phrase "African American religion" is meaningful only insofar as it describes how through religion, African Americans have responded to oppressive conditions including slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the pervasive and institutionalized discrimination that exists today. This bold claim frames his interpretation of the historical record of the wide diversity of religious experiences in the African American community. He rejects the common tendency to racialize African American religious experiences as an inherent proclivity towards religiousness and instead focuses on how religious communities and experiences have developed in the African American community and the context in which these developments took place.

About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. EveryVery Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

In this electrifying follow-up to Kwame Alexander's Newbery winner The Crossover, soccer, family, love, and friendship take center stage. A New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Longlist nominee.

Twelve-year-old Nick learns the power of words as he wrestles with problems at home, stands up to a bully, and tries to impress the girl of his dreams. Helping him along are his best friend and sometimes teammate Coby, and The Mac, a rapping librarian who gives Nick inspiring books to read.  

This electric and heartfelt novel-in-verse bends and breaks as it captures all the thrills and setbacks, action and emotion of a World Cup match.

"A novel about a soccer-obsessed tween boy written entirely in verse? In a word, yes. Kwame Alexander has the magic to pull off this unlikely feat, both as a poet and as a storyteller. " —The Chicago Tribune

Can’t nobody stop you

Can’t nobody cop you…

ILA-CBC Children's Choice List· ALA Notable Children’s Book · Book Links’ Lasting Connections · Kirkus Best Book · San Francisco Chronicle Best Book· Washington Post Best Book· BookPage Best Book