Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the YearA Kirkus Prize Finalist for NonfictionA Southern Book Prize FinalistAn NPR Best Book of 2020An Esquire Best Book of 2020A BookPage Best Book of 2020A New York P
"Sometimes," writes Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, "everything reduces to circles and lines." In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath a
Harvey. Maria. Irma. Sandy. Katrina. We live in a time of unprecedented hurricanes and catastrophic weather events, a time when it is increasingly clear that climate change is neither imagined nor distant—and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways.In this highly original work of lyrical reportage, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place. Weaving firsthand accounts from those facing this choice—a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a neighborhood in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves hundreds of years ago—with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of the communities both curr
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.
From National Book Award-longlisted poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted collages and missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Chang grasps on to a sense of self that g
From the fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Drew Lanham.Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, S
The 1947 Partition of India is the backdrop for this powerful novel, narrated by a precocious child who describes the brutal transition with chilling veracity. Young Lenny Sethi is kept out of school
At the dawn of the 20th century in Pakistan, Freddy Junglewalla moves his family — pregnant wife, baby daughter, and Jerbanoo, his rotund mother-in-law — from their ancestral forest home
Seventeen years after she'd left home "for good," Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story, by turns hilari
Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? In her latest book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit,
The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family’s roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. Th
A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018 In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, wa
In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: “Earth.” There are no inhabitants, and no sun—only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin he
