19

Sep

Presented in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Department of History, the longtime Commissioner of Major League Baseball Bud Selig in conversation with Professor David McDonald. Selig provdes an unprecedented look inside professional baseball today, focusing on how he helped bring the game into the modern age and revealing his interactions with players, managers, fellow owners, and fans nationwide.

More than a century old, the game of baseball has always been resistant to change—owners, managers, players, and fans all hate it. As always, baseball needs to evolve—to compete with other professional sports, stay relevant, and remain America’s Pastime. Perhaps no one knows this better than Bud Selig who, as the head of MLB for more than twenty years, ushered in some of the most important, and controversial, changes in the game’s history—modernizing a sport that had remained unchanged since the 1960s.

19

Sep

This joint reading brings together poets and professors from UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee to celebrate their most recent publications. 

About America That Island off the Coast of France : A speaks to the impossibility of emigration, of ever being the citizen of only one country. Born in France, raised in Florida, Kercheval now divides her time between the U.S. and Uruguay. The poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience to create a new form of elegiac memoir. Against the backdrops of Paris, Montevideo, and Florida, the poems explore citizenship and homelessness, motherhood and self, family and freedom, turning over and over again the very meaning of the word home, as the poems, like the poet, make the fraught journey back and forth between America and France. As Kercheval wonders in her poem "The Red Balloon," "is leaving / ever painless? Is returning?"

20

Sep

The Wisconsin Book Festival and A Room on One's Own Bookstore present a joint reading by Oliver Baez Bendorf and Jennifer Nelson.

About Advantages of Being Evergreen: Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s remarkable Advantages of Being Evergreen is an essential book for our time and for all time. With rigorous compassion and great formal dexterity Bendorf imagines a new world for all of our animal selves in which we are truly seen and truly safe. At the same time these are poems that never shy from the shocking violence and cruelty of this world. Over and over again people come together to make their individual and communal body whole, knowing all the while that so much of the world seeks to wreck even the simplest kinds of safety. Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. This is a book of the earth’s abiding wonder. And the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom. - Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic.

24

Sep

Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power is widely known as the moral voice of her generation. A relentess advocate for promoting human rights, she has been heralded by President Barack Obama as one of America's "foremost thinkers on foreign policy." In her memoir, Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person do?"—and a call for a clearer eye, a kinder heart, and a more open and civil hand in our politics and daily lives. The Education of an Idealist traces Power’s distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to presidential Cabinet official. In 2005, her critiques of US foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on his presidential campaign. After Obama was elected president, Power went from being an activist outsider to a government insider, navigating the halls of power while trying to put her ideals into practice. She served for four years as Obama’s human rights adviser, and in 2013, he named her US Ambassador to the United Nations, the youngest American to assume the role.

26

Sep

Presented in partnership with the UW Center for the Humanities, Ana-LIsa Cox presents the long-hidden stories of America’s black pioneers, the frontier they settled, and their fight for the heart of the nation. When black settlers Keziah and Charles Grier started clearing their frontier land in 1818, they couldn’t know that they were part of the nation’s earliest struggle for equality; they were just looking to build a better life. But within a few years, the Griers would become early Underground Railroad conductors, joining with fellow pioneers and other allies to confront the growing tyranny of bondage and injustice.

02

Oct

When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby U.S. border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one of the most heavily policed sites in America. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. She learned English, watched Friends, and, after having a baby at sixteen, dreamed of teaching dance and moving with her son to New York City. But life had other plans. Following a misstep that led to her deportation, Aida found herself in a Mexican city marked by violence, in a country that was not hers.

11

Oct

In Masters of Empire, the historian Michael A. McDonnell reveals the vital role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg, who lived across Lakes Michigan and Huron, were equally influential. Masters of Empire charts the story of one group, the Odawa, who settled at the straits between those two lakes, a hub for trade and diplomacy throughout the vast country west of Montreal known as the pays d’en haut.

Highlighting the long-standing rivalries and relationships among the great Indian nations of North America, McDonnell shows how Europeans often played only a minor role in this history, and reminds us that it was native peoples who possessed intricate and far-reaching networks of commerce and kinship. As empire encroached upon their domain, the Anishinaabeg were often the ones doing the exploiting. By dictating terms at trading posts and frontier forts, they played a crucial part in the making of early America.

15

Oct

Presented in partnership with Go Big Read, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change. By the end of the nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. “Milk” might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers had rushed to embrace the rise of industrial chemistry, and were knowingly selling harmful products. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, or even labelling requirements, they put profit before the health of their customers. By some estimates, in New York City alone, thousands of children were killed by “embalmed milk” every year. Citizens–activists, journalists, scientists, and women’s groups–began agitating for change. But even as protective measures were enacted in Europe, American corporations blocked even modest regulations. Then, in 1883, Dr.

16

Oct

Thousands of books at unbelievably low prices! This semiannual sale is free (except the preview sale) and open to the public. Organized by the Friends of UW-Madison Libraries, proceeds help to support our annual lecture series, special purchases for the library collections, preservation of library materials, and grants for the visiting scholar program. Books for the sale are donated primarily by University of Wisconsin faculty, staff, students, and Madison-area residents. 

• Wednesday, October 16
  Preview Sale:  4:00-8:00 p.m. ($5 entry)
• Thursday and Friday, October 17-18
  Regular Sale: 10:30 a.m.-7:00 p.m. (no entry fee)
• Saturday, October 19
  Bag Sale: 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. ($5 per bag)
  Bring your own grocery bag or purchase one for $1
  From 1:05-2:00 p.m. the remaining books & items are free

17

Oct

Thousands of gently used books, DVDs and other materials.  Most items are $2 or less.  Hosted by the Friends of the Madison Public Library.  Sale runs October 17-20. Sale hours:

• Thursday, October 17th, 9:00AM - 9:00PM 
• Friday, October 18th, 9:00AM - 6:00PM
• Saturday, October 19th, 9:00AM - 5:00PM
• Sunday, October 20th, 1:00PM - 3:00PM

17

Oct

A new home, a new marriage, a new family. It’s a lot to sort out. But before medicolegal death investigator Mattie can smooth out the unexpected chaos of her new life, duty calls. At the local ER, a battered and bruised teenage girl has been brought in by a mysterious man who claimed she’d fallen out of a car. The staff is suspicious, but while they attend to the teenager, the unidentified man slips out. Then the girl dies, but not before informing social worker Hildy Schneider that the man had her little sister as well.

Mattie’s exam reveals forensic evidence of long-term IV drug use and physical abuse, findings consistent with Hildy’s suspicion that the girl was a victim of human trafficking. They are able to confirm her identity as a teen who went missing six months ago, along with her sister—facts that are deeply unsettling to Mattie who now shares a home with her husband’s teenage daughter.

Working closely with Hildy and Sorenson homicide detectives, including her husband Steve Hurley, Mattie must delve into a dark underworld to stop the ruthless trafficking of human lives—before it's too late for another young girl...

17

Oct

A Yale University study found that when women executives spoke more often than their peers, their competency rating dropped by 14% (yet when their male counterparts did the same, theirs went up by 10%). Another study revealed that even in the hallowed chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court, the female justices were three times as likely to be interrupted by their male colleagues. When Elizabeth Warren refused to cede the floor of the Senate, she was warned and silenced—but nevertheless, she persisted. These high-profile examples of women’s voices being stifled underscore an endemic issue: from the meeting room to the boardroom, at work, in government, in Hollywood movies, and even at home, women’s voices routinely take a backseat to men’s. With such pressure to be silent, it’s no wonder so many women say they hate the sound of their own voices.

17

Oct

A globe-trotting, century-spanning adventure story, Jake Wolff’s The History of Living Forever takes us from Maine to Romania to Easter Island and introduces a cast of unforgettable characters—drug kingpins, Big Pharma flunkies, centenarians, boy geniuses, and even a group of immortalists masquerading as coin collectors. It takes us deep into the mysteries of life—from first love to first heartbreak, from the long pall of grief to the irreconcilable loneliness of depression to the possibility of medical miracles, from coming of age to coming out. Hilarious, haunting, heart-busting, life-affirming, it asks each of us one of life’s essential questions: How far would you go for someone you love?

17

Oct

This popular, fast-paced event featuring five-minute talks from some of UW-Madison’s biggest brains is back! This year’s edition brings a flood of information about the one substance that all life depends on—water. 2019 is the Year of Safe Drinking Water in Wisconsin. Dive in to an evening of fun and facts about Wisconsin’s lakes, rivers, faucets, snow and more in the Discovery Building’s H.F. DeLuca Forum.

Featuring:

17

Oct

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Akashic Books continues its award-winning noir anthology series, featuring the first collection of short fiction written about Milwaukee by writers who've experienced life here. The crime/noir genre can be one of the purest forms of social commentary, and the contributors capture the struggle and resilience of the people who live here. Featuring readings by Jennifer Morales, Vida Cross, Mary Thorson, Christi Clancy, and Nick Petrie.

17

Oct

The miracle of organ transplants straddles the line between heartbreak and hope—one person’s life extended through the tragedy of another’s loss. Joshua D. Mezrich, a transplant surgeon at the University of Wisconsin, witnesses this complex miracle with everyday regularity, and in his eloquent and illuminating new book, When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon this dedicated doctor and elegant writer weaves stories from his own awe-inspiring work into a history of the medical advances that have made the extension of many lives possible.

"Joshua Mezrich has performed the perfect core biopsy of transplantation—a clear and compelling account of the grueling daily work, the spell-binding history and the unsettling ethical issues that haunt this miraculous lifesaving treatment,” says Pauline Chen, author of Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality. “Mezrich's compassionate and honest voice, punctuated by a sharp and intelligent wit, render the enormous subject not just palatable but downright engrossing.”

17

Oct

Editor of the award-winning site Feministing.com, Maya Dusenbery brings together scientific and sociological research, interviews with doctors and researchers, and personal stories from women across the country to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today.

In Doing Harm, Dusenbery explores the deep, systemic problems that underlie women’s experiences of feeling dismissed by the medical system. Women have been discharged from the emergency room mid-heart attack with a prescription for anti-anxiety meds, while others with autoimmune diseases have been labeled “chronic complainers” for years before being properly diagnosed. Women with endometriosis have been told they are just overreacting to “normal” menstrual cramps, while still others have “contested” illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia that, dogged by psychosomatic suspicions, have yet to be fully accepted as “real” diseases by the whole of the profession.

17

Oct

Poets Kevin Coval, Shira Erlichman, and Angel Nafis come together for a joint reading to start the Wisconsin Book Festival off right!

About Everything Must Go: Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston. The book celebrates Chicago’s Wicker Park in the late 1990’s, Coval’s home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters. Allston’s illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it. The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities.

17

Oct

Established in 1998, the lecture was named to honor Charlotte Zolotow, a distinguished children's book editor for 38 years with Harper Junior Books, and author of more than 65 picture books, including such classic works as Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (Harper, 1962) and William's Doll (Harper, 1972). Ms. Zolotow attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison on a writing scholarship from 1933-36 where she studied with Professor Helen C. White. The Cooperative Children's Book Center, a library of the School of Education of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, administers the event which each year brings a distinguished children's book author or illustrator to the campus to deliver a free public lecture.

18

Oct

Approximately 2.4 million Black youth participate in after school programs, which offer a range of support, including academic tutoring, college preparation, political identity development, cultural and emotional support, and even a space to develop strategies and tools for organizing and activism. In Reclaiming Community, Bianca Baldridge tells the story of one such community-based program, Educational Excellence (EE), shining a light on, both, the invaluable role youth workers play in these spaces, and the precarious context in which such programs now exist. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, Baldridge persuasively argues that the story of EE is representative of a much larger and understudied phenomenon. With the spread of neoliberal ideology and its reliance on racism-marked by individualism, market competition, and privatization-these bastions of community support are losing the autonomy that has allowed them to embolden the minds of the youth they serve.

18

Oct

Amidst construction of a federal dam in rural Tennessee, Nathan, an engineer hiding from his past, meets Claire, a small-town housewife struggling to find her footing in the newly-electrified, job-hungry, post-Depression South.

As Nathan wrestles with the burdens of a secret guilt and tangled love, Claire struggles to balance motherhood and a newfound freedom that awakens ambitions and a sexuality she hadn’t known she possessed. The arrival of electricity in the rural community, where prostitution and dog-fighting are commonplace, thrusts together modern and backcountry values. In an evocative feat of storytelling in the vein of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, and Ron Rash’s Serena, Watershed delivers a gripping story of characters whose ambitions and yearnings threaten to overflow the banks of their time and place. As the townspeople embark on a biblical undertaking to harness elemental forces, Nathan and Claire are left to wonder what their lives will look like when the lights come on.

18

Oct

The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History is an exciting exploration of American history by way of vibrant and powerful ideas, thinkers, texts, and intellectual institutions. Written by one of the most distinguished intellectual historians of her generation, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen takes a chronological approach, beginning with the first explorers and settlers in the New World up to the 21st century. Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how ideas have been a major force in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism.

Presented in partnership with The Madison Institute.

18

Oct

Wisconsin People & Ideas, the Wisconsin Academy’s magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture, presents a Wisconsin Book Festival reading featuring the winners of the statewide 2019 Fiction & Poetry Contests, hosted by editor Jason A. Smith.

Fiction readings include the 1st-place story “Exile,” by Steve Fox (Hudson),

2nd-place story “Spirit Box,” by Nikki Kallio (Waupaca),

and 3rd-place story “Mirror Box,” by Michael Hopkins (Neenah).

Poetry readings include

1st-place poem “Greyhound,” by Robert Russell (Madison),

2nd-place poem “Morning's Detour,” by Mary Wehner (Fond du Lac),

and 3rd-place poem “Nineteen Forty-Five,” by Jeri McCormick (Madison), along with other poems chosen by the award-winning poets.

Join us in celebration and support of Wisconsin's creative writing community!

18

Oct

A thrilling and richly drawn family drama about a daughter’s quest to understand her mother’s mysterious death.

On the morning of her seventieth birthday, Georgianna Grove receives an unexpected letter that calls her back to Missing Lake, Wisconsin, where her mother was murdered sixty-six years earlier. Georgie’s father had confessed to the murder the next morning and was carted off to a state penitentiary. Haunted by the night that took both her parents away and determined to unearth the truth, Georgie takes her reluctant family on what will become a dangerous canoe trip up the swollen Bone River to return to Missing Lake.

Acclaimed novelist Susan Richards Shreve, celebrated for her “refined explorations of parent-child relationships” (Washington Post), captures the tenor of the times with clarity and elegance as she follows both Georgie and her parents on parallel trips up the Bone River, weaving together the hope of June 2008 with the injustices of June 1941. Georgie must untangle a web of bigotry, loss, and half-forgotten memories to finally understand her parents’ fate.

18

Oct

A deeply human story, Fentanyl Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. “A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape,” writes Ben Westhoff. “These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs”—and all-too-often tragically lethal. Drugs like fentanyl, K2, and Spice—and those with arcane acronyms like 25i-NBOMe— were all originally conceived in legitimate laboratories for proper scientific and medicinal purposes. Their formulas were then hijacked and manufactured by rogue chemists, largely in China, who change their molecular structures to stay one step ahead of the law, making the drugs’ effects impossible to predict. 

18

Oct

How do you write for different aged readers? Kevin Henkes will discuss his three most recent books — a picture book (A Parade of Elephants), a book for beginning readers (Penny and Her Sled), and a middle-grade novel (Sweeping Up the Heart) — pointing out how they are different and how they are similar. He will talk about inspiration, process, and his philosophy about books and children. He will also share autobiographical information, including childhood photos and glimpses of his studio.

18

Oct

1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.

2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.

Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?

18

Oct

Crisis of Conscience is an eye-opening—sometimes hair-raising—account of the social and legal evolution of whistleblowing, told through riveting legal cases and grounded in an examination of the economic, sociological and psychological forces that breed corruption and complicity, but also the moral decisiveness to call them out. We meet ordinary people who took extraordinary action against wrongdoing from inside drug companies and hospitals, the Ivy League and the Pentagon, trading floors and nuclear plants. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with whistleblowers, lawyers, watchdogs and experts—and spanning American history from the Revolution to Watergate, the Pentagon Papers to the Panama Papers and beyond—Mueller infuses this thoroughly researched history with vivid characters who give this ambitious, game-changing book an intimate, humanizing scale. Time and again, we are prompted to ask ourselves, “Would I do the same in this crisis situation?” Or better, “Did I do the right thing?” Because as the narrative reminds us, we all have whistleblower moments—and in these troubled times, need the whistleblowing instinct more than ever before.
 

18

Oct

In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives collide. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life—her husband, a newspaperman who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home, and her husband’s seventeen-year-old cousin, who communes with spirits.

Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West. The way in which Nora’s and Lurie’s stories intertwine is the surprise and suspense of this brilliant novel.

Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Téa Obreht’s talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely—and unforgettably—her own. 

18

Oct

A revolutionary new argument from eminent Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits attacking the false promise of meritocracy. It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal – that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding – reigns supreme.  Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream.

18

Oct

An initiation signals a beginning: a door opens and you step through. Traditional Wiccan initiates are usually brought into the craft through a ceremony with a High Priestess. But even though Amanda Yates Garcia's mother, a practicing witch herself, initiated her into the earth-centered practice of witchcraft when she was 13 years old, Amanda's real life as a witch only began when she underwent a series of spontaneous initiations of her own.

19

Oct

THOUSANDS of new and gently used books for children and teens!

Schedule:
8 - 9: Open to Friends members only (Anyone may join at the door)
9 -1: Open to all

Prices:
$4 hardcover picture books and non-fiction ($3 Friends members)
$2 paperbacks ($1 Friends members)
$2 hardcover fiction and board books (everyone)
Noon - 1 p.m. : All books $1!

Payment: Cash, check or institutional purchase order (please bring tax exempt # if applicable). (No credit cards)

19

Oct

Learn about machines the fun way! The Magic School Bus meets The Way Things Work in this kid-friendly guide to understanding the basics of simple machines, perfect for budding engineers. The Invention Hunters travel the globe in their flying museum collecting the world’s greatest inventions! Today they’ve landed in a construction zone. These silly scientists think they’ve stumbled on incredible specimens of everything you’d never find at a building site, from roller skates and pogo sticks to swords and race cars. But what they really discover–with a kid as their guide–is how simple machines like pulleys, cranks, and levers are used to engineer tools ranging from jackhammers to dump trucks…and even toilets! Using simple explanations and diagrams and a heaping helping of humor, the Invention Hunters make the perfect companions for curious kids who are ready to learn about science, physics, engineering, history, and more.  

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

19

Oct

What does "women's fiction" mean for booksellers, librarians, publishers, and the people who read and write in the genre? How does women's fiction intersect and conflict with modern feminism? Two bestselling authors of women's fiction, Madison writers Susan Gloss and Kelly Harms, tell all about what it means to read, write, and sell women's fiction in today's literary and cultural climate. 

About The Curiosities: The follow-up to Susan Gloss's successful debut, Vintage, is a charming mid-western story of artists, inspiration, and how to reinvent your life with purpose and flair. Nell Parker has a PhD in Art History, a loving husband named Josh, and a Craftsman bungalow in Madison, WI. But her last pregnancy ended later in the second trimester, and rather than pausing to grieve, she pushes harder for testing and fertility treatments. Urging Nell to apply for jobs, Josh believes his wife needs something else to focus on other than a baby that may never be.

19

Oct

In her groundbreaking new book How We Win, Farah Pandith argues that the solutions to the crisis of recruitment and radicalization are available and affordable. A pioneer in the war of ideas, her unprecedented experiences for Bush and Obama reveal information about Washington’s soft power challenge. She calls out the false claim that “ISIS is defeated” and focuses on the importance of defeating the ideology.

The need is urgent as terrorist organizations continue to beat the current approach to this global threat. To win, she argues, we must go “all in” in order to extinguish this threat once and for all. She lays out a comprehensive strategy that is a call to action for policymakers, tech entrepreneurs, the media, business professionals, and anyone interested in fighting hate, and presents concrete solutions and recommendations for how we can stem the extremists’ toxic message. Drawing upon her experiences at the National Security Council, U.S. Department of State, and USAID, she makes the case that we have the resources right now to defeat the extremist threat.

19

Oct

A potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods, Suicide Woods is Benjamin Percy’s first story collection since his acclaimed Refresh, Refresh. Percy, whose recent work includes the werewolf novel Red Moon, the post-apocalyptic Lewis-and-Clark saga The Dead Lands, the paranormal/internet thriller The Dark Net, and the Green Arrow, Teen Titans, and James Bond comic book series, now brings his page-turning skills to these new stories, which have appeared everywhere from Esquire, VQR, and Ploughshares to McSweeney’s, Orion, the Missouri Review, and more.

19

Oct

Dear Delia chronicles the story of Henry F. Young, an officer in the famed Iron Brigade, as told through 155 letters home to his wife and family in southwestern Wisconsin. His insights, often poignant and powerful, enable readers to witness the Civil War as he did. Young covers innumerable details of military service—from the camaraderie, pettiness, and thievery he witnessed among the troops to the brutality of internecine war. He was an equally astute observer of the military leadership, maneuvers and tactics, rumored troop movements, and what he considered the strengths and weaknesses of African American soldiers. He kept up with Wisconsin and national politics, often noting incidents of graft and corruption and offering pointed opinions regarding the 1864 presidential election. Candid, contemplative, and occasionally humorous, Young provides a clear window into everyday events during wartime. Epitomizing the feelings of many midwesterners of the time, Young’s communications highlight his unflagging patriotism—his fierce determination and willingness to sacrifice for a country he loved.

19

Oct

Journey to the moon on the Apollo 12 mission with Alan Bean, the fourth astronaut to walk on the lunar surface and the only artist to paint its beauty firsthand! As a boy, Alan wanted to fly planes. As a young navy pilot, Alan wished he could paint the view from the cockpit. So he took an art class to learn patterns and forms. But no class could prepare him for the beauty of the lunar surface some 240,000 miles from Earth. In 1969, Alan became the fourth man and first artist on the moon. He took dozens of pictures, but none compared to what he saw through his artistic eyes. When he returned to Earth, he began to paint what he saw. Alan's paintings allowed humanity to experience what it truly felt like to walk on the moon. Journalist and storyteller Dean Robbins's tale of this extraordinary astronaut is masterful, and artist Sean Rubin's illustrations are whimsical and unexpected. With back matter that includes photos of the NASA mission, images of Alan's paintings, and a timeline of lunar space travel, this is one adventure readers won't want to miss!

19

Oct

This study examines how intellectual and institutional developments transformed the U.S. Navy from 1873 to 1898. The period was a dynamic quarter-century in which Americans witnessed their Navy evolve. Cultures of progress clusters of ideas, beliefs, values, and practices pertaining to modern warfare and technology guided the Navy's transformation. The agents of naval transformation embraced a progressive ideology. They viewed science, technology, and expertise as the best means to effect change in a world contorted by modernizing and globalizing trends. Within the Navy's progressive movement, two new cultures Strategy and Mechanism influenced the course of transformation. Although they shared progressive pedigrees, each culture embodied a distinctive vision for the Navy's future.

19

Oct

With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which she has become known, Leslie Jamison offers us fourteen new essays that are by turns ecstatic, searching, staggering, and wise. In its kaleidoscopic sweep, Make It Scream, Make It Burn creates a profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession.

19

Oct

This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories from a 21st Century Indian, author Louis Clark examines the effects of his mother's alcoholism and his young sister's death, offers an intimate recounting of the backlash he faced as an Indian on the job, and celebrates the hard-fought sense of home he and his wife have created. Rebel Poet continues the author's tradition of seamlessly mixing poetry and prose, and is at turns darker and more nuanced than its predecessor.

19

Oct

More than four million visitors travel each year to the Wisconsin Dells, making it the most economically significant tourist destination in the state. After the first non-Native settlers arrived in the late 1830s, photographers began capturing images of the region. H. H. Bennett marketed his iconic images, some of which exploited the image and history of the Ho-Chunk tribe living in the region, to travel agents who sold them across the United States, encouraging early tourism in the area focused on the untamed nature of the frontier. In the next century, this continued desire for adventure was built into exotic hotel names, water parks, and amusement rides.

19

Oct

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence. These linked stories are set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio apartment of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages. Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure to succeed and fail again.

19

Oct

In the spring of 1998, acclaimed oncologist Azra Raza had been treating leukemia patients for nearly two decades. But it wasn’t until her own husband was diagnosed with, and eventually died from, leukemia that she realized how unbearable the disease could be. From the fear of an unexpected lump, through torrential sweats, horrible lesions, and excruciating pain, to his last moments with their young daughter, Dr. Raza bore witness—as so many have—to her husband’s deterioration at the hands of the disease and the drugs used to treat it. And she did it knowing that his likelihood of survival was close to zero.

19

Oct

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities, three of the country's foremost authors on Food Politics gather to discuss the transformative power of food in our communites, including food security, food justice, and food as means of liberation. Jennifer Gaddis, author of The Labor of Lunch, Monica White, author of Freedom Farmers, and Anne Zeide, author of Canned, will engage in a wide-ranging discussion about many of the most pressing food issues facing society today.

19

Oct

In The Stakes, Kuttner takes stock of the damage done to our democracy so far, and what could happen in a second Trump term. He examines whether constitutional restraints against Trump’s attacks on the norms of democracy are likely to hold. Exploring the roots of Trumpism, Kuttner exposes the errors of not only Republicans but also Democrats to combat an economy that was brutally turned against working families and primarily served elites. With the Democrats long having taken a centrist, corporate-beholden stance, neither of the two parties was credibly addressing broad public anxiety, and the support for the premise that government could solve national problems was at an all-time low.

19

Oct

An eye-opening narrative about how geometric principles fundamentally shaped our world. On a cloudy day in 1413, a balding young man stood at the entrance to the Cathedral of Florence, facing the ancient Baptistery across the piazza. As puzzled passers-by looked on, he raised a small painting to his face, then held a mirror in front of the painting. Few at the time understood what he was up to; even he barely had an inkling of what was at stake. But on that day, the master craftsman and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi would prove that the world and everything within it was governed by the ancient science of geometry.

19

Oct

Fifteen-year-old Ilya arrives in Louisiana from his native Russia for what should be the adventure of his life: a year in America as an exchange student. The abundance of his new world--the Super Walmarts and heated pools and enormous televisions--is as hard to fathom as the relentless cheerfulness of his host parents. And Sadie, their beautiful and enigmatic daughter, has miraculously taken an interest in him. 

19

Oct

In this often-surprising book of essays, Krista Eastman explores the myths we make about who we are and where we’re from. The Painted Forest uncovers strange and little-known “home places”—not only the picturesque hills and valleys of the author’s childhood in rural Wisconsin, but also tourist towns, the “under-imagined and overly caricatured” Midwest, and a far-flung station in Antarctica where the filmmaker Werner Herzog makes an unexpected appearance. The Painted Forest upends easy narratives of place, embracing tentativeness and erasing boundaries. But it is Eastman’s willingness to play—to follow her curiosity down every odd path, to exude a skeptical wonder—that gives this book depth and distinction. An unlikely array of people, places, and texts meet for close conversation, and tension is diffused with art, imagination, and a strong sense of there being some other way forward. Eastman offers a smart and contemporary take on how we wander and how we belong.

19

Oct

Some families have to dig hard to find the love that holds them together. Some have to grow it out of the ground. Bruce Kuipers was good at hunting, fishing and working, but not at much else that makes a real father or husband. Conflicted, angry, and a serial cheater, he destroyed his relationship with his wife, Nancy, and alienated his three sons journalist Dean, woodsman Brett, and troubled yet brilliant fisherman Joe. He distrusted people and clung to rural America as a place to hide. So when Bruce purchased a 100-acre hunting property as a way to reconnect with his sons, they resisted. The land was the perfect bait, but none of them knew how to be together as a family. Conflicts arose over whether the land— an old farm that had been degraded and reduced to a few stands of pine and blowing sand—should be left alone or be actively restored. After a decade- long impasse, Bruce acquiesced, and his sons proceeded with their restoration plan. What happened next was a miracle of nature.

19

Oct

An unforgettable, inventive, and riveting epic saga with the literary force and evocative imagination of Station Eleven, Zone One, and The Road, that signals the arrival of an extraordinary new talent. A little more than a century from now, the world has been utterly transformed. After years of slowly overtaking the continent, starting with the great coastal cities, rising floodwaters have left America an archipelago of mountaintop colonies surrounded by a deep expanse of open water. Civilization as it once was is gone. Bands of pirates roam the waters, in search of goods and women to breed. Some join together to create a new kind of society, while others sail alone, barely surviving. Stubbornly independent Myra and her precocious and feisty eight-year-old daughter, Pearl, fish from their small boat, the Bird, visiting small hamlets and towns on dry land only to trade for supplies and information. Just before Pearl’s birth, when the monstrous deluge overtook their home in Nebraska, Maya’s oldest daughter, Row, was stolen by her father. For eight years Myra has searched for the girl that she knows, in her bones and her heart, still lives.

19

Oct

Single payer healthcare is not complicated: the government pays for all care for all people. It’s cheaper than our current model, and most Americans (and their doctors) already want it. So what’s the deal with our current healthcare system, and why don’t we have something better? 

In Health Justice Now, Timothy Faust explains what single payer is, why we don’t yet have it, and how it can be won. He identifies the actors that have misled us for profit and political gain, dispels the myth that healthcare needs to be personally expensive, shows how we can smoothly transition to a new model, and reveals the slate of humane and progressive reforms that we can only achieve with single payer as the springboard.

In this impassioned playbook, Faust inspires us to believe in a world where we could leave our job without losing healthcare for ourselves and our kids; where affordable housing is healthcare; and where social justice links arm-in-arm with health justice for us all. Single payer is the tool—health justice is the goal!
 

19

Oct

All rivers are connected . . . 

So begins John Hildebrand’s unforgettable journey through America’s heartland in a small boat. Inspired by tales of a mythic Round River, a circular stream where “what goes around comes around,” he sets off to rediscover his home state of Wisconsin. He finds a place in the midst of an identity crisis, torn by political divisions and the widening gulf between city and countryside.

Cobbling rivers together, from the burly Mississippi to the slender wilds of Tyler Forks, Hildebrand navigates the beautiful but complicated territory of home. In once prosperous small towns he discovers unsung heroes—lockmasters, river rats, hotelkeepers, mechanics, environmentalists, tribal leaders, and perennial mayors—struggling to keep their communities afloat. Hildebrand charts the improbable oxbows along the course of history, which is neither a straight line nor inevitable. In Long Way Round we find possibility around the next bend.

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

19

Oct

With her new book, Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, Arana weaves a magnificent tapestry of historical research with up-to-the-minute reporting and cultural analysis to give readers an urgent look at Latin America today. Silver, Sword, and Stone is a brilliant, kaleidoscopic book. Its extraordinary sweep artfully and perceptively traverses a wide terrain of time and topics, showing readers how the past lives on today. “History has a way of slipping fitfully into the future,” writes Arana, and nowhere is that clearer than in the people she profiles. They are emblematic of three obsessions that have held Latin Americans fast for the past millennium:

Silver represents the lust for precious metals—a fixation that burned brightly before Columbus’stime, consumed Spain in its relentless conquest of America, drove a cruel system of slavery and colonial exploitation, sparked bloody revolutions, addled the region’s stability for centuries, and morphed into Latin America’s best hope for the future.

19

Oct

Presented in partnership with the Arts + Literature Laboratory, three award-winning poets visit Madison for this special Watershed Reading. Featuring readings by Jeffrey Levine, founder of Tupelo Press and author of the new poetry collection, At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered; James Arthur, author of the brand new The Suicide's Son; and Anders Carlson-Wee, author of The Low Passions.

19

Oct

Xuan Juliana Wang’s remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions. 

In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces and stories of a new generation never before captured between the pages in fiction. What sets them apart is Juliana Wang’s surprising imagination, able to capture the innermost thoughts of her characters with astonishing empathy, as well as the contradictions of the modern immigrant experience in a way that feels almost universal. Home Remedies is, in the words of Alexander Chee, “the arrival of an urgent and necessary literary voice we’ve been needing, waiting for maybe, without knowing.”

19

Oct

Former Olympic figure skater and self-professed America's Sweetheart Adam Rippon showcases his funny and inspiring personality in this entertaining memoir in the vein of Andy Cohen. Your mom probably told you it's what on the inside that counts. Well, then she was never a competitive figure skater. Olympic medalist Adam Rippon has been making it pretty for the judges even when, just below the surface, everything was an absolute mess. From traveling to practices on the Greyhound bus next to ex convicts to being so poor he could only afford to eat the free apples at his gym, Rippon got through the toughest times with a smile on his face, a glint in his eye, and quip ready for anyone listening. Beautiful on the Outside looks at his journey from a homeschooled kid in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a self-professed American sweetheart on the world stage and all the disasters and self-delusions it took to get him there. Yeah, it may be what's on the inside that counts, but life is so much better when it's beautiful on the outside.

19

Oct

Much more than a knack for snappy comebacks, wit is the quick, instinctive intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place. In this whimsical book, James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Geary reasons that wit is both visual and verbal, physical and intellectual: there's the serendipitous wit of scientists, the crafty wit of inventors, the optical wit of artists, and the metaphysical wit of philosophers. In Wit's End, Geary embraces wit in every form by adopting a different style for each chapter; he writes the section on verbal repartee as a dramatic dialogue, the neuroscience of wit as a scientific paper, the spirituality of wit as a sermon, and other chapters in jive, rap, and the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. Wit's End agilely balances psychology, folktales, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, drawing upon traditions of wit from around the world. Entertaining, illuminating, and entirely unique, Wit's End demonstrates that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.

19

Oct

Spaceflight historian, author, YouTuber, and space personality, Amy Shira Teitel discusses the history of space flight, the space program, and all things Vintage Space.

About Fighting for Space: A book that will appeal to readers of Fly Girls and The Astronaut Wives' Club, Fighting for Space is the mostly-unknown tale of Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb--two accomplished aviatrixes, one generation apart, who each dreamed of being the first woman in space, but along the way battled their egos, their expectations, and ultimately the patriarchal society that stood between them and the stars. Fighting for Space is a dual biography of these fascinating and fearless women, using their stories as guides through the changing social, political, and technical landscape of the time.

19

Oct

Marlantes draws glancing inspiration from his own family history to tell a story against the backdrop of a logging industry clashing with the radical burgeoning labor movement, World War I, and the upheavals of early twentieth century America.

In the early 1900s for political reasons, the three Koski siblings —Ilmari, Matti, and the politicized young Aino—are forced to flee Finland to the United States. Not far from the majestic Columbia River, the siblings settle among other Finns in a logging community in southern Washington, where the harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests begets rapid development, and radical labor movements begin to catch fire. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this wilderness while Aino, foremost of the book’s many strong, independent women, devotes herself to organizing the industry’s first unions. As Aino struggles to reconcile her beliefs with her latent desire to build a family –a desire complicated by the trauma from the past—she finds herself pulled between two very different suitors, both of whom harbor their own painful secrets.

19

Oct

The four most powerful African American women in politics share the story of their friendship and how it has changed politics in America. The lives of black women in American politics are remarkably absent from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics is a sweeping view of American history from the vantage points of four women who have lived and worked behind the scenes in politics for over thirty years—Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore—a group of women who call themselves The Colored Girls. Like many people who have spent their careers in public service, they view their lives in four-year waves where presidential campaigns and elections have been common threads. For most of the Colored Girls, their story starts with Jesse Jackson’s first campaign for president. From there, they went on to work on the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. 

19

Oct

At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy. As Phelps-Roper grew up, she saw that church members were close companions and accomplished debaters, applying the logic of predestination and the language of the King James Bible to everyday life with aplomb—which, as the church’s Twitter spokeswoman, she learned to do with great skill. Soon, however, dialogue on Twitter caused her to begin doubting the church’s leaders and message: If humans were sinful and fallible, how could the church itself be so confident about its beliefs? As she digitally jousted with critics, she started to wonder if sometimes they had a point—and then she began exchanging messages with a man who would help change her life.

19

Oct

The Wisconsin Book Festival celebrates two decorated graduates from the UW Program in Creative Writing with Tiana Clark and Rebecca Hazelton reading from their newest works.  

About I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood: For prize-winning poet Tiana Clark, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that she cannot escape, but one that she has learned to lean into as she delves into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, her own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because the speaker in this triptych book cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past—she will always see blood on the leaves.

19

Oct

In the bestselling tradition of The Bitch in the House, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is an anthology about the powerful and sometimes painful things that we can’t discuss with the person who is supposed to know us and love us the most.

In the early 2000s, as an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took many years for her to realize what she was actually trying to write about: the fracture this caused in her relationship with her mother. When her essay, “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About,” was published by Longreads in October of 2017, it went on to become one of the most popular Longreads exclusives of the year, and was shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, Lidia Yuknavitch, and many other writers, some of whom had their own individual codes of silence to be broken.

20

Oct

Wisconsin’s artisan cheese scene is steeped in tradition and bursting with innovations. Local cheesemakers attract visitors from all over the world. Cheese is a huge part of the state’s tourist draw and homegrown character. Everyone who calls Wisconsin home or visits for a day will love this book of the best recipes to cook with cheese. Stunning photos and 60 recipes from the 28 creameries featured will include comfort-food staples like pizza, mac ‘n cheese and grilled-cheese sandwiches, as well as wow-worthy dinner-party favorites such as mascarpone cheesecake, plus picnic-friendly salads and delicious breakfasts.
 

20

Oct

Years ago, Steve Hannah’s chance detour through the Midwest cut short a planned cross-country trip. He found himself ensconced in Wisconsin, a distinctly different place from the East Coast where he was born and raised. Breathtakingly beautiful and full of welcoming people, America’s Dairyland would soon become his home. 

Dairylandia recounts Hannah’s love for his adopted state through his long-lived column, “State of Mind.” He profiles the lives of the seemingly ordinary yet quite (and quietly) extraordinary folks he met and befriended as he traveled the main streets and back roads of Wisconsin. From Norwegian farmers to a CIA-trained Laotian fighter to a woman who kept her favorite dead bird in the freezer, Hannah was charmed and fascinated by the kind and authentic folks he met. These captivating vignettes are by turns humorous, touching, and inspiring.

20

Oct

In the autumn of 1960, Angie Glass is living an idyllic life in her Wisconsin hometown. At twenty-one, she’s married to charming, handsome Paul, and has just given birth to a baby boy. But one phone call changes her life forever.

When Paul’s niece, Ruby, reports that her father, Henry, has committed suicide, and that her mother, Silja, is missing, Angie and Paul drop everything and fly to the small upstate town of Stonekill, New York to be by Ruby’s side.

Angie thinks they’re coming to the rescue of Paul’s grief-stricken young niece, but Ruby is a composed and enigmatic seventeen-year-old who resists Angie’s attempts to nurture her. As Angie learns more about the complicated Glass family, staying in Henry and Silja’s eerie and ultra-modern house on the edge of the woods, she begins to question the very fabric of her own marriage.

Through Silja’s flashbacks, Angie’s discovery of astonishing truths, and Ruby’s strategic dissection of her parents’ state of affairs, a story of love, secrets, and ultimate betrayal is revealed.  

20

Oct

Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she's a senior Daily Beast reporter happily married to another woman. A lot in her life has changed, but what hasn't changed is her deep love of Red State America, and of queer people who stay in so-called "flyover country" rather than moving to the liberal coasts. 

In Real Queer America, Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: "Something gay every day." Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more.

20

Oct

Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice focuses on contemporary issues, this text showcases a large collection of regional poets laureate writing on subjects critical to understanding social justice as it relates to the Great Lakes region. Undocumented includes writing by seventy-eight poets who truly represent the diversity of the Great Lakes region, including Rita Dove, Marvin Bell, Crystal Valentine, Kimberly Blaeser, Mary Weems, Karen Kovacik, Wendy Vardaman, Zora Howard, Carla Christopher, Meredith Holmes, Karla Huston, Joyce Sutphen, and Laren McClung, among others. City, state, and national poets laureate with ties to Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin appear in these pages, organized around themes from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide,” calling on readers to act on behalf of victims of social injustice. 

20

Oct

Paul Hendrickson will discuss his new book, Plagued By Fire, in conversation with David Maraniss.Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life.

20

Oct

Presented in partnership with American Short Fiction, we are thrilled to present this exciting peek into some of the most dazzling and formidable new voices on the literary horizon. American Short Fiction authors Tia Clark, Barrett Swanson, Rachel Swearingen, and Brandon Taylor will read from their work and join editor Adeena Reitberger to discuss what makes a story powerful, innovative, and incisive. American Short Fiction is a triannual print magazine based in Austin, Texas and is the 2019 winner of a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize.

29

Oct

For as long as they can remember, Cyrus Grace Dunham felt like a visitor in their own body. As a child named Grace, they mastered the art of behaving like a lovable little girl in public. In private, they posed in front of the mirror and lifted their chin up "like men in magazines," calling themselves "Jimmy." Their life was a series of imitations -- daughter, sister, teenage girl, young gay woman -- until their profound sense of alienation became intolerable. This is the story of their search for a new name. 

Writing with disarming emotional intensity in a voice uniquely theirs, our narrator begins as Grace and ends as Cyrus, chronicling a childhood in a family of artists with larger-than-life personalities, bouts of gender dysphoria, obsessive-compulsive disorder, debilitating anxiety, soaring romantic adventures, and the frightening and exhilarating process of gender transition, all the while exploring the complex relationships that lay our foundations, constrain us, and inform our capacity to love. 

31

Oct

Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923–1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his “solo” turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter’s personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to Dexter, “Man, you ought to leave your karma to science.”

11

Nov

In Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It, Richard Stengel, the former editor-in-chief of Time and Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Obama administration, provides the first and only insider account of how the U.S. government tried—and failed—to combat the global rise of disinformation that poisoned the 2016 election. From his unique vantage point, Stengel writes about seeing a tsunami of Russian disinformation after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the weaponization of information and grievance by ISIS and Russia, and then how the Russians turned their sights on the U.S. election. Stengel explains not only why disinformation is a threat to democracy, but what we can do about it.

19

Nov

Downsizing. Decluttering. A parent’s death. Sooner or later, all of us are faced with things we no longer need or want. But when we drop our old clothes and other items off at a local donation center, where do they go? Sometimes across the country—or even halfway across the world—to people and places who find value in what we leave behind.

In Secondhand, Adam Minter, journalist and author of Junkyard Planet, takes us on an unexpected adventure into the often-hidden, multibillion-dollar industry of reuse: thrift stores in the American Southwest to vintage shops in Tokyo, flea markets in Southeast Asia to used-goods enterprises in Ghana, and more. Along the way, Minter meets the fascinating people who handle—and profit from—our rising tide of discarded stuff, and asks a pressing question: In a world that craves shiny and new, is there room for it all?