A lyrical, reverse-chronology portrait of a woman’s life in which her daughter pieces together memories from her final days back to childhood. Through intimate scenes and reflective prose, the book explores grief, memory, family bonds, and how identity is shaped by experience. It is a compassionate meditation on a mother’s life and a daughter’s effort to understand her.

Jonas Olofsson explores the human sense of smell, explaining how olfaction shapes memory, emotion and perception and how it engages the brain even before odor molecules hit receptors. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and history, the book shows why smell has been overlooked, why people can experience the same scent differently, and how smell can be assessed, trained and sometimes recovered after loss. It’s a concise, curiosity-driven look at the science and everyday importance of our often-neglected sense.

Good Things is a concise, warm collection of more than 125 recipes and practical cooking lessons from Samin Nosrat, centered on flavor, comfort, and sharing. It offers approachable recipes for everyday meals and gatherings, along with technique tips, ingredient guidance, and hosting advice—aimed at helping cooks create nourishing food and meaningful moments without fuss.

Groceries is a book-length poem that explores our fraught relationship with objects—how we obtain, name, keep, and discard them. Mixing everyday items (fax machines, horseshoes, waves) with broader ecological questions, it acts as a lyrical guide for listening to and speaking with the material world, considering how objects shape personal and collective futures.

A formally daring collection of poems that reimagines Black life across time through speculative, Afrofuturist lenses, blending fragmented syntax, sonic performance, and visual play to collapse past, present, and future while interrogating language, identity, embodiment, and the social forces that shape how histories and possibilities are imagined.

Integrated examines the consequences of school desegregation for Black communities by tracing four generations of the author’s family. Combining personal narrative and research, Noliwe Rooks shows how desegregation led to school closures, mass firings of Black teachers, and continued discrimination that reshaped educational opportunities and informs present-day disputes over schooling.

Calvin Duncan was convicted of murder at nineteen and spent decades at Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola). With little formal education he taught himself the law, became a jailhouse lawyer who assisted fellow inmates and taught legal classes, and the book—co-written with Sophie Cull—traces his legal coming-of-age and examines the flaws of the criminal justice system.

A dreamlike, poetic reimagining of Jamaica that moves between present-day life and deep historical memory. Told as a mosaic of voices—a mother searching for a missing child, an undocumented migrant, a youth wandering dream-gates—the book explores loss, cultural memory, and ecological decline, with evocative notes on healing herbs, disappearing flora and fauna, and sea spirits. Objects like Zora Neale Hurston’s abandoned camera and rich, cinematic imagery anchor the collection’s eco-spiritual visions without revealing plot twists.

When veteran goalie Jethro Hale is traded to a team coached by Clay Powers — his former lover and the youngest coach in the league — their past affair and unresolved feelings resurface. As the team pursues a big season, they must navigate awkwardness, parenthood and a rekindled attraction that could cause a scandal if it comes to light.

Anna must marry to inherit after her grandfather’s will threatens her independence. To protect her future she enters a high‑stakes horse race and a betting ring, clashing with and gradually falling for the arrogant Lord Julian Ramsay in a slow‑burn frenemies-to-lovers romance.

A candid memoir about an Indian American woman whose long struggle with depression leads her to a persuasive alternative therapist who runs a Mormon-influenced self-help community. Drawn into the leader’s control, she experiences major life changes and ultimately reclaims her autonomy by studying psychology and learning to trust her intuition.

Lili Taylor recounts how a pause from her acting career led her to notice the rich, everyday world of birds. In a series of intimate, spoiler-free essays she shares encounters—from city rooftops to backyard nests—and reflects on how paying attention to birds deepened her sense of wonder, connection, and the importance of small moments.

Set against the backdrop of a post-industrial Chicago, this poignant narrative delves into the complexities of family, identity, and the American Dream. Through the eyes of a young woman returning home, the story weaves together personal memories and historical insights, exploring the socio-economic challenges faced by working-class families. As she navigates her family's past and present, the protagonist grapples with themes of loss, resilience, and the enduring impact of deindustrialization on her community, offering a deeply reflective and intimate portrayal of life in a changing America.

Set in the midcentury American Midwest, At Last follows two matriarchs, Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner, whose children marry. Both are sharp and cunning and hold conflicting beliefs about marriage, responsibility, and family, and they vie for the love of their shared granddaughter. The narrative traces their lives from different childhoods through pivotal events that shape them, exploring how an unintended relationship can come to define a life.

Bright Circle is a group biography that follows five Boston women who in November 1839 formed a conversation society to consider what they were born to do and how to do it. Randall Fuller recounts how figures such as Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller developed ideas about the self, nature, and feeling while urging male peers to address the rights of enslaved people and of women. Together they helped form the foundations of American feminism.

Max is thirty and restless, carrying years of dysphoria and dissatisfaction. After a New Year’s Eve fall she tries pursuing a conventional relationship with Vincent, but his family expectations and a resurfacing past force both of them to confront identity, forgiveness, and how much the past shapes who we become. The novel explores trans identity, family pressure, race, and the work of making — or remaking — a life together.

False Dawn examines the U.S. recovery from the Great Depression, arguing that many New Deal policies unintentionally prolonged high unemployment. Drawing on contemporary sources and economic-historical research, Selgin separates the New Deal’s missteps from effective measures and traces how the country ultimately overcame mass unemployment, offering lessons for future recessions.

A narrative history of the American West that traces the period from the mid‑18th to the late‑19th century. Using seven central figures—including Daniel Boone, Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill—the book examines how expansion shaped lives, cultures, and the landscape, showing both acts of boldness and the human and environmental costs of frontier growth.

Positive Obsession is a cultural biography of Octavia Butler that situates her life and work within the social and political movements of her time—Civil Rights, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, and the economic shifts of the late twentieth century. Susana M. Morris explores how those contexts shaped Butler’s speculative fiction and its recurring concerns: the rise and fall of American power, systems of hierarchy and violence, climate crisis, and alternatives to conventional religion and family, often centering Black women as complex, driven protagonists. The book also examines Butler’s compulsive need to write and how that determination shaped her career and ideas.

On May 19, 1884, the yacht Mignonette sank and four men, including Captain Thomas Dudley, were left adrift in a lifeboat. After two weeks without food they chose to sacrifice the youngest, 17-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker, an action that led to their rescue and a murder trial. The book reconstructs both the ordeal at sea and the trial, examining how survival imperatives clashed with moral and legal norms.

A reporting-driven investigation into the anger that fueled the recent populist surge, traveling from shuttered factories and struggling small towns to the corridors of power and wealth to weave together interviews, history and analysis; it shows how economic dislocation, cultural resentment, racial anxieties, media amplification and elite neglect combined to produce a combustible political energy, offering both compassionate portraits of people left behind and a critique of the structural forces and narratives that made their rage politically potent.

Mike Sielski traces the history of the slam dunk and its influence on basketball and American social change. He shows how the dunk helped shift the sport from white control to a Black man's game and became an expression of Black culture during the civil rights era. After a nearly decade-long college ban the dunk reemerged through stars from Julius Erving to Michael Jordan and helped grow the NBA into a global league.

Jeff Pearlman offers a detailed retelling of Tupac Shakur's life, examining the man behind the public myth and the enduring questions around his murder. The book reconstructs West Coast hip hop, goes inside Death Row Records and the sets of Juice and Poetic Justice, and uses nearly seven hundred interviews and previously unpublished material to present a layered portrait of a complicated, elusive figure.

At the turn of the 21st century in Tanzania, three young people—Karim, Fauzia and Badar—come of age as tourism, technology and new opportunities begin to reshape their quiet town. Their intersecting stories follow ambition, the desire for escape, and uncertain prospects as each must decide how to take control of their future.