Category: New Books

Posted on by

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire

Journalist Katz (The Big Truck That Went By) delivers a searing and well-documented portrait of early 20th-century U.S. imperialism focused on the career of U.S. Marine Corps major general Smedley D. Butler (1881–1940). Contending that American military actions served the interests of U.S. business and financial institutions, often with dire effects on local people, Katz provides the geopolitical context behind interventions in China, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and visits each location to document the legacy of U.S. interference. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby

Kirby’s book succeeds not just because she’s a preternaturally gifted prose stylist, but because of her willingness to take risks. She experiments with points of view and occasionally dips into metafiction (“Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” is a master class in storytelling, as well as a hilarious commentary on a fiction scene that’s seen men overrepresented for decades.) And yet she also knows when to tap the brakes, when to step back and let her carefully drawn characters speak for themselves. It’s a stunning collection from a writer whose talent and creativity seem boundless. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman

The poignant and searching debut from Gorman, the youngest presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history, goes beyond the inauguration poem to consider the larger role of history, struggle, and hope in American lives. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says

If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Famed for Fiction, Jim Harrison Was Also a Poet of Prodigious Appetites

His first published book was a poetry collection, 1965’s “Plain Song”; his last book of poems during his lifetime, 2016’s “Dead Man’s Float,” was published about two months before he died. In between he published a dozen or so other collections, adding up to a massive and bounteous body of work that would have made Harrison a significant American writer even if he had never published in any other genre. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)