Luke Gerwe - Editor

Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince (Voice of Witness)

Moving stories of life in a country enduring an ongoing crisisSeven years after the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck Haiti, the island nation remains in crisis, all but ignored by the international community. At the center of this crisis is Lavil—“The City” in Kreyol, as Port-au-Prince is known to Haitians—the cultural, political, and economic capital of Hai... read more

Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture (Voice of Witness)

Lives from an invisible community—the migrant farmworkers of the United States The Grapes of Wrath brought national attention to the condition of California’s migrant farmworkers in the 1930s. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ grape and lettuce boycotts captured the imagination of the United States in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet today, the stories of the more than 800,000 men, women, and c... read more

Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy (Voice of Witness)

The men and women in Invisible Hands reveal the human rights abuses occurring behind the scenes of the global economy. These narrators — including phone manufacturers in China, copper miners in Zambia, garment workers in Bangladesh, and farmers around the world — reveal the secret history of the things we buy, including lives and communities devastated by low wages, environmental degradation, ... read more

Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation (Voice of Witness)

The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been one of the world’s most widely reported yet least understood human rights crises for over four decades. In this oral history collection, men and women from Palestine—including a fisherman, a settlement administrator, and a marathon runner—describe in their own words how their lives have been shaped by the historic crisis. Other narrators includ... read more

High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (Voice of Witness)

In the gripping first-person accounts of High Rise Stories, former residents of Chicago’s iconic public housing projects describe life in the now-demolished high-rises. These stories of community, displacement, and poverty in the wake of gentrification give voice to those who have long been ignored, but whose hopes and struggles exist firmly at the heart of our national identity.

Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing

Michael Muhammad Knight

If Tripping with Allah is a road book, it’s a road book in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey, rather than On the Road. Amazonian shamanism meets Christianity meets West African religion meets Islam in this work of reflection and inward adventure. Knight, the “Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature” seeks reconciliation between his Muslim identity and his drinking of ayahuasca, a psyched... read more

William S. Burroughs vs. The Qur'an

Michael Muhammad Knight

When Michael Muhammad Knight sets out to write the definitive biography of his “Anarcho-Sufi” hero and mentor, writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), he makes a startling discovery that changes everything. At the same time that he grows disillusioned with his idol, Knight finds that his own books have led to American Muslim youths making a countercultural idol of him, placing him on the ... read more

Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons

John Barth

John Barth stays true to form in Every Third Thought, written from the perspective of a character Barth introduced in his short story collection The Development. George I. Newett and his wife Amanda Todd lived in the gated community of Heron Bay Estates until its destruction by a fluke tornado. This event, Newett notes, occurred on the 77th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash, a detail ... read more

Toward You

Jim Krusoe

The final book in Jim Krusoe's trilogy about the relationship between this world and the next.Toward You completes Jim Krusoe's bittersweet trilogy about the relationship between this world and the next. Bob has spent several years trying to build a machine that will communicate with the dead. He's gotten more or less nowhere. Then two surprising things happen: he receives an important message... read more

The Doper Next Door: My Strange and Scandalous Year on Performance-Enhancing Drugs

Andrew Tilin

What happens to a regular guy who dopes? Surprised to learn that pro athletes aren’t the only ones taking performance-enhancing substances, journalist Andrew Tilin goes in search of the average juicing Joe, hoping to find a few things out: Why would normal people take these substances? Where do folks get them? Does the stuff really work?But these controversial drugs often silence their users, ... read more

The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst

Steven Church

Steven Church grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose predictable daily rhythms give way easily to anxiety—and a place that, since Civil War times, has been a canvas for sporadic scenes of havoc and violence in the popular imagination. Childhood was quiet on the surface, but Steven grew up scared—scared of killer tornadoes, winged monkeys, violent movies, authority figu... read more

The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books

The way we absorb information has changed dramatically. Edison’s phonograph has been reincarnated as the iPod. Celluloid went digital. But books, for the most part, have remained the same—until now. And while music and movies have undergone an almost Darwinian evolution, the literary world now faces a revolution, a sudden seismic change in the way we buy, produce, and, yes, read books.Scholars... read more

A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America

David Griffith

In the wake of Abu Ghraib, Americans have struggled to understand what happened in the notorious prison and why. In this elegant series of essays, inflected with a radical Catholic philosophy, David Griffith contends that society's shift from language to image has changed the way people think about violence and cruelty, and that a disconnect exists between images and reality. Griffith meditate... read more

Something Bright, Then Holes

Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson’s fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer’s attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight — of feeling lost, then found, then lost again. The book’s three sections range widely, and include a long sequence of Niede... read more

Someday We'll All Be Free

Kevin Powell

Someday We’ll All Be Free is the indispensable and passionate follow-up to Kevin Powell’s best-selling essay collection, Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? Manhood, Race, and Power in America. Here Powell widens his lens and skillfully dissects the dreams of American freedom and democracy in these early days of the 21st century. Be it the reelection of President George W. Bush, the colossal tragedy ... read more

Dead in Desemboque: Historias de Amor y Sangre!

Eddy Arellano

Inspired by kitschy Mexican "historietas" (pocket-sized comic books), Roberto presents an English-language version featuring his alter-ego, Eddy Arellano. When a dama named Juanita calls him down to Sonora, Eddy crosses the Rio Bravo and never looks back. Soon he's embroiled in a complex, comic drama featuring a memorable gallery of quirky characters.

On the Lower Frequencies

Erick Lyle

On the Lower Frequencies is at once a manual, memoir, and history of creative resistance in a world awash with war and poverty. An icon on the 1990s zine scene, Iggy Scam traces not only the evolution of cities, but of his own thinking, from his early focus on more outré forms of resistance through more contemplative times as he becomes preoccupied with the need for a more affirmative vision o... read more

My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism

David Gessner

In My Green Manifesto, David Gessner embarks on a rough-and-tumble journey down Boston’s Charles River, searching for the soul of a new environmentalism. With a tragically leaky canoe, a broken cell phone, a cooler of beer, and the environmental planner Dan Driscoll in tow, Gessner grapples with the stereotype of the environmentalist as an overzealous, puritanical mess. But as Dan recounts his... read more

Architectural Theories of the Environment: Posthuman Territory

As architects and designers, we struggle to reconcile ever increasing environmental, humanitarian, and technological demands placed on our projects. Our new geological era, the Anthropocene, marks humans as the largest environmental force on the planet and suggests that conventional anthropocentric approaches to design must accommodate a more complex understanding of the interrelationship betw... read more

Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes

Written by authors born into the so-called “dilemma of intermarriage,” the stories in Half/Life explore the experience of being raised in a half-Jewish home. Though each essay is distinct, and the experiences are vastly different, each describes growing up without a streamlined identity, unsure of community or religious direction. From Jenny Traig, whose experiences led her to extreme devotion... read more

The Wildly Irish Sextet

Dick Wimmer

Dick Wimmer offers readers five new tales centring on Seamus Boyne, the greatest painter in the world. Among the cast of characters back with him to continue the wild ride are the Boynes' saucy daughter, Tory, and Seamus' best friend, the writer Gene Hagar.

Lost in the Supermarket: An Indie Rock Cookbook

Kay Bozich Owens, Lynn Owens

Historically, a love of cooking has been left to those considered far from cool: suburbanite Betty Crockers toiling over a hot stove. But the new youth-culture sensibility has taken over, merging the axiom “You are what you eat” with its updated mantra “You are who you listen to.” Lost in the Supermarket—yes, named for the 1979 hit by The Clash—is a creative compendium of recipes that reclaims... read more

East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg

Gordon Ball

“This was Allen Ginsberg,” Gordon Ball declares after recounting intimate moments with the cultural icon and beloved Beat Generation poet on East Hill Farm, outside Cherry Valley, New York.During the late 1960s, when peace, drugs, and free love were direct challenges to conventional society, Allen Ginsberg, treasurer of Committee on Poetry, Inc., funded what he hoped was “a haven for comrades ... read more

The Sickness

Alberto Barrera Tyszka

A profound and philosophical exploration of the nature and meaning of illness, Alberto Barrera Tyszka's tender, refined novel interweaves the stories of four individuals as they try, in their own way, to come to terms with sickness in all its ubiquity. Dr. Miranda is faced with a tragedy: his father has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has only a few weeks to live. He is also faced with... read more

Welcome to Paradise

Mahi Binebine

Mahi Binebine's courageous novel delves into a world that most readers know only from stories on the nightly news, delivering a compassionate glimpse into the difficulties facing asylum seekers and a striking portrait of human desperation. Mahi Binebine’s courageous novel takes place in Morocco, where seven would-be immigrants gather one night near the Strait of Gibraltar to wait for a signal ... read more

The Addicted Lawyer: Tales of the Bar, Booze, Blow, and Redemption

Brian Cuban

Brian Cuban was a successful lawyer—and an addict. Brian Cuban was living a lie. With a famous last name and a successful career as a lawyer, Brian was able to hide his clinical depression and alcohol and cocaine addictions—for a while. Today, as an inspirational speaker in long-term recovery, Brian looks back on his journey with honesty, compassion, and even humor as he reflects both on what ... read more

Hooked

John Franc

A fast-paced and fascinating look into the male mind and sexual obsession, Hooked portrays the attempt to mask the self while needlessly committing acts of reckless exposure, both literal and figurative. Read it if you must, but don't tell anybody about it. In the tradition of Vladimir Nabokov and Henry Miller, John Franc's masterful novel explores sexual obsession, as a group of male friends ... read more

Bright Before Us (A Tin House New Voice)

Katie Arnold-Ratliff

A haunting debut novel that explores the fraught journey toward adulthood, the nature of memory, and the startling limits to which we are driven by grief Facing the prospect of fatherhood, disillusioned by his fledgling teaching career, and mourning the loss of a former relationship, Francis Mason is a prisoner of his past mistakes. When his second-grade class discovers a dead body during a fi... read more

The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Fiedler

Despite his often-unacknowledged influence, academics, intellectuals, and the general audience in America and abroad still read Leslie Fiedler’s work and draw on its concepts. He inspired both reverence (Leonard Cohen penned: "leaning over the American moonlight / like the shyest gargoyle / who will not become angry or old") and rage (Saul Bellow called him "the worst fucking thing that ever h... read more

The Little General and the Giant Snowflake

Matthea Harvey

In this compelling tale for children and adults alike, the poet Matthea Harvey collaborates with artist Elizabeth Zechel to create a powerful, resonant allegory for these times of violent military solutions to global problems.In this compelling tale, there is a little general who heads an army called the Realists. Every day he and his troops practice battle formations while the Dreamers, the o... read more

African Psycho

Alain Mabanckou

Its title recalls Bret Easton Ellis’s infamous book, but while Ellis’s narrator was a blank slate, African Psycho’s protagonist is a quivering mass of lies, neuroses, and relentless internal chatter. Gregoire Nakobomayo, a petty criminal, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine. He’s planned the crime for some time, but still, the act of murder requires a bit of psychological and logistica... read more

Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy

Jeffrey A Engel

In a gripping story of international power and deception, Engel reveals the "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain. As allies, they fought Communism; as rivals, they clashed over which would lead the Cold War fight. In the quest for sovereignty and hegemony, Engel shows that one important key was airpower, which created jobs, forged ties with the developing world, a... read more