Politics and Prose Presents

Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she’s kept at bay for a lifetime.

Shifting between past and present, Livia’s decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.

With razor-sharp acuity and deep affection, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver’s unforgettable new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing power of art.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and Coyote’s Wild Home, a children’s book co-authored with Lily Kingsolver. She also collaborated with family members on the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received numerous awards and honors including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Demon Copperhead, the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.

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The definitive account of how a discarded strand of hair found in Thomas Jefferson’s Bible led to a sweeping, multi-year genomic investigation, drawing on technological advances in DNA to finally resolve a 200-year national controversy.
“Written with the gravitas of history and the pace of a thriller, Richard Kurin’s landmark account is vital and compelling.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
In 2011, staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History discovered what appeared to be a hair—light red, possibly human—pressed between the pages of the Thomas Jefferson Bible. That hair sparked an unprecedented scientific quest: determining if modern genomics could recover Jefferson’s DNA and finally resolve the most divisive and enduring question surrounding his life—the paternity of the children of Sally Hemings, one of hundreds of African Americans enslaved by Thomas Jefferson.
For over two centuries, the Jefferson–Hemings controversy has shaped American debates about race, power, slavery, and the mythology of the Founding Fathers. Historians have argued fiercely. Descendants have lived with uncertainty. DNA technology in the 1990s brought us closer, but not all the way; the evidence remained incomplete. Until now. In this riveting narrative—part scientific detective story, part historical epic—Richard Kurin, distinguished scholar and museum official, leads readers through the fifteen-year-long genomic investigation conducted with leading DNA scientists, archaeologists, genealogists, forensic experts, and Jefferson and Hemings’ descendants across the country.
The result is the first conclusive, scientifically validated answer to a question that has reverberated since the eighteenth century—an answer that settles the historical record, deepens our understanding of Jefferson, honors generations of family oral history, and asks America to confront the full complexity of its origins.

Richard Kurin is the Smithsonian Institution’s Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador-at-Large and previously served as Under Secretary overseeing all museums and scientific centers. An author of several popular books on American history and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Kurin has led major national cultural initiatives and produced award-winning public history.

Kurin is in conversation with Steve Inskeep. Inskeep is a cohost of Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio program in the United States, and of NPR’s Up First, one of the nation’s most popular podcasts. His reporting has taken him across the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Pakistan, and China. His search for the full story behind the news has led him to history; he is the author of Instant City, Jacksonland, and Imperfect Union, and now Differ We Must.

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A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, whose “great body of work . . . has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing” (The New York Times).
In a review of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), The New York Times heralded Jorie Graham as a “poet of large ambitions and reckless music.” In the fifteen collections that followed, she has sought to remake the lyric’s ability to capture our recklessly disintegrating and accelerating daily realities. Now, in perhaps the most unflinching book of her long career, Graham explores how the human spirit, in the face of everything that threatens it, might navigate the rapids of extreme change. In these newly spare poems she enacts, with exquisite formal precision, how we might remain intact under conditions—ecological, political, technological—set to destroy what we've come to know as our world. Can we lose our humanity, these poems ask, Can it be taken from us, Will we surrender it without resistance? Extraordinary and haunting, Killing Spree reads like a survival manual guiding us deftly through the cataracts of a runaway climate, tipping-point violence, and out-of-control technology, into a terrain where a defiant, powerful imagination (and love) of the world reveals itself. Here is a poet truly at the height of her powers.

Jorie Graham is the author of sixteen collections of poems. Her poetry has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize (UK), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Nonino Prize, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She lives in Massachusetts and is Boylston Chair Emerita at Harvard University.

Graham is in conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes most of Montgomery County and a small part of Prince George's County. Congressman Raskin was sworn into his fifth Term at the start of the 119th Congress on January 6, 2025. Rep. Raskin was chosen by the Democratic Caucus to be the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary in the 119th Congress. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland, where he also served as the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years. He has authored several books, including the Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, the highly-acclaimed We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students, and the New York Times #1 best-seller Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy. Congressman Raskin is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and is a former editor of the Harvard Law Review.

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A searing exploration of American violence, interweaving memoir, history, and reportage to reveal the wound at the heart of our nation—and to offer hope that the country, and we, might be healed.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection, as America seemed to be falling apart, David Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. What resulted is The Savage Mind, the most personal and powerful work of his storied literary career.
How do we understand America, ourselves, and the impulses that seem intent on destroying both? Ranging from Treuer’s upbringing on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota to the experiences of his parents, a Jewish Holocaust refugee and the first American Indigenous woman judge, The Savage Mind reveals the terrifying essence of our nation: frontier violence, which has defined our country, our culture, and our very selves. The frontier, Treuer shows, was a site of epic, phantasmagoric bloodshed, initiated by white settlers but perpetuated by all of us. And after the geographic frontier closed in the late 19th century, it did not vanish—quite the opposite.

Today, Treuer explains, America’s frontier—and all its violent pathologies—has migrated overseas and into our hearts and minds. The atrocities in Gaza and the school shootings in the American heartland are bound together by this invisible filament—one that Treuer makes visible in The Savage Mind, and which he offers hope for weaving, once and for all, into a better cloth.

New York Times bestselling author David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, a Minnesota Book Prize winner, a California Book Prize winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at USC.

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As a child, Rodriguez wondered why he lived in a single cramped room with his family, where he was beaten often and never felt safe. But despite difficult circumstances, he always believed he was going to be a successful artist.
When he was in the ninth grade, his art teacher invited him to ride the New York City subway, with one destination in mind: the development of his craft, by drawing the commuters sitting across from him. A blank page in his sketchbook was something Rodriguez could control in an otherwise chaotic life.
In this astonishing memoir, he explains how his art, his grandmother, and his own relentless drive saved him from heart-wrenching circumstances and led him to redefine out-of-fashion realist portraiture as fresh and magical.
Rodriguez writes with rhythm, verve, and an artist’s POV, painting a vivid picture of his native Bronx, the tattoos and rooftop graffiti that mesmerized him as a kid, and the teachers who saw his potential and nourished it.
Painting regular people in all their complexity is Rodriguez’s gift and his offering to the world, an old-school act that has made him a new-school star. Work in Progress delivers Rodriguez’s most precise and moving portrait yet: of himself.

Devon Rodriguez is a Bronx-born portrait artist of Puerto Rican and Honduran descent. He rose to notoriety for drawing realistic portraits of commuters on the New York City subway system. He has also portrayed such luminaries as former President Biden, Oprah, and more. The most-followed visual artist on TikTok, he was a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. His work has been featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times. He was named a 2025 Time100 Creator and a Forbes Top Creator the same year. He lives in New York City.

Rodriguez is in conversation with Elizabeth Méndez Berry (She/Her), Vice President & Executive Editor One World. Elizabeth’s career has been led by curiosity, from her own award-winning journalism to her work as an editor and grantmaker. She started out as an assistant music editor at Vibe magazine where she wrote and edited music criticism; in his book Decoded, Jay-Z cited one of her essays as an inspiration for the line “I’m like Che Guevara with bling on, I’m complex / I never claimed to have wings on” in his iconic track “Public Service Announcement.” Before joining One World, she invested in the arts and journalism as a funder at the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She cofounded Critical Minded, an initiative that supports cultural criticism. At One World, she acquires nonfiction and works with authors including Yaba Blay, Eve L. Ewing, Jeneen Interlandi, Devon Rodriguez, Guadalupe Rosales, and Adam Serwer.

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Blockers. It wasn’t a compliment. In the new Washington, it was the worst thing you could be—especially if you worked in the federal government and wanted to keep your job. A Blocker was a holdover, an impediment, someone who didn't get the message—and, most of all, someone who didn't belong.

Michael Lewis found seven of them.

Blockers is the story of people who believed they had a calling, who were convinced they were doing something the country couldn’t do without, and then discovered they were no longer wanted. One kept Americans’ most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods, another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis.

There was also a security guard.

It should come as no surprise that the writer who made subprime mortgages gripping (The Big Short) and who turned baseball statistics into poetry (Moneyball) could transform the first two years of the second Trump administration into a thriller about federal employees. But he does.

And he does something else. He puts before us a clear question: If these public servants can’t survive in government today, then what does that say about us?

New York Times best-selling author Michael Lewis has published many books on subjects ranging from politics to Wall Street to sports. Lewis’s most recent book, the #1 New York Times bestseller Going Infinite, told the story of FTX’s collapse and the enigmatic founder at its center, Sam Bankman-Fried. More recently, Lewis edited Who Is Government?, an anthology by an all-star team of writers exploring the consequential work of government workers. Lewis is the creator and host of Apple’s #1-rated podcast Against the Rules, a searing look at what’s happened to fairness in American life through the lens of people who depend on public trust. He grew up in New Orleans and lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

It may be scant solace, but history will be particularly harsh to a subset of Trump enablers with a few key things in common: They have money and power. They represent intuitions that are central in determining whether America remains a free, functioning democracy or not. And they absolutely know better. History starts now.
In Profiles in Cowardice, Jacob Weisberg has written one of the first defining books of the Trump Era—how this pitch-black political moment happened, why so few resisted, and what it reveals about the character of American leadership.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and Big Tech. Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone, and Wall Street. Brad Karp, Paul, Weiss, and Big Law. Mitch McConnell and the United States Senate. Eight individuals in all, together forming an entwined network of power in America, and a new way to understand how authoritarianism can take root in an open society—not by overthrowing institutions, but by bending and bullying them into submission.

Jacob Weisberg is the author of books including Ronald Reagan (2016), The Bush Tragedy (2008), and In an Uncertain World (2003), co-written with former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin. A native of Chicago, he is the former longtime editor of Slate and the co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. He serves as Chair of The Committee to Protect Journalists and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Lewis and Weisberg are in conversation with Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is the founder and editor of The Weekly Dish, a site launched in 2000, and former editor of both Michael Lewis and Jacob Weisberg at The New Republic.

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The story that inspired the acclaimed motion picture Worth, told by the man behind the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a moving saga of national tragedy and healing.

Now with the author’s reflections on how today’s hyper-partisan America needs to unite to face our greatest challenges.
Just days after September 11, 2001, attorney Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by Congress to administer the federal 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a unique effort to compensate families victimized in the terror attacks. He was given an unlimited budget and total authority over how to spend it.

Feinberg soon found himself under attack and mired in controversy. Traumatized and angry, some families threatened to sue over awards they considered skimpy; others were insulted by the very idea that a dollar value could be placed on the lives of their loved ones. Feinberg spent three years meeting 9/11 survivors and families, hearing their stories and absorbing their grief.

Gradually, Feinberg earned the respect and support of the 9/11 families, over 97 percent of whom chose to participate in the fund rather than sue. What Is Life Worth? shares the lessons Feinberg learned about the power of compassion and the limits of any effort to place a value on human life.

Kenneth R. Feinberg has played a key role in resolving many of our nation’s most challenging and widely known disputes. He is best known for serving as the Special Master of the Federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001, in which he reached out to all who qualified to file a claim, evaluated applications, determined appropriate compensation, and disseminated awards. Mr. Feinberg shared his extraordinary experience in his book What Is Life Worth?, first published in 2005 by PublicAffairs, and in his follow-up book Who Gets What, published by PublicAffairs in 2012. Mr. Feinberg has been appointed to two presidential-level commissions because of his experience and expertise, and has had a distinguished teaching career as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Columbia University Law School, New York University Law School, and the University of Virginia Law School.

Feinberg is in conversation with Peter L.W. Osnos, the author of An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, the coauthor of Would You Believe . . . The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? and the editor of George Soros: A Life in Full. His most recent book is LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail. He is the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs and a former publisher of the Times Books imprint at Random House, where he was previously a senior editor and associate publisher. Prior to his career in book publishing, he spent eighteen years at The Washington Post, where he was a correspondent in Saigon, Moscow, and London and served as foreign editor and national editor. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Columbia School of Journalism, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He lives in Bethesda, MD.

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the untold story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington
“Chatelain teaches us how to tell fuller, truer stories. This is the model for recovering what we have been quick to forget.”—Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses
There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day's headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.
In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker, civil rights activist Rosa Parks, gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program; and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.
How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.

Marcia Chatelain is a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls (Duke University Press, 2015) and Franchise (Liveright, 2020), which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award, the Hagley Medal for Business History, and the Lawrence Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Chatelain is in conversation with Ashley Preston, an author and tenured Associate Professor of History at Howard University. Her past positions include serving as director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation-National Historic Landmark at Bethune-Cookman University while she also was an archives technician for the National Archives for Black Women’s History at the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House-National Historic Site. She is the author of Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida: Bringing Social Justice to the Sunshine State and Mary McLeod Bethune the Pan-Africanist. Dr. Preston's research interests focus on the activism of Black women during the early twentieth century and the ways in which they uplifted their communities, created institutions, and stood against systemic racism.

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The chilling and revelatory story of how Russia’s confrontation with the West went global.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced a rupture with the United States and Europe not seen since the Cold War. As a result, Russia refocused its entire state machinery on one purpose: To outlast the West.

Russia foreign policy analyst Hanna Notte uncovers how Russia reinvented itself, outmaneuvering sanctions, forging surprising alliances, charming the Global South, and sowing fear in Western societies. Putin is the one pulling the strings, but he is not the only player: Propagandists, diplomats, businessmen, and rogue agents have done Russia’s bidding. From civilian shelters to military bases, presidential palaces to tense borderlands, Notte chronicles the untold stories of those waging Russia’s battles—and of everyday people swept up in Putin’s agenda. Blending analysis with reportage from more than a dozen countries, We Shall Outlast Them paints a sweeping picture of Putin’s wartime adaptation and illuminates how Russia has fostered enduring appeal around the globe.

Hanna Notte is the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and has written about Russian foreign policy in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Foreign Affairs, among others. She lives in Berlin.

Notte is in conversation with Anton Troianovski, a New York Times reporter based in Washington, reporting on U.S. foreign relations and the impact of American policy on other countries. He works closely with his colleagues who cover the White House, the U.S. military and diplomacy to understand President Trump’s efforts to reshape the world order and how they are reverberating across the government.

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In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.

In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Harlem with her family.

Lee is in conversation with Clint Smith. Clint Smith is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book, Just Beneath the Soil (Knopf, May 2027). He is also the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021, and the bestseller, How the Word Is Passed (Adapted for Young Readers), with Sonja Cherry-Paul, (Little, Brown, 2025). He wrote the New York Times bestselling poetry collection Above Ground as well as the award-winning poetry collection Counting Descent. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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From Jennifer Welch, the host of the wildly popular “I’ve Had It” podcast and a trusted voice in new media, comes a piercing, incisive, no-holds-barred take on the rising threat of theocracy in America and a fresh vision for how we can take back our country.
As a progressive atheist from a Bible Belt red state, Jennifer Welch has a unique perspective on the intersection of religion and politics in America. She has seen how the far right has used religion across denominations to coalesce power, and how their messaging, particularly the Evangelical prosperity gospel, reinforces economic inequality.
In Not Today, Fascists, Welch explores:

• how America is moving not only toward fascism, but also theocracy;
• the current administration’s harmful platform and how it’s hurting everyday Americans;
• why the separation of church and state remains a fundamental principle of our country and the ways in which rogue actors are seeking to dismantle it;
• the role of Big Church and its economic and political sway over our government;
• how politicians on the left can create an effective platform and messaging on human decency, structural equality and a populist economics perspective to win elections

Not Today, Fascists will arm readers with the language and facts they need to discuss crucial politics issues, to win elections and to take back our country.

Jennifer Welch has spent the last twenty-five years designing dynamic, highly specialized commercial and residential interiors across the country in a broad range of styles. In addition to her design firm, Jennifer is the star of Bravo’s Sweet Home, which gives all-access insight into her multifaceted, fast-paced design business, and the cohost of the I’ve Had It podcast. A mother of two boys, Dylan and Roman, and partner to attorney and photographer Josh Welch, Jennifer understands the balance of family and career and is a vocal advocate for women empowerment in business.

Welch is in conversation with journalist Jim Acosta, host of “The Jim Acosta Show” and former Anchor and Chief White House Correspondent at CNN.

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At the funeral of Charles Maddox, Theo Brown hears testimonies about his dead best friend’ s full, rich, glamor-filled life— stories that make Theo wonder if he really knew Charles, and if Theo himself has really lived. Trying to make up for his thirty-seven humdrum years, eager to help Charles’ s grieving sister, and wanting to find out what happened to his friend, Theo leaves his native Washington, DC on a journey of discovery, and self-discovery, among Charles’ s circle in New York. Part psychological realism, part detective story, Let Us Go Then, You and I explores the question behind the question: What is the best way to live in this world?

Clifford Thompson’s previous books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays. His work has appeared in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. Thompson lives in Brooklyn.

Thompson is in conversation with David Nicholson, a former editor and book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World and author of Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City. The New York Times praised its “sensitivity and grace,” and the Los Angeles Times included it on a list of books that “show us where to find the real America.” It was also featured in Publisher’s Weekly as one of “7 Essential Washington, D.C., Books (That Aren’t About Politics).” Nicholson attended Haverford College before graduating from the University of the District of Columbia. He studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Nicholson has worked as a reporter in San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Dayton, Ohio. He lives in Vienna, Virginia, with his wife and son.

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https://politics-prose.com/book/9781963869910?ic_referral=DAJQdd197_ohEPz91DFW2qagv9uelpXW6tFdKOkguPwwMxqFhBZ9V3k3EULfmKR7A6UMtp-FfXsKfCg1WKPZgjVZ1PLvEF3dc1oUqgENx3UU9H-4dOSJV4l9B3gH-Z-B5mP4_Ms

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road comes the heart-wrenching journey of a family facing an unthinkable destiny, whose flawed genetic code might hold the long-sought key to a cure for dementia.
In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker’s superb follow-up to Hidden Valley Road (“Deeply compassionate and chilling,” wrote The Washington Post). This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking—shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility—and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish—and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too.
The Vanishing Family unfolds like a heartbreaking thriller as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this this family’s rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia—including the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful and redemptive, The Vanishing Family is an enthralling narrative about one family’s fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end.

Robert Kolker is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Hidden Valley Road, named an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, a New York Times Book Review Top 10 book of the year, a GQ Best Book of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century. His first book was Lost Girls, named a New York Times Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2013.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780385551038?ic_referral=nccgjOSL3MbVXHskXfdI_QoudBdGNQm5S5hl9jrPIyowM_JTM6Ph162-rq5RDQ8CWMo-9EuRh6jRfYb70gVtoOIHz8ZVMDnJx36j4KJ7s56QPWB2BucbTie4QqXfdYqKWPdvS4Y

An acclaimed reporter takes us on an unforgettable journey, capturing the human capacity for love and connection against all odds.
We live in an era defined by crisis—whether it be war and displacement, climate collapse, or growing inequality, and how the powerful profit from violence and exploitation. Celebrated foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the frontlines, uncovering some of the darkest moments of our time. Yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she’s witnessed the incredible goodness of regular people.
In This Is Also a Love Story, Hayden reexamines catastrophe through the love stories she has come across. She introduces us to a mother in northeast Nigeria who risks everything to save her daughter from forced marriage to Boko Haram militants, and to a group of Syrian women who have tirelessly searched for their missing spouses and children, while launching a call for justice. We meet a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and read letters from the bereaved to the dead, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan. Through these stories, which crisscross the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Ghana, Rwanda and Iraq, she challenges us to reconsider what it means to be alive on this planet today.
What if news was recounted through the prism of the actions and decisions people take for those they love? Would it become harder to dehumanize those who seem different to us? This Is Also a Love Story dares us to recognize how innate generosity and self-sacrifice can be found in even the most difficult of times, and—as a result—to question what might be needed to create a better world.

Sally Hayden is an Irish journalist focused on migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises. Sally’s work has been featured by The New York Times, the Irish Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian, CNN International, Al Jazeera, Time, BBC, and other outlets across the world. Sally’s first book My Fourth Time, We Drowned was the winner of the Orwell Prize and the Irish Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the New York Public Library’s Helene Bernstein Book Award for excellence in journalism.

Hayden is in conversation with James Palmer. Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and writes FP’s weekly China Brief newsletter. Palmer is the author of The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia and The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China. He won the Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing in 2003.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668034620?ic_referral=g-DnZF3CEqXPWzKLP7S48RZJnxV-UstroI_NEtK2fkowM0MNK13U1TsmTXmNXgXqWQFhtpGH1nCS2zb2rfBPAvqUJ1PftPUh3Rxd-udBpC6QPNavkWNP4Os4abqcf8jMcGvUAIA

10 portraits of Israelis from all backgrounds, depicting the war-torn landscape of recent Israeli history: complicated, polarized, lively, argumentative, and—increasingly—adrift.
Renowned journalist Ruth Margalit revisits 10 profiles of Israeli politicians, cultural figures, and iconoclasts spanning a decade of her reporting for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine to create a powerful mosaic of the clashing forces that have led to Israel’s current state.
To live in Israel today, Margalit writes, is to be either a whale or a Jonah—trying to make do in the belly of the whale. The profiles in this collection represent both: outsiders trying to make a life in a system designed against them, and insiders hatching plans and amassing power all while riding the twin waves of populism and jingoism.
Returning to these profiles from her current reality as a writer and mother living in Tel Aviv at a time of war, Margalit reexamines the texts in light of a transformed society and self, adding new updates and insights to journalistic portraits she has created over the course of a dozen years.
Incorporating perspectives of Israelis from all strata of society—Jews, Arabs, activists, artists, politicians, and academics alike—Margalit stitches an enlightening patchwork to help readers better understand the seemingly inscrutable politics of a nation in which so many have a deep and abiding interest.

Ruth Margalit is a Tel Aviv-based journalist and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Her writing regularly appears in the pages of The New Yorker, where she was a member of the editorial staff, and her book reviews and essays are frequently featured in the New York Review of Books. She has also written for the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, Slate, Bookforum, the Columbia Journalism Review, Haaretz, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tel Aviv University and has a master's degree from Columbia University's School of Journalism. Raised in Jerusalem, she lived in New York between 2010-2019, before moving back to Israel with her family. She is the author of a children's book in Hebrew (2025).

Margalit is in conversation with Celeste Marcus, the executive editor of Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, which she helped to found. Her biography of Chaim Soutine was published in October, 2025. She lives in Washington, DC.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781586424602?ic_referral=iO9bqcj8r1OG9sAwFuJQOaFKfSrDngORQpyzd4NjyH0wM_zEmOU_ImrNmCpWN8HDTV2R3y4wtPObyYQoQ1Q3JavJxbileMQ_3hG9lNicjj0rekbtZ7_rbo6Bq9JmV2MCHZWWaWk

It’s 1915. War rages in Europe while Armenians in the Ottoman Empire find themselves unfairly blamed for a major military defeat. Cooped up at home, fourteen-year-old Arakel tries to ignore rumors of arrests and beatings of Armenians by focusing on the journey with his two best friends, one Turkish and the other Armenian, on the Silk Road to China in two years, after high school, certain war will be over by then.
His life is torn apart when Turkish officials order nearly every Armenian into exile in the desert. Tormented by armed guards, Arakel doesn’t grasp what’s happening until they strip his family of food, water, and their meagre possessions and force them across the Euphrates River where bloated corpses float by. He has crossed into the land of the dead. In a desperate attempt to survive, he must reach out to people of different faiths and backgrounds–Bedouins, Kurds, Arab camel drivers, Turks, Germans, and even a wandering dervish, people he considers enemies, but can he trust them?
In a barbaric world, he confronts what lies deep within the human heart. With an elegance reaffirming our collective humanity, The Kaleidoscope of Destinyreveals the courage, hope, and ingenuity to survive the darkest of times during an overlooked part of history and will resonate in today’s challenges.

Before publishing her debut novel, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny, Sarah Ignatius worked for many years as a human rights lawyer and as a nonprofit executive director. She also taught immigration and asylum law at Boston College Law School for several years and is the co-author of Immigration Law and the Family. Previously, she authored a detailed report on the U.S. asylum system for Harvard Law School’s National Asylum Study Project, and her legal articles have appeared in the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Benders Immigration Bulletin, and Immigration Briefings. She has received recognition from the New England Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators and the National League of American Pen Women as well as Glimmer Train, and was selected as a Somerville Arts Council Literature Artist Fellow. She graduated from Stanford University and Georgetown University Law Center. She is half-Armenian and lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Ignatius is joined in conversation with David Ignatius, a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9798897473199?ic_referral=YJQrH61SxWH44YFp5_ZcygzBGeemEkqhwulptQiLrHEwM19-xns3nuZGaVrxIS9ypW_BANf_TJJWP5vVILWoCvmDeh4errMd5D6y3RZhM-ZMibU6FLp8umb-38w0dG9COC31W4w

A passionate and illuminating account of soul, the hard-won wisdom shepherded by Black people throughout generations

How did enslaved Africans turn America’s infamous failure into the greatest moral occasion of modern Western life? In this book, Christopher Freeburg answers that question with one word: soul. It was soul, Freeburg believes, which drove Black individuals and communities, grappling with horrific strife, to reimagine American life and equality in earnest.

Black cultural life contains a central and significant theme—a soul, or form of life—expressed in a variety of musical, religious, and political forms. Through the work and words of figures ranging from the poet Phillis Wheatley to President Barack Obama and musician Nina Simone to disco owner Jewel Thais-Williams, Freeburg shows how Black communities leaned time and again on soul and its four pillars: resonance, revelation, resilience, and transcendence. It is soul, what Freeburg calls a beautiful transaction between individual and community across time and place, that has allowed Black people over generations to transform feelings of defeat and alienation into moral courage and shared belonging.

Christopher Freeburg is the Presidential Humanities and Social Sciences Chair in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book was Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death.

Freeburg will be in conversation with Tamika Smith, the local host of All Things Considered on WAMU 88.5 and Consider This from WAMU.Tamika joined WAMU in 2014 as a part-time weekend host. She later joined WAMU full-time as a host and reporter for WAMU/DCist. She was named WAMU’s afternoon drive-time host in 2022.Tamika’s prior experience includes producing the nationally acclaimed Russ Parr Morning Show, and launching Question of the Day with Murray and Tamika, an award-winning interactive trivia game on Amazon Alexa.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780300264159?ic_referral=hlvdHe-UlhrFRqR6nJG0EKR8OOTlrbf4bV7hxotgGiUwM--AVZeXI_2o9TFDwXdlnlVo6n4uTlYfIxQVcmDLur2p05QaOFg1IYQk8ZhBrq0QUc2yxQTIr69b6ndCMKanFoK_RZs

An inspiring account of how the US government built a start-up development program to fight AIDS called PEPFAR, which saved more than twenty-six million lives and created a new blueprint for results-oriented American foreign aid.

In 2002, more than two million Africans died of AIDS. Militaries reported HIV infection rates of more than twenty-five percent. Nearly four in ten pregnant women in some countries were infected. But in 2003, to the surprise of the world, President George W. Bush created PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which became his signature legacy for doing good in his eight years in office. PEPFAR has saved more than twenty-six million lives, prevented HIV from being transmitted to nearly eight million infants during birth, stabilized governments, and built back economies in Africa. It has been arguably America’s most successful foreign assistance program in history.

How did it succeed? Lifeline tells the remarkable fast-paced story of how a small core of Americans and Africans built AIDS treatment programs from scratch in many countries—and how they faced down people who tried to stop them with grit and ingenuity. Based on interviews with more than 200 people—from President Bush and Dr. Anthony Fauci to local physicians and patients in small villages across Africa—Lifeline demonstrates indisputably the essence of American leadership and how America has, and still can, tackle the world’s greatest challenges and be a force for good in the world.w

John Donnelly spent more than a decade covering the politics of AIDS and America’s response to the pandemic for The Boston Globe. He lived for several years in South Africa and traveled the continent of Africa for The Globe immediately following PEPFAR’s launch. After his career in journalism, he became an adviser to the President of the World Bank and received a Bellagio residency from the Rockefeller Foundation to write this book. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Donnelly is joined in conversation with Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a Washington Correspondent for The New York Times, covering the intersection of health policy and politics. In nearly 30 years at The Times, she has also been a Congressional Correspondent, a White House Correspondent, a national political features writer, and a National Correspondent covering the mid-Atlantic region. Stolberg has written about HIV/ AIDS since the early 1990s, and covered PEPFAR since its creation. Stolberg is currently working on a history of public health and politics, to be published by Random House.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063483088?ic_referral=VyBS2E93_bxdlCr2mUHFSBF0NXA-Vwf8wh_B3dmMdgQwM6TOJUaWTSWgx13za7zieVEeTR31VKd_ZFbmb9i11sP1FsMATiTjvfb2kSqb_MHWQ_e-5jA-s72cElJx9HrH_oTbkpg

From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation
In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.
Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning—and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters’ strivings and struggles—to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice—reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character’s eyes and then another’s, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life.

At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of an age.

Anand Giridharadas is the New York Times bestselling author of The Persuaders, Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MS NOW. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Giridharadas is joined in conversation with Terry Moran, an award-winning journalist, writer, and broadcaster who spent nearly three decades at ABC News, reporting from around the world and across America. Today, Moran is an independent journalist and the founder of Real Patriotism, where he writes, reports, and hosts conversations about American politics, culture, and civic life. His recent work has taken him back on the road, reporting from communities across the country and listening to Americans far from the political stages and studios of Washington.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593802014?ic_referral=aK7xGBBHKFFVQOyQ6DFhs7_83jlGFf7AloFBrquCcNswM32KCjSaCVGp7C9TeDZcIGTb6ef0G0oAHkg95d9M2Deyn22nogqD9MMZoSooXG3KOTXYKdj8dhJ8Y4_x9NYDY20VVmw

“I can’t teach you, but I can show you.” With these words, Kentucky balladeer Doc Hopkins shared his musical knowledge with a willing student, summoning an independent streak deeply embedded in the American character. His words capture the informal creativity and colloquial practice that marks folk tradition as it extends from the countryside to the city and back again.
Stephen Wade recounts creators and conservators like Doc Hopkins, many of them born in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. The figures include Sid Harkreader, Kirk McGee, Ola Belle Reed, Jewel Fagan Haynes, Cordell and Olean Kemp, Bill Monroe, Helen Marie Rowe, Virgil and Mabel Anderson, Joe and Odell Thompson, John Jackson, Huddie Ledbetter, Uncle Dave Macon, Dorris Macon, Raeburn Flerlage, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Jim Schwall, Archie Green, Lloyd Lewis, Thaddeus Willingham, Jack Conroy, and Fleming Brown. As Will Keys, another of the musicians featured here, once told the author about his way of playing, it’s “AWYC, Any Way You Can.” These individuals and their stories demonstrate how folklore offers a way of understanding the world.
Thoughtfully written, filled with original research, and abundantly illustrated with both color and black and white photography, Our Common Life illuminates the truth that creative freedom within informal tradition, fundamental to the artists and their processes, speaks to a resourcefulness inscribed in the nation’s founding charter and expressed in its common life.

Stephen Wade is musician, author, and a Grammy-nominated recording artist best known for his long running stage performances of Banjo Dancing and On the Way Home. He is the author of the award-winning book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience.

Wade is in conversation with Tom Cole, who studied comparative literature at Grinnell College, where he began his radio career at 10-watt KDIC. He went on to work overnights as a board operator at WAMU-FM while working afternoons at Voice of America, eventually becoming production manager at WAMU. He finally landed at NPR, where he spent 33 years as an editor and producer on the Arts & Culture Desk in the News Division. For the past 49+ years, he has also hosted the Sunday morning program, G-Strings, for WPFW-FM.

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