To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven. In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers. In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali. Over the past twenty years, journalist Joshua Hammer visited Timbuktu numerous times and is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Haidara’s heroic and ultimately successful effort to outwit Al Qaeda and preserve Mali’s—and the world’s—literary patrimony. Hammer explores the city’s manuscript heritage and offers never-before-reported details about the militants’ march into northwest Africa. But above all, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is an inspiring account of the victory of art and literature over extremism.

Translated by Amanda De Lisio and Thayane Brêtas As long as feminism has existed as a movement in Brazil, sex workers have taken to the streets in solidarity—despite the fact that mainstream feminist discourse positions sex work, and the “putas” who enact it, as detrimental to women’s rights. In Putafeminista, activist and sex worker Monique Prada calls for feminists to retire this hypocrisy and embrace putafeminism: a working class women’s movement that rejects whorephobia and its classist, colonial dimensions. Drawing on her firsthand experiences with sex work and movement building, Prada argues for the validity of sex work as feminist labor and tracks the innovations introduced by Brazilian sex workers to feminist internet discourse, street actions, and governmental advocacy. For readers seeking the glimmers of tomorrow’s feminism, Prada places that future with putafeminists, naming the brothel a “final frontier” for all women to gather, reform, and revolt.

Hache Pueyo returns after But Not Too Bold with her new novella Cabaret in Flames, where Interview with the Vampire meets Certain Dark Things in an alternate-Brazil where brutal flesh-hungering Guls stalk the night streets and manipulate the government from their glittering cabaretGuls can be brutal. Few know this better than Ariadne, who lost half her body to their appetites, but their brutality is a predictable constant amid Brazil’s political chaos. Now, she treats them in the specialized clinic she inherited from Erik Yurkov—the mentor who rescued her as a child, trained her in medicine, built her prostheses, and disappeared without a trace.Ariadne’s routine is disturbed when Quaint knocks on her door: a charming, tattooed gul claiming to be Erik’s oldest friend. Quaint suspects foul play in Erik’s disappearance, and they soon discover Erik sought asylum at Cabaré, an infamous club in Rio de Janeiro frequented by the gul elite.Together, Ariadne and Quaint will unravel the conspiracy behind their friend’s disappearance, navigate the labyrinthine world of Ariadne’s memories, and discover what Erik means to them—and what they are starting to mean to each other.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever. Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force reminiscent of early Anne Rice will win Due a new legion of fans.

Vampires and vaqueros face off on the Texas-Mexico border in this supernatural western from the author of The Hacienda. As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters—her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead. Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago. Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind. When the United States attacks Mexico in 1846, the two are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Néstor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros. But the shock of their reunion—and Nena’s rage at Néstor for seemingly abandoning her long ago—is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh. And unless Nena and Néstor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn.

In the vein of The Pisces and The Vegetarian, Chlorine is a debut novel that blurs the line between a literary coming-of-age narrative and a dark unsettling horror tale, told from an adult perspective on the trials and tribulations of growing up in a society that puts pressure on young women and their bodies... a powerful, relevant novel of immigration, sapphic longing, and fierce, defiant becoming.Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach, her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life. But these are human concerns. These are the concerns of those confined to land, those with legs. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep, of the oceans and the rivers. Ones that called sailors to their doom. Ones that dragged them down and drowned them. Ones that feasted on their flesh. Ones of the creature that she's always longed to become: mermaid. Ren aches to be in the water. She dreams of the scent of chlorine--the feel of it on her skin. And she will do anything she can to make a life for herself where she can be free. No matter the pain. No matter what anyone else thinks. No matter how much blood she has to spill.

Trans life past, present and future is explored in this kaleidoscopic follow-up to the Women's Prize-nominated Detransition, Baby Deep in the forest, a group of restless lumberjacks working an illegal logging outfit plan a winter dance that some will volunteer to attend as women; the broadest, strongest axeman finds himself caught in a rivalry with a pretty, young jack that culminates in jealousy, betrayal and an astonishing spectacle of transition. Meanwhile, in other times and places, the gender apocalypse is brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend; an illicit boarding-school romance surfaces intrigue and cruelty; and a Las Vegas party weekend turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between a thrilling mystery man or a veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood. In this quartet of tales, Torrey Peters' keen eye for the rough edges of desire reveals fresh possibilities. Acidly funny, boldly inventive and breathtaking in scope, Stag Dance provokes and unsettles, inspires and delights.

Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions--what it means to live and date under white supremacy, to never know if one is loved or fetishized, how to navigate fierce desires and tectonic heartbreak through the rise and eventual eruption of a first queer love."When two galaxies stray too near each other, the attraction between them can be so strong that the galaxies latch on and never let go. Sometimes the pull triggers head-on wrecks between stars--galactic collisions--throwing bodies out of orbit, seamlessly into space. Sometimes the attraction only creates a giant black hole, making something whole into a kind of missing." In vivid, tensile prose, DYKE (GEOLOGY) subverts the flat, neutral language of scientific journals to explore what it means to understand the Earth as something queer, volatile, and disruptive.

A humorous, profound debut memoir about chronic pain, accessibility, and young adulthood, by an acclaimed essayist and cartoonist.In 2021, Gabrielle Drolet developed a condition that made her unable to use her hands. It only worsened over time, and as a writer and artist, she had to learn new ways of creating and expressing herself. The experience completely changed her life and her outlook.    Look Ma, No Hands explores both the difficulty and the humour of developing chronic and life-altering pain in her twenties. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of her life touched by her how she learned to write when she couldn’t type; how she learned to manage the most mundane daily tasks. She moves cities and as her work as a writer and cartoonist builds has to navigate different byzantine health systems without the privilege or security of having a family doctor, even as she moves into her new apartment and embarks on first dates. And she does all of this with the most wonderful sense of the absurd.    Look Ma, No Hands is utterly charming and shares profound reflections on life’s curveballs, and explores how, in Drolet’s words, “you can live a full—even funny—life in a disabled body.”

A stirring meditation on Black performance in America from the New York Times bestselling author of Go Ahead in the Rain At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.

A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this daring, provocative, and radically hopeful memoir. When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher--her female teacher--she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can't yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya? From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own--ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant. This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya's childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one's own life.

A revolutionary story of empowerment and redemption, Like a Bird is the highly anticipated debut novel from Fariha Roisin, author of the poetry collection How to Cure A Ghost One of Vogue 's Most Anticipated Books of the Fall Taylia Chatterjee has never known love, and certainly has never felt it for herself. Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with her older sister Alyssa, their parents were both overbearing and emotionally distant, and despite idyllic summers in the Catskills, and gatherings with glamorous family friends, there is a sadness that emanates from the Chatterjee residence, a deep well of sorrow stemming from the racism of American society. After a violent sexual assault, Taylia is disowned by her parents and suddenly forced to move out. As Taylia looks to the city, the ghost of her Indian grandmother dadi-ma is always one step ahead, while another more troubling ghost chases after her. Determined to have the courage to confront the pain that her family can't face, Taylia finds work at a neighborhood cafe owned by single mother and spiritualist, Kat. Taylia quickly builds a constellation of friends and lovers on her own,daring herself to be open to new experiences, even as they call into question what she thought she knew about the past. Taylia's story is about survival, coming to terms with her past and looking forward to a future she never felt she was allowed to claim. Writing this for eighteen years, poet and activist Fariha Roisin's debut novel is an intense, provocative, and emotionally profound portrait of an inner life in turmoil and the redemptive power of community and love.

From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 (Time)"A story about aspiration and belonging that is as universal as it is profound.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing "A gift to anyone interested in American history. I couldn't stop turning pages."—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown "What history should be--richly detailed, authoritative, and compelling."—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower MoonStrangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan­––Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy.    Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country’s history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late-1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals.  At the book’s heart is a shameful chapter of American the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country’s first undocumented hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled.    In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer’s style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.

Translated by Amanda De Lisio and Thayane Brêtas As long as feminism has existed as a movement in Brazil, sex workers have taken to the streets in solidarity—despite the fact that mainstream feminist discourse positions sex work, and the “putas” who enact it, as detrimental to women’s rights. In Putafeminista, activist and sex worker Monique Prada calls for feminists to retire this hypocrisy and embrace putafeminism: a working class women’s movement that rejects whorephobia and its classist, colonial dimensions. Drawing on her firsthand experiences with sex work and movement building, Prada argues for the validity of sex work as feminist labor and tracks the innovations introduced by Brazilian sex workers to feminist internet discourse, street actions, and governmental advocacy. For readers seeking the glimmers of tomorrow’s feminism, Prada places that future with putafeminists, naming the brothel a “final frontier” for all women to gather, reform, and revolt.

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable. Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.