From Pitchfork and Guardian contributor Dean Van Nguyen comes a revelatory history of Tupac beyond his musical legend, as a radical son of the Black Panther Party whose political legacy still resonates today.Before his murder at 25, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the preeminent storyteller of the 90s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. He recorded no fewer than 10 platinum albums, starred in major films, and became an activist and political hero known the world over. In this cultural history, journalist Van Nguyen reckons with Tupac’s coming of age, fame, and cultural capital, and how the political machinations that shaped him as a boy have since buoyed his legacy as a revolutionary following the George Floyd uprising. Words for My Comrades engages—crucially—with the influence of Tupac’s mother, Afeni, whose role in the Black Panther Party and dedication to dismantling American imperialism and police brutality informed Tupac’s art. Tupac’s childhood as a son of the Panthers, coupled with the influence of his step-father’s Marxist beliefs, became his own riveting code of ethics that helped listeners reckon with America’s inherent injustices.Using oral histories from conversations with the people who shaped Tupac’s life and career, many of whom were interviewed for the first time here—from Panther elder Aaron Dixon, to music video director Stephen Ashley Blake, to friends and contemporaries of Tupac’s mother—Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history, and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics.Van Nguyen reveals how Tupac and Afeni each championed the disenfranchised in distinct ways, and how their mother-son bond charts a narrative of the last fifty years of revolutionary Black American politics. Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture, and how America produced two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries.

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation. Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial. Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation. How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

The Good Life Elsewhere is a very funny book. It is also a very sad one. Moldovan writer Vladimir Lorchenkov tells the story of a group of villagers and their tragicomic efforts, against all odds and at any cost, to emigrate from Europe’s most impoverished nation to Italy for work. The Good Life Elsewhere aims to present the complexity of a new Europe, where allegiances shift but memories are rooted in place. The book integrates small-scale human follies with strategic partnerships, unification plans, and the Soviet legacies that still hang over the former Eastern Bloc. Lorchenkov addresses the vexing question of what to do when many formerly pro-Soviet/pro-Russia countries want to link arms with their Western European brethren. In this uproarious tale, an Orthodox priest is deserted by his wife for an art-dealing atheist; a mechanic redesigns his tractor for travel by air and sea; thousands of villagers take to the road on a modern-day religious crusade to make it to the promised land of Italy; meanwhile, politicians remain politicians. Like many great satirists from Voltaire to Gogol to Vonnegut, Lorchenkov makes use of the grotesque to both horrify us and help us laugh. It is not often that stories from forgotten countries such as Moldova reach us in the English-speaking world. A country where 25 percent of its population works abroad, where remittances make up nearly 40 percent of the GDP, where alcohol consumption per capita is the highest in the world, and which has the lowest per capita income in all of Europe – this is a country that surely has its problems. But, as Lorchenkov vividly shows, it’s a country whose residents don’t easily give up. Russian critics have praised Lorchenkov’s work, calling this novel “a bleeding, wild work, grotesque in every twist of its plot and in every character, written brightly, bitterly, humorously, and – paradoxically, as we’re dealing with the grotesque – honestly.” In The Good Life Elsewhere, Vladimir Lorchenkov shows himself to be a fearless critic, an enduring optimist, and a master stylist. And he does it all “in vivid colors, with a pamphleteer’s spite, and a good-humored smile.”