An explosive account of how America’s shadow system of justice is purposefully designed to ensnare and criminalize innocent Black children—from an award-winning sociologistWrongful convictions have long been viewed as rare exceptions to an otherwise well-oiled criminal justice machine. But after years spent investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago's Cook County, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve began to suspect otherwise. When she discovered hundreds of cases indicting innocent Black youth of crimes they didn’t commit, she realized that wrongful convictions were more than a set of anomalies. Arresting and incarcerating these kids was the point—the crime would be tailored to fit.In a suspenseful narrative account based on hundreds of interviews, media analysis, archival research, and hidden documents, Gonzalez Van Cleve presents a groundbreaking “howdunnit,” illustrating how this shadow system operates. The police, informed by assumptions of Black guilt, find a “criminal,” and create a narrative to pin him to the case they aim to close. They routinely coerce confessions, bury evidence, and persuade witnesses to lie.Lee Hester, a disabled fourteen-year-old boy, is branded a “super predator” and convicted for killing his teacher; Romarr Gipson is called a “threat to public safety” at seven years old and charged with a murder that is physically impossible for him to commit. In the cases of the Central Park Five, Roscetti Four, and the Dixmoor Five, groups of boys are characterized as “wolf packs” to make their behavior seem sinister.These “crime fictions,” predicated on enduring racist myths, often defy logic and even DNA evidence. Nevertheless, they are actively produced, institutionalized by police, enshrined in our legal records by the courts, and propped up by media coverage. While injustice perpetuated by police has been more widely reported on in the past twenty years, nothing comes close to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s A systematic account of the secret, far-reaching bureaucracy built to sustain this shadow system of justice.  By placing the lost boys at the center of their own story, what emerges is a historical lineage of wrongful convictions, and a powerful indictment of the culture that so willingly places faith in the police’s promise to keep us safe.

One spring morning, a stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He doesn’t explain much about where he came from or why he’s there—but when he visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the people of Golden hang on the walls, he begins purchasing them, one at a time, and giving each portrait to the person depicted. In exchange, he asks only for the person’s story. And so portrait by portrait, person by person, secrets are revealed, regrets are shared, and ordinary lives are profoundly altered. A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is an unforgettable novel about the power of generosity, the importance of connection, and the quiet miracles that happen when we choose kindness and wonder.

From the Haitian-style “shotgun” houses of the 19th century to the lavish high-rises of the 21st century, a walk through the streets of America’s neighborhoods that reveals the rich history—and future—of urban housing The Philadelphia row house. The New York tenement. The Boston triple-decker. Every American city has its own iconic housing style, structures that have been home to generations of families and are symbols of identity and pride. Max Podemski, an urban planner for the city of Los Angeles and lifelong architecture buff, has spent his career in and around these buildings. Deftly combining his years of experience with extensive research, Podemski walks the reader through the history of our dwelling spaces—and offers a blueprint for how time-tested urban planning models can help us build the homes the United States so desperately needs. In A Paradise of Small Houses , Podemski charts how these dwellings have evolved over the centuries according to the geography, climate, population, and culture of each city. He introduces the reader to styles like Chicago’s prefabricated workers cottages and LA’s car-friendly dingbats, illuminating the human stories behind each city’s iconic housing type. Through it all, Podemski interrogates the American values that have equated home ownership with success and led to the US housing crisis, asking, “How can we look to the past to build the homes, neighborhoods, and cities of the future that our communities deserve?”

How the Word Is Passed meets Braiding Sweetgrass in a cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery, told through the stories of long-lived trees. The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely. In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the way seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.

This Everyman’s Library edition–containing in one volume all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso–includes an introduction by Nobel Prize—winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli’s marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations. Translated in this edition by Allen Mandelbaum, The Divine Comedy begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity. Mandelbaum’s astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets.

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer. Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.” “Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today. With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.