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Celebrate Hispanic and Latinx Heritage Month Sept. 15 - Oct. 15
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Visitations: Poems
by Julia Alvarez
In these poems, Alvarez traces her life gently, a fingertip following lines on a page, through memories of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, a dictatorship dramatically survived, family and sofrito, tias and the sisters who forged her, her move to America and overcoming English, the search for mental health and beauty, redemption and success. We meet her grandchild and her mother, her lovers and the homes where she grew up and into the formidable writer read in thousands of classrooms across America today. In these poems, her wisdom is as clear and beautiful as the light that shines through crystal and yet grounded through form and the substance of self-knowing.
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Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys
by Mariana Enriquez
Combining travel, history, and personal reflection, this unconventional memoir follows a writer through cemeteries across four continents as she explores their history and architecture as well as their emotional resonance, revealing how these spaces mirror the living world and shape her own literary perspective.
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Migrant Heart: Essays about Things I Can't Forget
by Reyna Grande
An ambitious memoir in essays by beloved bestselling author Reyna Grande that illuminates the hidden cost of the American Dream and the complex journey of healing that follows survival. What is the true power of stories? Can they heal the jagged edges of a traumatic childhood? Is the cost of telling the story worth the price of the cure? With her signature blend of sophistication and raw honesty, Grande interrogates how living between two nations, two languages, and two identities has shaped the woman, mother, and writer she has become. Moving from the legacy of violence in her hometown of Iguala, Mexico, to a bittersweet family vacation in Europe spent reconciling her own impoverished past with her children's world of abundance, she uncovers startling truths about the nature of survival. Whether being racially profiled in the Arizona borderlands or finding unexpected wisdom from the slugs in her garden, Grande unflinchingly asks: How do we bridge the gap between who we were and who we have become? How do we turn pain into power? When memory threatens to define us, how can we use story to heal while still honoring our boundaries? Migrant Heart is a powerful testament to Grande's role as a storyteller and cultural witness. It expands our understanding of life in the United States and the complex people who cross and live within its borders. It is an essential read for the seekers, the dreamers, and anyone who believes in the enduring, transformative power of finding one's voice.
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My Side of the River: A Memoir
by Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
Exploring separation, generational trauma and the toll of the American dream, the author recounts what happened when, at 15, her parents were forced back to Mexico, leaving her and her brother to fend for themselves as underage children affected by broken immigration laws.
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Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth
by Daisy Hernández
In this one-of-a-kind book, Daisy Hernandez fiercely interrogates one of the most complicated subjects of contemporary life and politics: citizenship. Braiding memoir, history, and cultural criticism, she exposes the truths and lies of how we define ourselves as a country and a people. Turning to her own family's stories--her mother arrived from Colombia, while her father was a political refugee from Castro's Cuba--Hernandez shows how the very idea of citizenship is a myth, one of the stories we tell ourselves about the American soul and psyche. Reframing our understanding of what it means to be an American, Citizenship is an urgent and necessary account of the laws, customs, and language we use to include and exclude, especially those who come from Latin America. With her scholar's mind and memoirist's gift for narrative, Hern ndez weaves a story both personal and national, while reckoning with our country's ongoing debate about who belongs and providing fresh ways of thinking about citizenship. At once bracing, fearless, and tender, Citizenship is a powerful portrait of one family's experiences in the borderlands of citizenship and an honest illumination of the country in which we live.
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Dreaming of Home: How We Turn Fear into Pride, Power, and Real Change
by Cristina Jimenez
The award-winning community organizer chronicles her life as ab undocumented immigrant in New York City facing systemic racism and community challenges while discovering her purpose in social justice and reimagining the concept of home amid societal upheaval.
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El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory
by Jazmine Ulloa
El Paso has been called the Ellis Island of America's southern border, a mountain pass cum border town cum bifurcated metropolis where past meets future, and disadvantage meets opportunity, or so the promise goes. El Paso is an extraordinary, can't-look-away reported history; it uses deep research and dozens of new interviews to blow away the myth of this place, where Mexico's Juarez and America's El Paso intertwine. It charts the history of El Paso through five families. From the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican Repatriation, to the shifting immigration laws under Reagan and Trump and the violence and bloodshed brought on by the drug war, El Paso captures a place often misunderstood or forgotten by the rest of the country, and the world. Ulloa draws upon meticulous research and reporting and stunning historical detail to craft the intimate narratives of an unforgettable cast of characters.
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Cooking the Borderlands: Spice and Smoke Between Mexico and the States
by Claudette Zepeda
The Mexican American border has been an inflamed political focal point within the US; at the same time, Mexican food has long been the most popular ethnic cuisine in America. This is a story of a personal and culinary identity that formed betwixt two cultures, told through recipes, anecdotes, and an irreverent sense of humor. Borderlands details the Mexican dishes Claudette grew up eating and loves, their American counterparts, and how the fluidity and flexibility between the two nations shows us a way of being in the world. With her sophisticated, first-hand perspective of the Mexican American border, immigration, and the feet-in-many-worlds attitude of Border Kid culture, Claudette shines a human light on the imaginary line stretching from California through Texas and shows how vital this place is in American culture. Includes more than 100 vibrant, flavor-packed recipes from Top Chef star, Iron Chef Mexico finalist, and Tijuana-San Diego border kid Claudette Zepeda.
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Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
by Pamela Colloff
For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises he married nine women--some at the same time. When Skalnik got caught, as he invariably did, he would run a different con. Locked up with other men awaiting trial, he claimed they confessed their crimes to him. Then he peddled those stories to prosecutors. In Pinellas County, Florida, he became a frequent witness for the state, thinking nothing of exaggerating men's wrongdoing or implicating the innocent to help prosecutors win convictions. In 1985, Jim Dailey, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran, was implicated in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County Jail with Skalnik. No forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing, but Skalnik's account of his confession helped put Dailey on death row. Skalnik, meanwhile, walked free. More than three decades later, after another man took responsibility for the killing, Pamela Colloff, reporting for the New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, visited Skalnik and asked him if he would recant his testimony. He refused. By then, Skalnik had caused untold damage: to the women and girls he exploited, to the dozens of men he helped imprison, and to Jim Dailey, who went on to receive an execution date. Pamela Colloff spins a dark tale of a remorseless and brilliant liar made lethal by a system more concerned with winning convictions than finding the truth.
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The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
by Cal Flyn
From the blacksand beaches of Iceland, to river crossings deep in the Amazon jungle, to the barren beauty of Antarctica, wildernesses make up some of the world's more alluring natural landscapes. But what is a wilderness, really? It is a powerful, ancient concept, lying at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. For thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from modern life. More recently these “pristine” places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans. The Savage Landscape takes us into these breathtaking wilds--deep into dark forests, to the tops of mountains, and into the hearts of deserts--asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.
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The Others: Ufos, Ai, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny
by D. W. Pasulka
Author and religious studies scholar D. W. Pasulka uncovers a hidden history of alleged contact between human and nonhuman intelligences--some framed as angels, others as UFOs/UAP--interwoven with the rise of artificial intelligence and the dream of immortality. Pasulka examines the science of life extension and the beliefs of people who have experiences of UFOs. She unveils a hidden architecture of belief and influence--one in which human consciousness is being reimagined and extended. Pasulka begins the book with a fascinating and unexpected historical origin story. In the early twentieth century, a censured Catholic visionary predicted that humanity would soon encounter a new form of intelligence--one that would appear alien but was something far stranger. By the mid-twentieth century, other Catholic mystics and science fiction visionaries, echoed similar prophecies, naming the twenty-first century as the critical threshold . . . and we are now at that unparalleled point in human history. It's time for The Others. Drawing on first-person interviews, suppressed histories, and access to insiders in science and tech, The Others explores a startling new terrain: where the sacred meets the synthetic, and where the next phase of human evolution may already be underway.
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Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate
by Roopika Risam
With our earliest tools like ancient cave markings and knotted strings, to colonial record-keeping and the algorithmic state, Data Empire reveals how data has always been the seed of power: a technology of control that has shaped civilizations and upheld empires. Empire was never just about weapons or ships. It was built on collecting information on us, to rule us. Both a sweeping history and a sharp critique, Data Empire is a call to recognize the power data holds--and to imagine what resistance looks like in an age defined by it. In looking at the history of data, readers will understand: Data made civilization possible: Long before algorithms and AI, systems of counting, recording, and organizing information enabled everything from agriculture to taxation. From clay tablets in Mesopotamia to colonial censuses to modern databases, data determines who is visible, who is legible, and who can be governed. The modern data state was built in moments of crisis: In the twentieth century, governments became vast information-processing systems. Today's digital systems inherit the logics of earlier recordkeeping regimes, including those shaped by colonialism, racial classification, and forms of government that extract from land and from populations. The biases we see in algorithms are not new but continuations of a long history. We are living through a transformation in who controls data--and therefore power: For most of history, data infrastructures were largely state-driven. Today, they are increasingly owned and operated by private corporations, even as they structure public life. This shift raises urgent questions about accountability, sovereignty, and the future of public life.
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The Everest Mystery: Sandy Irvine, George Mallory, and the Truth Still Buried on Everest
by Julie Summers
There is no mystery more compelling in the history of mountaineering than the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine close to the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924. Over 100 years after they were last seen 'going strong for the top, ' the question of exactly what happened to them on that fateful day has not been answered. George Mallory's frozen remains were discovered in 1999. But in September 2024, a climber found an old boot lying out in the open on the Central Rongbuk Glacier on Mount Everest, several miles from where Mallory lay. The boot contained a foot, and a sock bearing a nametape spelled out in red: A.C. IRVINE. Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit--becoming the first to do so--or did they perish while ascending? What happened to the camera that Irvine may have carried, which would have documented their climb? Written by Julie Summers, Sandy Irvine's great-niece, and Jochen Hemmleb, the world's leading authority on the Mallory and Irvine Everest expedition, The Everest Mystery explores the life of Sandy Irvine, his relationship with George Mallory, and the many theories about what happened to them so close to the summit of Mount Everest. Above all, it restores Sandy Irvine to his rightful place in the great mystery of Everest 1924.
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Blizzard of Lies: Karen Read, John O'Keefe, and the Shocking Unsolved Murder in Cop Town, USA
by Dave Wedge
In January 2022, a Boston police officer turned up dead in the snow, seemingly a victim of a simple hit-and-run. But Officer John O'Keefe's death kicked off a scandalous whodunit that invited federal scrutiny and triggered nationwide outrage. The explosive story of O'Keefe's death, and the subsequent accusation and trial of his girlfriend Karen Read, ignited one of the most high-profile true crime mysteries in decades. The apparently open-and-shut manslaughter case quickly devolved into a chaotic mixture of lies, institutional corruption, and police cover-ups that threw the Massachusetts law enforcement scene into turmoil. And Read's 2025 acquittal left O'Keefe's death an unresolved mystery, with more questions than answers. With dramatic twists including a rogue journalist, a mistrial, and polarizing public protests--along with revelations that called several other murder cases into question--Blizzard of Lies is a Boston-area veteran reporter's detailed and immersive account of one of the most controversial crime stories of his career. Featuring interviews with people on both sides of the case, including law enforcement, Read and her legal team, and the O'Keefe family, investigative journalist Dave Wedge shares inside stories and new details on: John O'Keefe's turbulent relationship with Karen Read. Evidence excluded from the courtroom Additional cases now in jeopardy because of misconduct uncovered during Read's trial. Heroic acts from O'Keefe's policing career. The O'Keefe family's civil suit and ongoing pursuit of the truth.
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