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<\/a>Bad Indians Book Club : Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Patty Krawec, foreword by Omar El Akkad<\/p>\nIn this powerful reframing of the stories that make us, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec leads us into the borderlands of history, science, memoir, and fiction to ask: What worlds do books written by marginalized people describe and invite us to inhabit?<\/em><\/p>\n When a friend asked what books could help them understand Indigenous lives, Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin, gave them a list. This list became a book club and then a podcast about a year of Indigenous reading, and then this book. The writers in Bad Indians Book Club refuse to let dominant stories displace their own and resist the way wemitigoozhiwag–European settlers–craft the prevailing narrative and decide who they are.<\/em><\/p>\n In Bad Indians Book Club, we examine works about history, science, and gender as well as fiction, all written from the perspective of “Bad Indians”–marginalized writers whose refusal to comply with dominant narratives opens up new worlds. Interlacing chapters with short stories about Deer Woman, who is on her own journey to decide who she is, Krawec leads us into a place of wisdom and medicine where the stories of marginalized writers help us imagine other ways of seeing the world. As Krawec did for her friend, she recommends a list of books to fill in the gaps on our own bookshelves and in our understanding.<\/em><\/p>\n Becoming Kin, which novelist Omar El Akkad called a “searing spear of light,” led readers to talk back to the histories they had received. Now, in Bad Indians Book Club comes a potent challenge to all the stories settler colonialism tells–stories that erase and appropriate, deny and deflect. Following Deer Woman, who is shaped by the profuse artistry of Krawec, we enter the multiple worlds Indigenous and other subaltern stories create. Together we venture to the edges of worlds waiting to be born.<\/em> – Broadleaf Books<\/p>\n Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work.<\/em><\/p>\n Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer\u2019s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin\u2019s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin\u2019s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.<\/em><\/p>\n Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships\u2014geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic\u2014and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer\u2019s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.<\/em> – Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect \u201cLife Ruiners\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison\u2019s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah\u2019s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?<\/em><\/p>\n Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.<\/em> – Random House<\/p>\n Raised by scientifically minded parents, Margaret Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec: a vast playground for her entomologist father and independent, resourceful mother. It was an unfettered and nomadic childhood, sometimes isolated but also thrilling and beautiful.<\/em><\/p>\n From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking key moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel school year that would become Cat\u2019s Eye to the unease of 1980s Berlin, where she began The Handmaid\u2019s Tale. In pages alive with the natural world, reading and books, major political turning points, and her lifelong love for the charismatic writer Graeme Gibson, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood stars, and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.<\/em><\/p>\n As she explores her past, Atwood reveals more and more about her writing, the connections between real life and art\u2014and the workings of one of our very greatest imaginations.<\/em> – Doubleday<\/p>\n For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the \u201cCIA book program,\u201d which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.<\/em><\/p>\n From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden\u2019s \u201cbook club\u201d secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers\u2019 luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where they would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden\u2019s texts that dissidents began to reproduce them in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed.<\/em><\/p>\n Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom\u2014people like Miros\u0142aw Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.<\/em> – Random House<\/p>\n The life and times of literary pioneer and queer icon Margaret C. Anderson, who risked everything to be the first to publish James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses in America. Perfect for fans of The Editor, Flapper, and Nasty Women.<\/em><\/p>\n Already under fire for publishing the literary avant-garde into a world not ready for it, Margaret C. Anderson\u2019s cutting-edge magazine The Little Review was a bastion of progressive politics and boundary-pushing writing from then-unknowns like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. And as its publisher, Anderson was a target. From Chicago to New York and Paris, this fearless agitator helmed a woman-led publication that pushed American culture forward and challenged the sensibilities of early 20th century Americans dismayed by its salacious writing and advocacy for supposed extremism like women\u2019s suffrage, access to birth control, and LBGTQ rights.<\/em><\/p>\n But then it went too far. In 1921, Anderson found herself on trial and labeled \u201ca danger to the minds of young girls\u201d by a government seeking to shut her down. Guilty of having serialized James Joyce\u2019s masterpiece Ulysses in her magazine, Anderson was now not just a publisher but also a scapegoat for regressives seeking to impose their will on a world on the brink of modernization.<\/em><\/p>\n Author, journalist, and literary critic Adam Morgan brings Anderson and her journal to life anew in A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, capturing a moment of cultural acceleration and backlash all too familiar today while shining light on an unsung heroine of American arts and letters. Bringing a fresh eye to a woman and a movement misunderstood in their time, this biography highlights a feminist counterculture that audaciously pushed for more during a time of extreme social conservatism and changed the face of American literature and culture forever.<\/em> – Atria \/ One Signal Publishers<\/p>\n Poor boy. Spy. Transgressor. Genius.<\/em><\/p>\n In repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world of government censorship and religious authoritarianism comes an ambitious cobbler\u2019s son from Canterbury with a daring desire to be known\u2014and an uncanny ear for Latin poetry. A torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, like Christopher Marlowe, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism.<\/em><\/p>\n What Marlowe seizes in his rare opportunity for a classical education, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture. His astonishing literary success will, in turn, nourish the talent of a collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.<\/em><\/p>\n Dark Renaissance illuminates both Marlowe\u2019s times and the origins and significance of his work\u2014from his erotic translations of Ovid to his portrayal of unfettered ambition in a triumphant Tamburlaine to Doctor Faustus, his unforgettable masterpiece about making a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge. Introducing us to Marlowe\u2019s transgressive genius in the form of a thrilling page-turner, Stephen Greenblatt brings a penetrating understanding of the literary work to reveal the inner world of the author, bringing to life a homosexual atheist who was tormented by his own compromises, who refused to toe the party line, and who was murdered just when he had found love. Meanwhile, he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world including Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.<\/em> – W.W. Norton & Company<\/p>\n Drawing on never-before-seen interviews, a richly researched, sweeping examination of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century and her partner\u2019s emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy.<\/em><\/p>\n Gertrude Stein\u2019s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this new biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonni\u00e8re, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, expertly presenting us with this towering literary figure as we\u2019ve never seen her before.<\/em><\/p>\n A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner\u2014a triumph which, ironically, only drew attention away from the avant-garde poetry she called her \u201creal\u201d writing. After Stein\u2019s death in 1946, Alice B. Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein\u2019s unpublished writing into print, all the while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. The biographers who flocked to Stein\u2019s newly opened archive found a surprising trove of secrets which would change Stein\u2019s image forever: a forgotten novel, a cache of love letters, and a series of notebooks which shed entirely new light on her early years in Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein\u2019s radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. A captivating, brilliant work of biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.<\/em> – Scribner<\/p>\n Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz \u2013 just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy \u2013 collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.<\/em><\/p>\n After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha\u2019s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.<\/em><\/p>\n Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony\u2019s death.<\/em><\/p>\n A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.<\/em> – Viking<\/p>\n This title is also available in large print.<\/p>\n A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.<\/em><\/p>\n As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity\u2014our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project\u2014the nation\u2019s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut\u2014made possible by chattel slavery\u2014to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.<\/em><\/p>\n In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler\u2019s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women\u2019s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler\u2019s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler\u2019s stories.<\/em><\/p>\n Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. \u201cWho was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God\u2019s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn\u2019t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you\u2019re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It\u2019s about not being able to stop at all.\u201d<\/em> – Amistad<\/p>\n Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.<\/em><\/p>\n The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.<\/em><\/p>\n Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen\u2019s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother\u2019s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer\u2019s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless\u2014or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the \u201cminor\u201d writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to \u201cmodel minorities\u201d such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.<\/em> – Harvard University Press<\/p>\n For both avid readers and those looking to spark a new habit, The World in Books is an invitation to a more lively and meaningful intellectual life. Davis\u2019s literary adventure guides readers through some of the most important works of nonfiction of all time, offering a political, literary, and cultural history through reading.<\/em><\/p>\n Each of the fifty-two entries provides the book\u2019s opening lines or a brief excerpt from the work; a summary of the work; a biography of the author; why you should read the work; and what to read next. Davis offers insights into some of the most enduring issues of our time\u2014from the existential perspective in Viktor E. Frankl\u2019s Man\u2019s Search for Meaning, to questions of race in Toni Morrison\u2019s The Origin of Others, and the climate crisis in Elizabeth Kolbert\u2019s Under a White Sky. With insights from ancient times to the present day, Kenneth C. Davis offers a wide-ranging historical education through pleasure reading. In an accessible, conversational style, he explores texts that both mirror our contemporary moment and present new ways to think about our lives.<\/em><\/p>\n These 52 selections, with books perfect for reading one week at a time, offer a year-long journey through history, philosophy, nature, and personal growth. More than just a literary companion, The World in Books is an education that combines wisdom with practical application. Davis\u2019s work has been called \u201ca wealth of succinct, entertaining advice\u201d (Kirkus Reviews). The World in Books provides an engaging way to explore some of the most influential books ever written. A refresher course for lifelong learners.<\/em> – Scribner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/baldwin.jpg?resize=200%2C262&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Baldwin: A Love Story<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Nicholas Boggs<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Bibliophobia : a memoir<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Sarah Chihaya<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Book of lives : a memoir of sorts<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Margaret Atwood<\/p>\n
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<\/a>The CIA book club : the secret mission to win the Cold War with forbidden literature<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Charlie English<\/p>\n
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<\/a>A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Adam Morgan<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/dark-renaissance.jpg?resize=200%2C304&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Dark renaissance : the dangerous times and fatal genius of Shakespeare’s greatest rival<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Stephen Greenblatt<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/gertrude-stein.jpg?resize=200%2C302&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Gertrude Stein : an afterlife<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Francesca Wade<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/memorial-days.jpg?resize=200%2C303&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Memorial days : a memoir<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Geraldine Brooks<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/positive-obsession.jpg?resize=200%2C303&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Positive obsession : the life and times of Octavia E. Butler<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Susana M. Morris<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/to-save-and-to-destroy.jpg?resize=200%2C304&ssl=1\")
<\/a>To save and to destroy : writing as an other<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/p>\n
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<\/a>The world in books : 52 works of great short nonfiction<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Kenneth C. Davis<\/p>\n