This story collection portrays Black middle-class life in schools, workplaces, families, and online spaces with satire and unease. It examines self-representation, racial stereotypes, and communal expectation through characters whose pain and humor often sit side by side.

A sharp, funny, and unsettling collection about contemporary Black identity.

A major biography of Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became a defining orator, editor, and political activist of nineteenth-century America. It follows not only the public hero but also the family life, ideas, and political conflicts that shaped his meaning across time.

A sweeping biography that places Frederick Douglass at the center of American freedom and its contradictions.

Written as a letter to his mother, this memoir examines the body, addiction, violence, lies, and love in the life of a Black man raised in Mississippi. Through intimate personal history, it confronts the weight that racism, poverty, gender, and family damage can place on a body.

A memoir in the form of a letter, tracing the weight of body, memory, and America.

This nonfiction account follows the author's years as a U.S. Border Patrol agent and the migrants, deaths, and institutional violence he encountered along the U.S.-Mexico border. His position inside the system intersects with the lives of those crossing it, revealing the human cost of border policy.

A report from inside border enforcement that listens for the human voices behind the line.

This novel alternates between the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago and a woman's reckoning with loss in 2015 Paris. Through friendship, art, family, and the breaking and remaking of community, it follows wounds and memories that endure across generations.

A novel of a community living through loss and of those who carry its memory afterward.

This graphic novel moves between a crew repairing ruined structures in space and memories of love and separation at boarding school. With soft color and spacious visual storytelling, it explores friendship, romance, loss, and the desire to find someone again.

A lyrical science-fiction graphic novel where cosmic repair work meets the memory of first love.

This work of narrative history follows Germany from the aftermath of the First World War to the end of the Second through the records of foreign travelers, diplomats, reporters, students, artists, and athletes. By foregrounding uncertainty, fascination, blindness, and resistance as they appeared at the time, it shows fascism becoming part of everyday scenery.

Casual diaries and letters by travelers carry the atmosphere of the Third Reich into the present.

Korede, a nurse in Lagos, has repeatedly cleaned up after her dazzling younger sister Ayoola kills her boyfriends. When the doctor Korede secretly loves becomes drawn to Ayoola, the sisters' bond, guilt, and uneasy silence begin to come apart.

Dark humor and the ache of sisterhood come sharply alive in a sequence of brief chapters.

Taking its title from the jazz standard, this poetry collection considers the restlessness of love, the gap between memory and history, and the risk of belief after loss. Philosophical reflection and lyric pressure meet in voices moving between intimacy and solitude through Phillips's exacting syntax.

Because love offers no guarantee, the poems become gestures against despair.

This investigative nonfiction account traces the American opioid crisis from the spread of OxyContin outward into communities across the country. Through long reporting, it connects pharmaceutical marketing, failures in health care, social collapse, and the struggles of families and advocates confronting addiction.

The story of a painkiller expands into a national crisis involving corporations, medicine, families, and entire communities.

This young adult novel in verse follows Xiomara, a Dominican American girl in Harlem, as poetry helps her face family, faith, desire, and the scrutiny placed on her body. The verse form itself becomes the medium through which a girl who feels unheard claims her voice.

A young adult novel where writing poems becomes a way to reclaim one's voice.

Library of America's 2018 Innovator's Award recognized its publishing and cultural work in preserving American writing and making it accessible to readers. The honor concerns the organization's continuing contribution, not a single book.

A special award for an organization devoted to preserving and sharing American writing.

Terry Tempest Williams's 2018 Robert Kirsch Award was a lifetime achievement honor for her literary and civic work on the American West and the environment. It recognizes a body of writing that connects nature, land, faith, and political responsibility.

A lifetime achievement honor for writing on the American West and the environment.