Franz Nicolay’s riveting book "Band People" is a behind-the-scenes investigation into the internal dynamics of rock bands. Nicolay notes that documentary The Beatles: Get Back was an eye-opener to many because it revealed what he and... Read More

In a dazzling interplay of words and images, B. A. Van Sise’s "On the National Language" conjures the richness of North America’s endangered languages, some of which are spoken by only a handful of elders. There are cultural... Read More

A trans woman guards her secrets and fights dark powers in Margaret Killjoy’s novel "The Sapling Cage". Lorel wants to become a witch, learn to use magic, and travel the world. But she was assigned male at birth, and witches are always... Read More

African identities are diverse in Iheoma Nwachukwu’s haunting, award-winning collection "Japa and Other Stories". Japa is both noun and verb, identity and a place in the mind. Japa children escape Nigeria to far-flung continents,... Read More

Dianna E. Anderson’s "Body Phobia" is a convincing personal and philosophical exposé of how a culture that fears bodily differences harms vulnerable people. Anderson, who is nonbinary, trans, and queer, grew up in an evangelical... Read More

In Michael Weingrad’s slim, nostalgic literary novel "Eugene Nadelman", a nerdy Jewish boy comes of age in 1980s Philadelphia. Eugene shares his first name, and the book its format, with Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene... Read More

Tim Allis’s fascinating biography of American fashion and retail pioneer Henri Bendel, inventor of the clearance sale, asserts that much of what is taken for granted in modern retail can be attributed to Bendel, whose in-store fashion... Read More

The fictions that underlie racism and how they affect the way Americans perceive reality are dissected in Sarah Lewis’s eye-opening history text, "The Unseen Truth". In his 1861 speech “Pictures and Progress,” Frederick Douglass... Read More