Spring brings new perspectives on borders and migrants, surveys of censorship in schools, investigations into government influence peddling, and studies of how to win elections and control disinformation.
Top 10
Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
Madhumita Murgia. Holt, Apr. 2 ($29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-86739-1)
Journalist Murgia profiles individuals whose daily lives have been altered by AI—including a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, and an Indian doctor.
The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor
Hamilton Nolan. Hachette, Feb. 13 ($30, ISBN 978-0-306-83092-1)
Focusing this survey of the U.S. labor movement on the head of the flight attendants’ union, Nolan argues that organized labor is the only institution well positioned to fix the country’s growing inequality.
A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging
Lauren Markham. Riverhead, Feb. 13 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-54557-7)
Reporting on a 2021 fire that destroyed a refugee camp in Greece, Markham traces connections between contemporary inequities and ancient Greek myths.
Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State
Byron Tau. Crown, Mar. 5 ($32, ISBN 978-0-593-44322-4)
Wall Street Journal reporter Tau reveals that the U.S. government is the biggest customer for the tech industry’s booming business selling personal data.
Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor
Anne Kim. New Press, May 14 ($27.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-781-1)
A large segment of American business profits off government funds meant to aid the poor and utilizes vigorous lobbying operations to prevent regulation, according to this investigation.
The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding
Osita Nwanevu. Random House, July 23 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-44992-9)
Guardian columnist Nwanevu argues for sweeping reform of U.S. electoral institutions as crucial to not only dispel government gridlock but guarantee the viability of democracy itself.
Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans
Jane Marie. Atria, Mar. 12 ($29, ISBN 978-1-982155-77-3)
Peabody Award–winner Marie adapts her podcast The Dream for this exposé of multilevel marketing schemes that prey on the working class and the elites who profit off them.
Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
Annalee Newitz. Norton, June 4 ($26.99, ISBN 978-0-393-88151-6)
Bestselling sci-fi novelist Newitz chronicles the history of propaganda in the U.S. and speaks with experts and activists dealing with the spread of disinformation in today’s culture wars.
Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government
Brody and Luke Mullins. Simon & Schuster, May 14 ($34.99, ISBN 978-1-9821-2059-7)
The Mullins brothers chart the rise and fall of three government lobbying firms and examine the shadowy techniques such organizations use to solidify the power of their corporate clients.
You Get What You Pay For: Essays
Morgan Parker. One World, Mar. 12 ($28, ISBN 978-0-525-51144-1)
Analyzing the gulf between the popularity of her poetry and her personal feelings of alienation, Parker traces the cultural history of Black Americans’ relationship with the public eye, from racist beauty standards to Bill Cosby’s exhortations to respectability.
Politics & Current Events longlist
Amistad
Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker by Jessica Pryce (Mar. 19, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-303619-2) exposes institutional bias within the child welfare system, drawing from the author’s personal experience of disillusionment with the relentless drive toward family separation.
Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation by Marcus Hunter (Feb. 6, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-300472-6) offers a new vision of reparations that extends beyond the purely financial and draws on a wide range of inspirations, from legal and historical precedents to more spiritual considerations. 50,000-copy announced first printing.
Basic
Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—and How We Break Free by Tricia Rose (Mar. 5, $28, ISBN 978-1-5416-0271-7) analyzes institutional racism in the U.S., with a focus on how policies interact across institutions—including criminal justice, education, and housing—to produce even more harmful effects.
Beacon
The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom by Jennifer Ruth (Apr. 9, $24.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8070-4515-2) profiles people on the front lines of the far-right’s assault on academic freedom over the past 40 years, including current efforts to ban LGBTQ books and institute anti–critical race theory policies.
Bloomsbury SIGMA
The Tomb of the Mili Mongga: Fossils, Folklore, and Adventure at the Edge of Reality by Samuel Turvey (Apr. 16, $28, ISBN 978-1-399-40977-3) recounts how the author’s discovery of a recently extinct mammal on Indonesia’s Sumba Island transformed into a quest to understand the island’s legend of a giant yeti-like beast.
Columbia Global Reports
The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Defeating Disinformation and Winning Elections by Sasha Issenberg (Mar. 12, $18 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-9870536-2-1) tracks key players involved in Democratic online electioneering during the Trump years and their efforts to counter disinformation without creating their own.
Crown
City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways by Megan Kimble (Apr. 2, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-44378-1) chronicles the rise of America’s inner-city highways—which destroyed neighborhoods and made cities disconnected and unwalkable—and highlights efforts by groups in Austin, Dallas, and Houston to halt construction of new highways.
Doubleday
Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America by Shefali Luthra (June 26, $29, ISBN 978-0-385-55008-6) profiles individuals who have been affected by recent rollbacks of reproductive rights and demonstrates how those traveling out of state for abortions are creating bottlenecks to access across the country. 50,000-copy announced first printing.
Doubleday Canada
Nowhere, Exactly: On Identity and Belonging by M.G. Vassanji (Mar. 26, $25, ISBN 978-0-385-69656-2). The two-time Giller Prize winner reflects on the immigrant experience in Canada and his feeling of never quite being home.
Duke Univ.
Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace E. Lavery (Mar. 1, $23.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4780-5913-4) theorizes a continuous crisis of heterosexuality within the American sitcom and probes the genre’s long tradition of queer-coded characters who push the boundaries of the heteronormative family unit.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten (Mar. 26, $30, ISBN 978-0-374-17173-5) forecasts a massive population shift soon to come within the U.S., when tens of millions will relocate to a shrinking stretch of habitable land between Tennessee, Maine, and the Great Lakes.
The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos by Angela Garcia (Apr. 30, $29, ISBN 978-0-374-60578-0) draws on the author’s decadelong anthropological research and her own family history to examine Mexico City’s informal network of addiction treatment clinics.
Grand Central
Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation by Tom McGrath (June 4, $30, ISBN 978-1-5387-2599-3) charts the ascendance of the yuppies, the status-obsessed urban gentrifiers of the 1980s, and traces how yuppie materialism and self-absorption came to dominate American culture. 50,000-copy announced first printing.
Harper
Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be by Timothy P. Carney (Mar. 26, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-323646-2) investigates why raising children in the U.S. has become so much less enjoyable, laying blame on a culture that encourages constant surveilling of kids and policing of supposedly neglectful parents.
Harvard Univ.
The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China by Minxin Pei (Feb. 13, $35, ISBN 978-0-674-25783-2) argues that authoritarianism in China is less reliant on tech than has been widely reported, and that surveillance still relies on a labor-intensive, highly bureaucratic network of spying.
Haymarket
Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing by Rebecca Vilkomerson and Alissa Wise (June 4, $22.95 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-88890-095-6) highlights the centrality of Jewish organizers to the recent growth of the Palestinian solidarity movement in the U.S.
Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of Democracy in India by Siddhartha Deb (May 14, $21.95 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-88890-088-8) contends that Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party has merged tactics of religious fundamentalism and modern fascism in its persecution of minorities, women, intellectuals, and the poor.
Knopf
2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed by Eric Klinenberg (Feb. 13, $32, ISBN 978-0-593-31948-2) chronicles the consequential title year by profiling seven average New Yorkers, including a subway custodian and a bar manager, while also covering events in distant cities like Wuhan and London. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
Little, Brown
Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy by Isaac Arnsdorf (Apr. 9, $30, ISBN 978-0-316-49751-0) examines the radicalization of the Republican Party since the January 6 Capitol attack, which it says is driven by a highly mobilized movement laying the groundwork for Trump’s next “big lie.”
Liveright
The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora by Wendy Pearlman (June 18, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-324-09223-0) draws on hundreds of interviews with Syrians who have fled their country’s civil war for other parts of the world, focusing on their thoughts on the notion of home.
Mariner
They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms by Michael Hixenbaugh (May 14, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-06-330724-7) documents how the conservative takeover of a school board in the suburb of Southlake, Tex., inspired a wave of copycat campaigns across the country.
Melville House
Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy by David Masciotra (Mar. 26, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-68589-089-6) focuses on Chicago’s exurbs and suburbs, highlighting how the metro area’s outer—and whiter—ring of exurbs has formed an increasingly hostile and right-wing outlook as the inner ring of suburbs has become more diverse.
Metropolitan
We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance by Mara Kardas-Nelson (June 11, $31.99, ISBN 978-1-250-81722-8) contends that small, high-interest loans to the extremely poor, once promoted as a surefire solution for global poverty, have proven to be nothing but a debt trap.
New Press
The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Petra Molnar (May 21, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-836-8) tracks the growing reliance on AI surveillance for policing borders around the world, and details how tech companies stand to profit from increased restrictions on migration.
Pantheon
Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor (Mar. 12, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-70124-9) explores the concept and practice of solidarity, from ancient Rome through Black Lives Matter, arguing that it’s essential for combating everything from climate change to the loneliness epidemic.
Penguin Press
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler (July 9, $32, ISBN 978-0-593-65533-7) shares insights the author gleaned upon returning to China to teach English 20 years after having done it once before, including encounters with a much more ambitious and savvy generation of students.
PublicAffairs
Mayhem Merchants: The Big Business of Disinformation and How to Stop It by Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin (July 23, $29, ISBN 978-1-5417-0477-0). The founders of the watchdog group Check My Ads offer a playbook for fighting disinformation by targeting the businesses that fund them through advertising.
Random House
The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back by Madiba K. Dennie (June 4, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-72925-0) argues against constitutional originalism, characterizing it as a politically motivated philosophy that’s being used to diminish democracy by rolling back voting rights.
Scribner
Unit X: The Pentagon, Silicon Valley, and the Future of War by Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff (June 11, $30, ISBN 978-1-66803-138-4) is an insider account of cooperation between America’s tech industry and the U.S. military, from the founders of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.
Seven Stories
Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade (Feb. 27, $35, ISBN 978-1-64421-363-6) explains how disinformation threatens democracy by promoting extremism, and provides technical and legal solutions for combating it. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
Simon & Schuster
Latinoland: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority by Marie Arana (Feb. 20, $32.50, ISBN 978-1-9821-8489-6) draws on hundreds of interviews and archival research to portray America’s largest and fastest-growing minority—a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse group undergoing rapid change, including a rightward political drift.
Skyhorse
America’s Trial: Torture and the 9/11 Case on Guantánamo Bay by John Ryan (Mar. 5, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-5107-7891-7) documents how the trial of five Guantánamo Bay detainees accused of plotting 9/11 was derailed from the beginning by the critical question of whether CIA torture invalidated the case.
Sourcebooks
The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O’Connor (Feb. 6, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-4642-1663-3) tracks an eccentric cast of Bigfoot believers through America’s cryptozoology subculture in an investigation that develops into a wide-reaching rumination on nature and belief.
St. Martin’s
Free the Land: The Root Cause of Inequality and the Fight for a Better Future by Audrea Lim (June 25, $30, ISBN 978-1-250-27518-9) examines how the treatment of land as a source of profit has ramifications for a wide range of social justice issues, from gentrification to environmentalism.
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood by Gretchen Sisson (Feb. 27, $29, ISBN 978-1-250-28677-2) uses a decade’s worth of interviews with American mothers who were forced by circumstances to give up their children for adoption to indict a system that separates families instead of supporting them.
Stanford Univ.
Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman (Apr. 23, $28, ISBN 978-1-5036-3785-6) merges political philosophy and earth science to propose a new system of planetary governance that can deal with urgent international issues like climate change, pandemics, and pollution.
Tiny Reparations
Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (May 14, $29, ISBN 978-0-593-18714-2) draws on pop culture and the author’s own experience as the child of Mexican immigrants to explore thematic undercurrents of colonialism and migration hidden within or erased by the American mainstream.
Union Square
DIY: The Wonderfully Weird History and Science of Masturbation by Eric Sprankle (Mar. 19, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4549-4879-7) tracks the history of moralistic efforts to suppress masturbation, the 20th–century triumph of science-based sex education, and today’s reignited debates on the subject fueled by online subcultures advocating against male masturbation.
Verso
Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change by Tad Delay (Apr. 9, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-83976-543-8) surveys new forms of global warming denialism, including right-wing attempts to blame forest fires on leftist activists, and contends that this impulse to shift blame is structurally hardwired into capitalism.
Viking
Private Revolutions: How Ordinary Women Are Taking on China’s New Social Order by Yuan Yang (July 2, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-49390-8) samples five years’ worth of interviews with Chinese women facing increasing barriers to economic stability to portray an increasingly stratified China.
Yale Univ.
How to Steal a Presidential Election by Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman (Feb. 13, $26, ISBN 978-0-300-27079-2) lays out every possible scenario by which the U.S. presidential election could be stolen, including some that would be considered constitutional, and makes recommendations for reform.
