Houston-based writer Daniel Peña's debut Bang! is a thrilling novel involving drug cartels, a plane crash and the fate of being born on one side (or the other) of the border. I had the chance to ask Daniel some questions about his exciting novel, from inspiration to translated writers to books a writer reads while writing their own book.
Mark: Were there certain writers or books that inspired you when writing Bang?
February is Black HIstory Month –– as well as the anniversary month of Trayvon Martin's death. Below, find a list of a few of our favorite books regarding our country's relationship to race and color. From poetry to essays to history, this list is only a start. Don't see anything you're looking for? Swing by the store and ask for more recommendations!
In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a "helpmate" but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband's activism in these directions.
By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done.
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Published: Pantheon - October 24th, 2017
For African Americans of the Jim Crow era, Rogers's was their first black history teacher. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing the "facts" and minimizing ambiguity; neither was he above shock journalism now and then.
With elan and erudition--and with winning enthusiasm--Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Roger's work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African-American history in question-and-answer format. Among the one hundred questions: Who were Africa's first ambassadors to Europe? Who was the first black president in North America? Did Lincoln really free the slaves? Who was history's wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry? Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there? Who was the first black head of state in modern Western history? Where was the first Underground Railroad? Who was the first black American woman to be a self-made millionaire? Which black man made many of our favorite household products better?
Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control--relegating millions to a permanent second-class status--even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action."
Called "stunning" by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily Kos, "explosive" by Kirkus, and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.
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Published: St. Martin's Press - January 16th, 2018
From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors' story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable.
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Published: Restless Books - February 14th, 2017
Restless Classics presents The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois's seminal work of sociology, with searing insights into our complex, corrosive relationship with race and the African-American consciousness. Reconsidered for the era of Obama, Trump, and Black Lives Matter, the new edition includes an incisive introduction from rising cultural critic Vann R. Newkirk II and stunning illustrations by the artist Steve Prince.
In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most original thinkers and writers to speak on contemporary racism and race, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine, and Honoree Jeffers. "An absolutely indispensable anthology" (Booklist, starred review), The Fire This Timeshines a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestles with our current predicament, and imagines a better future.
As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage--and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.
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Published: Two Dollar Radio - November 7th, 2017
In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.
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Published: Picador - March 1st, 2016
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality--the black Chinese restaurant.
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Published: Scribner - September 5th, 2017
In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power--and limitations--of family bonds.
A suburban park, church, a good job, a cocktail party for the literati: to many, these sound like safe places, but for a young black man these insular spaces don't keep out the news--and the actual threat--of gun violence and police brutality, or the biases that keeps body, property, and hope in the crosshairs. Continuing conversations begun by Citizenand Between the World and Me, Silencer sings out the dangers of unspoken taboos present on quiet Midwestern cul-de-sacs and in stifling professional settings, the dangers in closing the window on "a rainbow coalition of cops doing calisthenics around/a six-foot, three-hundred-fifty-pound man, choked back into the earth for what/looked a lot, to me, like sport."
Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.
It has been 12 months since the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. And really, what a year it's been, for the United States, for the book world, and for Houston in particular. We've put together a list of the books that have gotten us through the year as staff members and as a store. Take a look!
Winner of the National Book Award in nonfiction, Gessen's THE FUTURE IS HISTORY follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.
Powerful and urgent, this book is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
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Published: Liveright - December 12th, 2017
Beard’s primary subject is female silence; she hopes to take a “long view on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment”, the better to get beyond “the simple diagnosis of misogyny that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on." Calling out misogyny isn’t, she understands, the same thing as explaining it, and it’s only by doing the latter that we’re likely ever to find an effective means of combating it.
Mrs. Obama was not only our first black first lady; she was President Obama's equal partner in marriage and parenthood and a tireless advocate for women's rights, education, healthy eating, and exercise. COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS features original testimonials from Gloria Steinem, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alice Waters, and Charlamagne tha God, among others.
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Published: Graywolf Press - October 7th, 2014
In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary society. From oft-heard claims of "post-racial society" to the rise in race-based hate crimes, Rankine book chronicles racial aggressions in our country and continues to be a necessary read.
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century.
We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
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Published: Graywolf Press - November 14th, 2017
Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue's gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers--from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all.
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Published: St. Martin's Press - January 16th, 2018
From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors' story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love.
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Published: Riverhead Books - February 6th, 2018
For Francisco Cantu, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantu joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantu tries not to think where the stories go from there.
Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River makes urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line.
Plus, we can't wait to host Francisco Cantu on February 7. Preorder your book now and join us for this free in-store event!
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Published: One World - October 3rd, 2017
"We were eight years in power" was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South.
In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America's "first white president."
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Published: Andre Deutsch - January 2nd, 2018
March, Women, March explores the women's movement in Britain, and the courageous rebels who refused to accept their exclusion from political life. Beginning with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 and moving to the suffragettes of the early twentieth century and beyond, Lucinda Hawksley traces the fight for equal rights. Her fascinating narrative incorporates diary extracts and letters that bring the movement's main protagonists back to life, and examines how suffragettes were portrayed in literature, art, and the contemporary media.
In this new book from Rice Professor and eminent scholar of the South, we meet Jefferson the politician and political thinker –– as well as Jefferson the architect, scientist, bibliophile, paleontologist, musician, and gourmet. We witness him drafting of the Declaration of Independence, negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, and inventing a politics that emphasized the states over the federal government –– a political philosophy that shapes our national life to this day.
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Published: Pegasus Books - September 5th, 2017
This past year reached the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, so how could we leave Service's book out?
The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political ferment in Russia that followed the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the beginnings of Lenin's Soviet socialist republic.
A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie's letter of response.
This pocket-sized letter, written as fifteen suggestions, creates a warm and compelling set of directives for women in the 21st century.
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Published: Picador - October 3rd, 2017
NASTY WOMEN is more than a gift book capitalizing on the zeitgeist; it's a collection of thoughtful and inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward. Take a look at the incredible essays included, from pieces by Rebecca Solnit and Cheryl Strayed to Samantha Irby and Jill Filipovic.
Though IT DEVOURS is derived from a popular podcast, knowledge of the series isn't necessary to enjoy this book.
Nilanjana Sikdar is an outsider to the town of Night Vale. Working for Carlos, the town's top scientist, she relies on fact and logic as her guiding principles. But all of that is put into question when Carlos gives her a special assignment investigating a mysterious rumbling in the desert wasteland outside of town. This investigation leads her to the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God, and to Darryl, one of its most committed members. Caught between her beliefs in the ultimate power of science and her growing attraction to Darryl, she begins to suspect the Congregation is planning a ritual that could threaten the lives of everyone in town. Nilanjana and Darryl must search for common ground between their very different world views as they are faced with the Congregation's darkest and most terrible secret.
This fascinating tale of a writer's emotional collapse was a favorite with Ben, Brazos' General Manager.
"It is fitting that I'm beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air."
This passage is from the first entry of a journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann's spellbinding new novel. It is the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany--a house that thwarts the expectations of the narrator's recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics. He is eager to finish a screenplay for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, but something he cannot explain is undermining his convictions and confidence, a process he is recording in this account of the uncanny events that unfold as he tries to understand what, exactly, is happening around him--and within him.
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Published: Soft Skull - January 9th, 2018
This one is brand new! After its debut just last week, JOB OF THE WASP is already on Operating Manager Mark and Marketing Director Sara's bookshelves.
A coming-of-age tale, a Gothic ghost story, and a murder mystery all in one, The Job of the Wasp is a bloodcurdling and brilliantly subversive novel about paranoia, love, and the nightmare of adolescence.
A new arrival at an isolated school for orphaned boys quickly comes to realize there is something wrong with his new home. He hears chilling whispers in the night, his troubled classmates are violent and hostile, and the Headmaster sends cryptic messages, begging his new charge to confess. As the new boy learns to survive on the edges of this impolite society, he starts to unravel a mystery at the school's dark heart. And that's when the corpses start turning up.
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Published: Graywolf Press - October 3rd, 2017
This book made its way into multiple Brazos Staff Top Ten Lists at the end of 2017! In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.
A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella "Especially Heinous," Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment.
Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel. It's been a staff favorite since its release.
We are lucky to have the author, Samanta Schweblin, visit Houston on March 26 with the Inprint Reading Series. Take a look!
One winter, six years ago, I drove a borrowed car down a rutted path that wound into a cedar valley of the Texas Hill Country. The land around me – with its dusty flats, its hidden meadows of bunch grass and prickly pear, its vultures wheeling in the sky— looked like some Hollywood set of archetypal Texas. This was Paisano Ranch, home to a storied and uniquely isolating fellowship program for writers. For six months at a time, a single Texas author is given the 250-acre property, along with its humble ranch house, which once belonged to the late folklorist J Frank Dobie.
In mid-2017, I sat down with our Marketing Director Sara to brainstorm. We wanted to create a place where people could take a moment, write about their favorite books, and start conversations with someone that they never met; to provide an opportunity to unplug and have something tangible to look back on weeks, months, or even years later.
The year is finally at an end! We have survived a complicated but wonderful 2017. Thank you for helping us weather everything from a hurricane to a World Series win, and much, much more. We couldn't have done any of this without you (yes you! Reading this article!). Thank you again, Houston, for making us proud.
We can't wait for the new releases 2018 will bring. This is what our booksellers are looking forward to reading (and selling) in the new year:
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Published: New Directions - April 24th, 2018
After a mysterious disaster, Japan has cut itself off from the world. This GORGEOUS speculative short novel explores temporality, family, and community. My favorite read this year, and something I just can't wait to share in 2018.
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Published: Two Lines Press - April 10th, 2018
A little boy is sent to live with his grandmother in a small coastal town. He is unable to live fully in the present due to his abusive past, which the reader peers into regularly through the boy's flashbacks. But LION CROSS POINT is as much an argument for hope and the ability to live beyond childhood PTSD as it is a tale of sadness. I can't wait to host Masatsugu Ono in April; I think our customers will be wowed by this deftly-written novella!
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Published: NYRB Classics - April 17th, 2018
NYRB is at it again with this splendid book! Shirley Kaszenbowski's search for her elusive lover (who communicates through cryptic messages in magazines, of course) brings her back to her hometown of Toronto. This has been one of my favorite winter reads.
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Published: Transit Books - March 13th, 2018
In March Transit Books is publishing THE RIGHT INTENTION a book of four linked novellas. Even better news, perhaps, all of Barba's books are translated by the masterful Lisa Dillman, the 2016 winner of the Best Translated Book Award.
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Published: St. Martin's Press - January 16th, 2018
I am excited to share Patrisse Khan-Cullors' memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist. Khan-Cullors' describes how their tumultuous youth which sometimes meant hunger, poverty, and fear was not so challenging, but a reality they overcame through empathy and faith. Shattered by the incarceration of their brother and absurd disparity, a maven for activism and equality joins forces with co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi to ignite the movement known as Black Lives Matter. An incredible history and backstory to the mission of BLM as well as the important role that feminism plays into activism.
Published: Little, Brown and Company - April 3rd, 2018
Jamison's memoir of her own alcoholism, yes –– but also a sprawling, myth-busting look at the history of literary drunkenness. Openhearted and academically rigorous.
Vollmann, America's reigning literary maniac, turns his attention to climate change. Whatever his subject, Vollmann finds the strangest and most dangerous aspects, and here he continues his career-long battle with armageddon.
A young girl comes of age in a trailer park, tended to by a series of damaged mother figures, while everyone around her seems to own –– and be gaga for –– guns.
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Published: Grove Press - January 9th, 2018
One of the books that I am looking forward to Jamie Quarto's FIRE SERMON; it is an absolutely beautiful and moving that will leave you looking at the many ways we can long for something.
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Published: Duke University Press - December 8th, 2017
Moten has a poet's ear and a critic's mind. This trilogy of critical work spans a breadth of topics surrounding literature, history, music, and race in America. If you were a fan of Kevin Young's BUNK then you have to check out these books. BLACK AND BLUR is currently available, while STOLEN LIFE and THE UNIVERSAL MACHINE will be released in March. Duke University Press, 2018
