From the author of the New York Times bestseller Begin Again, a politically astute, lyrical meditation on how ordinary people can shake off their reliance on a small group of professional politicians and assume responsibility for what it takes to achieve a more just and perfect democracy.

Like attending a jazz concert with all of one's favorite musicians...James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Toni Morrison, and more...Glaude brilliantly takes us on an epic tour through their lives and work.
―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race

We are more than the circumstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, one of the nation's preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires.

Based on the Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, the book begins with Glaude's unease with the Obama years. He felt then, and does even more urgently now, that the excitement around the Obama presidency constrained our politics as we turned to yet another prophet-like figure. He examines his personal history and the traditions that both shape and overwhelm his own voice.

Glaude weaves anecdotes about his evolving views on Black politics together with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, encouraging us to reflect on the lessons of these great thinkers and address imaginatively the challenges of our day in voices uniquely our own.

Narrated with passion and philosophical intensity, this book is a powerful reminder that if American democracy is to survive, we must step out from under the shadows of past giants to build a better society--one that derives its strength from the pew, not the pulpit.

Now, for the first time, we can read the version that Wilde intended...Both the text and Nicholas Frankel's introduction make for fascinating reading. --Paris Review

More than 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores all of the material removed by the novel's first editor.

Upon receipt of the typescript, Wilde's editor panicked at what he saw. Contained within its pages was material he feared readers would find offensive--especially instances of graphic homosexual content. He proceeded to go through the typescript with his pencil, cleaning it up until he made it acceptable to the most fastidious taste. Wilde did not see these changes until his novel appeared in print. Wilde's editor's concern was well placed. Even in its redacted form, the novel caused public outcry. The British press condemned it as vulgar, unclean, poisonous, discreditable, and a sham. When Wilde later enlarged the novel for publication in book form, he responded to his critics by further toning down its immoral elements.

Wilde famously said that The Picture of Dorian Gray contains much of me Basil Hallward is what I think I am, Lord Henry what the world thinks me, and Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages, perhaps. Wilde's comment suggests a backward glance to a Greek or Dorian Age, but also a forward-looking view to a more permissive time than his own repressive Victorian era. By implication, Wilde would have preferred we read today the uncensored version of his novel.

A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year--and maybe of the decade.
--Paul Krugman, New York Times

The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat.
--The Economist

Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years.
--Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book...In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy.
--Martin Wolf, Financial Times

A sweeping account of rising inequality...Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.
--John Cassidy, New Yorker

Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years.
--Timothy Shenk, The Nation

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Charming and brilliant. --Times Literary Supplement

Provocative, stimulating, wise―the book that our success-obsessed age needs to read.―Tom Holland

Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next...I was absorbed by Bradatan's book even--or especially--when I felt uncomfortable with its implications. --Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

Bradatan wears his erudition lightly. He is a pleasure to read, and his prose conveys a happy resilience in the face of life's inevitable contradictions. His lessons in humility remind us that the pursuit of success is often motivated by the dread of failure--and that our attempts to create things are often driven by an avoidance of our mortality. --Michael S. Roth, Washington Post

Bradatan writes with the same daring, the same interpretive anger that made his subjects notorious in their own day for choosing failure over what their respective worlds counted as success. A gripping read, start to finish. ―Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

Our obsession with success is hard to overlook. Everywhere we compete, rank, and measure. Yet this relentless drive to be the best blinds us to something vitally important: the need to be humble in the face of life's challenges.

In Praise of Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and political to the spiritual and biological. Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Costica Bradatan mounts his case for failure through the stories of four historical figures who led lives of impact and meaning and assiduously courted failure. Their struggles show that engaging with our limitations can be not just therapeutic but positively transformative.

Chicago Tribune, 10 Best Books of 2024
A Hyperallergic Best Book of the Year

The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation's racial regime.

In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen--until now.

The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War--the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War--revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive Caucasian for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.

To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations--and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

It is a radiantly original contribution to a conversation gravely in need of new thinking.
-Ben Tarnoff, The New Yorker

A visionary reexamination of the value of privacy in today's hypermediated world--not just as a political right but as the key to a life worth living.

The parts of our lives that are not being surveilled and turned into data diminish each day. We are able to configure privacy settings on our devices and social media platforms, but we know our efforts pale in comparison to the scale of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic manipulation. In our hyperconnected era, many have begun to wonder whether it is still possible to live a private life, or whether it is no longer worth fighting for.

The Right to Oblivion argues incisively and persuasively that we still can and should strive for privacy, though for different reasons than we might think. Recent years have seen heated debate in the realm of law and technology about why privacy matters, often focusing on how personal data breaches amount to violations of individual freedom. Yet as Lowry Pressly shows, the very terms of this debate have undermined our understanding of privacy's real value. In a novel philosophical account, Pressly insists that privacy isn't simply a right to be protected but a tool for making life meaningful.

Privacy deepens our relationships with others as well as ourselves, reinforcing our capacities for agency, trust, play, self-discovery, and growth. Without privacy, the world would grow shallow, lonely, and inhospitable. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Hannah Arendt, Jorge Luis Borges, and a range of contemporary artists, Pressly shows why we all need a refuge from the world: not a place to hide, but a psychic space beyond the confines of a digital world in which the individual is treated as mere data.

A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers.

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change--not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.

Make Your Own Job explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as self-realization. Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs.

Historian Erik Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious--and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today's job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to make your own job keeps hope alive.

A Forbes Best Higher Education Book of the Year

From renowned legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, a concise, case-by-case guide to resolving free-speech dilemmas at colleges and universities.

Free speech is indispensable on college campuses: allowing varied views and frank exchanges of opinion is a core component of the educational enterprise and the pursuit of truth. But free speech does not mean a free-for-all. The First Amendment prohibits abridging the freedom of speech, yet laws against perjury or bribery, for example, are still constitutional. In the same way, valuing freedom of speech does not stop a university from regulating speech when doing so is necessary for its educational mission. So where is the dividing line? How can we distinguish reasonable restrictions from impermissible infringement?

In this pragmatic, no-nonsense explainer, Cass Sunstein takes us through a wide range of scenarios involving students, professors, and administrators. He discusses why it's consistent with the First Amendment to punish students who shout down a speaker, but not those who chant offensive slogans; why a professor cannot be fired for writing a politically charged op-ed, yet a university might legitimately consider an applicant's political views when deciding whether to hire her. He explains why private universities are not legally bound by the First Amendment yet should, in most cases, look to follow it. And he addresses the thorny question of whether a university should officially take sides on public issues or deliberately keep the institution outside the fray.

At a time when universities are assailed on free-speech grounds from both left and right, Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide is an indispensable resource for cutting through the noise and understanding the key issues animating the debates.

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time but in universals--an acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world.

Dickinson died without fame; only a few poems were published in her lifetime. Her legacy was later rescued from her desk--an astonishing body of work, much of which has since appeared in piecemeal editions, sometimes with words altered by editors or publishers according to the fashion of the day.

Now Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, has prepared an authoritative one-volume edition of all extant poems by Emily Dickinson--1,789 poems in all, the largest number ever assembled. This reading edition derives from his three-volume work, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), which contains approximately 2,500 sources for the poems. In this one-volume edition, Franklin offers a single reading of each poem--usually the latest version of the entire poem--rendered with Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition is a milestone in American literary scholarship and an indispensable addition to the personal library of poetry lovers everywhere.

A revelatory new account of Black innovation in American opera, showing how composers, performers, and critics redefined the genre both aesthetically and politically in the early twentieth century.

The inauguration of a golden age in Black opera is often dated to 1955, when Marian Anderson became the first Black singer to perform in a leading role at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Yet Anderson's debut was actually preceded by a rich Black operatic tradition that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucy Caplan tells the stories of the Black composers, performers, critics, teachers, and students who created this vibrant opera culture, even as they were excluded from the genre's most prominent institutions. Their movement, which flourished alongside the Harlem Renaissance, redefined opera as a wellspring of aesthetic innovation, sociality, and antiracist activism.

Caplan argues that Black opera in the early twentieth century had decidedly countercultural ambitions. In opera's sonic grandeur and dramatic maximalism, artists found creative resources for expressing the complexity of Black life. The protagonists of this story include composers Harry Lawrence Freeman and Shirley Graham, whose operas boldly interpreted Black diasporic history; performers Caterina Jarboro and Florence Cole-Talbert, who both starred in the racially fraught role of Aida; and critics Sylvester Russell and Nora Holt, who wrote imaginatively about the genre in the Black press. Yet Caplan also focuses on the many Black students, amateurs, opera house staff, and listeners who contributed indelibly to opera's meanings.

With the creation of new companies, choruses, and audiences, opera not only circulated in the Black public sphere but itself became a public sphere with radical potential.

Paul Lockhart's Mathematician's Lament outlined how we introduce math to students in the wrong way. Measurement explains how math should be done. With plain English and pictures, Lockhart makes complex ideas about shape and motion intuitive and graspable, and offers a solution to math phobia by introducing us to math as an artful way of thinking and living.

In conversational prose that conveys his passion for the subject, Lockhart makes mathematics accessible without oversimplifying. He makes no more attempt to hide the challenge of mathematics than he does to shield us from its beautiful intensity. Favoring plain English and pictures over jargon and formulas, he succeeds in making complex ideas about the mathematics of shape and motion intuitive and graspable. His elegant discussion of mathematical reasoning and themes in classical geometry offers proof of his conviction that mathematics illuminates art as much as science.

Lockhart leads us into a universe where beautiful designs and patterns float through our minds and do surprising, miraculous things. As we turn our thoughts to symmetry, circles, cylinders, and cones, we begin to see that almost anyone can do the math in a way that brings emotional and aesthetic rewards. Measurement is an invitation to summon curiosity, courage, and creativity in order to experience firsthand the playful excitement of mathematical work.

An influential legal scholar argues that the Supreme Court played a pivotal role in the rise of mass incarceration in America.

With less than 5 percent of the world's population and almost a quarter of its prisoners, America indisputably has a mass incarceration problem. How did it happen? Tough-on-crime politics and a racially loaded drug war are obvious and important culprits, but another factor has received remarkably little attention: the Supreme Court. The Constitution contains numerous safeguards that check the state's power to lock people away. Yet since the 1960s the Supreme Court has repeatedly disregarded these limits, bowing instead to unfounded claims that adherence to the Constitution is incompatible with public safety.

In Justice Abandoned, Rachel Barkow highlights six Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for mass incarceration. These rulings have been crucial to the meteoric rise in pretrial detention and coercive plea bargaining. They have enabled disproportionate sentencing and overcrowded prison conditions. And they have sanctioned innumerable police stops and widespread racial discrimination. If the Court were committed to protecting constitutional rights and followed its standard methods of interpretation, none of these cases would have been decided as they were, and punishment in America would look very different than it does today.

More than just an autopsy of the Supreme Court's errors, Justice Abandoned offers a roadmap for change. Barkow shows that the originalist methodology adopted by the majority of the current Court demands overturning the unconstitutional policies underlying mass incarceration. If the justices genuinely believe in upholding the Constitution in all cases, then they have little choice but to reverse the wrongly decided precedents that have failed so many Americans.

Leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War.
--Ron Chernow, author of Grant

Provides leadership lessons that can be obtained nowhere else... Ulysses Grant in his Memoirs gives us a unique glimpse of someone who found that the habit of reflection could serve as a force multiplier for leadership.
--Thomas E. Ricks, Foreign Policy

Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain and Henry James hailed them as great literature, and countless presidents credit Grant with influencing their own writing. This is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant's memoirs, clarifying the great military leader's thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and offering his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S. Grant Association's Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the pre-war years, the war with Mexico, and the Civil War. Grant provides essential insight into how rigorously these events tested America's democratic institutions and the cohesion of its social order.

What gives this peculiarly reticent book its power? Above all, authenticity... Grant's style is strikingly modern in its economy.
--T. J. Stiles, New York Times

It's been said that if you're going to pick up one memoir of the Civil War, Grant's is the one to read. Similarly, if you're going to purchase one of the several annotated editions of his memoirs, this is the collection to own, read, and reread.
--Library Journal

A milestone in political and moral philosophy, as groundbreaking as the theories of Bentham and Kant and arguably the most important and influential piece of contemporary philosophy of the last century. --The Guardian
The principles of justice that Rawls set forth in this book are those that free and rational people would accept in an original position of equality. In this hypothetical situation, which corresponds to the state of nature in social contract theory, no one knows their place in society; their class or social status; their fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities--their intelligence, strength, and the like--or even their conception of the good. Deliberating behind this veil of ignorance, people naturally determine their proper rights and duties. Thus, as Rawls writes, each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.

Incorporating the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published in 1971. For more than half a century, A Theory of Justice has been taught and debated, celebrated and translated into more than thirty languages. This revised edition includes changes, discussed in the preface, that Rawls considered to be significant, especially to the discussions of liberty and primary social goods.

Should stand for years as the definitive history of New Orleans's first century. --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

This is the story of a city that shouldn't exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America's most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world.

Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city's history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent City evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of peoples, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric--and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel.

Powell's tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Tablet Best Book of the Year
Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award

One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society. --The Economist

What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in Western Christendom of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.

What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

A bottom-up investigation of the broken system of professional licensing, affecting everyone from hairdressers and morticians to doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and those who rely on their services.

Tens of millions of US workers are required by law to have a license to do their jobs--about twice as many as are in unions. The requirements are set by over 1,500 industry-specific licensing boards, staffed mainly by volunteers from the industries they regulate. These boards have enormous power to shape the economy and the lives of individuals. As consumers, we rely on licensing boards to maintain standards of hygiene, skill, and ethics. But their decisions can be maddeningly arbitrary, creating unnecessary barriers to work. And where boards could be useful, curbing harms and ensuring professionalism, their performance is profoundly disappointing.

When Rebecca Haw Allensworth began attending board meetings, she discovered a thicket of self-dealing and ineptitude. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with board members and applicants, The Licensing Racket goes behind the scenes to show how boards protect insiders from competition and turn a blind eye to unethical behavior. Even where there is the will to discipline bad actors, boards lack the resources needed to investigate serious cases. The consequences range from the infuriatingly banal--a hairdresser prevented from working--to the deeply shocking, with medical licensing boards bearing considerable blame for the opioid crisis and for staffing shortages during the COVID epidemic. Meanwhile, unethical lawyers who are allowed to keep their licenses are overrepresented among advocates working with the most vulnerable groups in society.

If licensing is in many arenas a pointless obstacle to employment, in others it is as important as it is ineffective. Allensworth argues for abolition where appropriate and outlines an agenda for reform where it is most needed.

How a broken criminal justice system has fueled the crisis of American democracy, and how we can address both problems together.

American criminal justice is in crisis. Prisons are swollen, confidence in police has plummeted, and race- and class-based biases distort every aspect of the system. American democracy is in crisis, too, as the chasm of loathing and incomprehension that divides political factions grows ever wider and deeper. Legal scholar and former prosecutor David A. Sklansky argues that these crises are deeply intertwined. And if the failures of American criminal justice are near the heart of our political divides, then reforming the system is essential for repairing our democracy.

Criminal Justice in Divided America shows how police, courts, and prisons helped to break American democracy and how better approaches to public safety and criminal accountability can help to repair it. Engaging critically with concerns from both the left and the right, Sklansky lays out a clear and deeply researched agenda for reforming police departments, prosecutors' offices, criminal trials, and punishment. Sklansky seeks pragmatic solutions that take account of political realities: the lofty ideal of empowering the people or the community can mean little when members of the public or the community disagree. While efforts to defund the police have exacerbated political conflicts without addressing the underlying problem of how and when force should be used to protect public safety, reforms aimed at improving police accountability, restraining prosecutorial power, and expanding the role of juries can bring together warring parties who share a concern for justice.

Ultimately, Sklansky argues, reform must be rooted in a strong commitment to pluralism--bridging political divides rather than worsening them, strengthening democracy, and securing the broad support that enables durable change.