An explosive, award-winning novel in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a satire of the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black miltancy.

A classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy.

Dan Freeman, the spook who sat by the door, is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Chicago blacks as Freedom Fighters in this explosive, award-winning novel.

As a story of one man's reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy, the book is autobiographical and personal. As a tale of a man's reaction to oppression, it is universal.

A revolutionary guide to Jewish practice rooted in social justice, feminism, and queer liberation.

This contemporary companion to the Jewish year cycle is not only a bellwether for radical Jews who want their lives and practice to be rooted in their political commitments but also an educational resource in Jewish tradition, holidays, and ritual. With a chapter for each month of the Hebrew calendar, For Times Such as These offers spiritual practices and holiday rituals rooted in movements for racial justice, decolonization, feminism, and queer and trans liberation.

Each chapter opens with an invocation by liturgist and healer Dori Midnight and illuminated by artist Sol Weiss. Highlighting each month's spiritual and cultural qualities, Rabbi Ariana Katz and Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg summarize and provide commentary on Torah readings; examine the texts, histories, and contemporary customs of Jewish holidays; and offer questions to reflect on and engage spiritually with the month. This work provides a guide for creative action and ritual making throughout the seasons, an exploration of anti-Zionist Judaism, and spiritual-cultural invitation to embody and expand decolonial, anti-racist, queer, and feminist Jewish practice.

The true story of how Detroit entrepreneurs created a thriving--if illegal--lottery system to support themselves and uplift their communities.

Winner: A Michigan Notable Book!

A testament to the tenacious spirit embodied in Detroit culture and history, this account reveals how numbers gambling, initially an illegal enterprise, became a community resource and institution of solidarity for Black communities through times of racial disenfranchisement and labor instability. Author Felicia B. George sheds light on the lives of Detroit's numbers operators--many self-made entrepreneurs who overcame poverty and navigated the pitfalls of racism and capitalism by both legal and illegal means. Illegal lottery operators and their families and employees were often exposed to precarity and other adverse conditions, and they profited from their neighbors' hope to make it through another day. Despite scandal and exploitation, these operators and their families also became important members of the community, providing steady employment and financial support for local businesses.

This book provides a glimpse into the rich culture and history of Detroit's Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods, linking the growing gambling scene there with key characters and moments in local history, including Joe Louis's rise to fame and the recall of a mayor backed by the Ku Klux Klan. In succinct and engrossing chapters, George explores issues of community, race, politics, and the scandals that sprang up along the way, discovering how playing the numbers grew from a state-proclaimed crime to an encouraged legal activity.

Enduring poems that distill hope from despair, love from sorrow, and courage from ambivalence.

Winner: A Michigan Notable Book!

In this spare and elegant collection, distinguished poet Keith Taylor demonstrates his finest power of observation, watching the natural and human world go by. What Can the Matter Be? considers aging and death--of the self, of animals, of the earth--as well as place, and how rootedness in place allows a sturdy vantage point from which to see and reflect on the wider world. In poems and prose both grave and gleeful, Taylor controls the line and the lyric with experience and care. His curiosity and admiration for nature shine through in poems such as Under Their Mortal Glory and The Gleaners, while Responsibilities and That Room in Alberta contrast the minutia of individually lived moments against the global, uncontrollable decay of nature and societies. And then there are moments of sheer delight, as in Twenty-Three Nuns on Warren Road. Together, these nuanced and often surprising works urge empathy and call out in sorrow, love, and hope for the world.

The decline and resurgence of a storied Midwestern city as seen through the eyes of a seasoned journalist, union activist, and Detroit devotee.

Reflecting on his life's work as a reporter, including thirty-two years with the Detroit Free Press, journalist John Gallagher merges memoir with an insider's account of the challenges facing Detroit and other Rust Belt cities, as well as the tensions inside local newsrooms throughout the country.

Beginning with Gallagher's first job in 1974 in Chicago, with subsequent stops in Rochester and Syracuse, New York, this witty and exciting chronicle details his experiences behind the scenes, breaking major news stories over the decades that followed. From the early days when reporters called in stories on pay phones to today's revenue-generating affiliate commissions, his memoir serves as a documentary of this turbulent journalistic era. Gallagher's career intersected many notable events, including the troubled Kilpatrick administration, newspaper strikes, the federal bailout of automotive companies, the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the exceptional Grand Bargain struck to save the city--all while noting the increasingly important roles nonprofits and private companies play in city politics and newsrooms, for better and for worse.

Alongside sage insight into the difficulties and decline of traditional media, Gallagher's experience and advice inspire hope, often underscoring and celebrating the surprising and happy reinvention of heartland cities like Detroit.

A dazzling tale of sisterhood and the healing power of nature embodied in the Great Lakes.

A young girl faces turmoil when she must rise to the challenge of caring for her sister suffering a long-haul case of COVID-19. Brooding over her sister's precarious condition, Dawn seeks solace in free diving in Lake Huron, where she discovers a presence in the gray-blue waters who also knows the pain of loss and loneliness. The Lake Huron mermaid reaches out to Dawn, starting a chain of events that set the human sisters on a wild journey to the Straits of Mackinac.

A new tale in the spirit of the award-winning The Lake Michigan Mermaid, this collection of poems introduces another beautifully illustrated freshwater mermaid to the world, fluidly shifting between Dawn and the mermaid's voice. Their voices resonate with a parallel sense of longing and isolation, interrupted by the hope, compassion, and restoration found in sorority. Through this poetic adventure, Dawn and the mermaid unearth a deeper understanding of sisterhood and the significance of growing up together, making sense of the world together, and fighting to stay together.

Dan Freeman, the spook who sat by the door, is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Black Chicagoans to combat racism as Freedom Fighters in this explosive novel.

A working-class radical revolutionary's tale--penned by a prominent union leader--now available in English.

Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline.

With bold and stimulating illustrations by William Gropper, Annie Sommer Kaufman's translation brings Gold's emotionally rich narrative forward to reveal some of the most dramatic conflicts in America's suppressed Communist history. This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broide offers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists.

Local voices reveal the personal stories and cultural legacy of a once-flourishing fishing town impacted by environmental change.

A Book Club Selection by the National Museum of the Great Lakes!

Weaving together the stories and voices of residents, anglers, community leaders, and environmental workers and researchers, this compelling account details the lives and livelihoods impacted by a once-unrivaled Michigan salmon fishery. From the introduction of Chinook salmon to the Great Lakes in the late 1960s, a thriving recreational fishery industry arose in Northern Michigan, attracting thousands of anglers to small towns like Rogers City each week at its peak. By the early 2000s, a crisis loomed beneath the surface of Lake Huron as the population of a prey fish species called alewife unexpectedly collapsed, depleting the salmon's main source of food. By 2007, the salmon population had collapsed too, leaving local fisheries and their respective communities lacking a key commodity and a bid on fishery tourism.

Author, angler, and ecologist Carson Prichard artfully incorporates fisheries science and local news media into an oral history that is entertaining, rich, and genuine. Complementing an ecological understanding of events, this narrative details the significance of the fishery and its loss as experienced by the townspeople whose lives it touched.

Resistance and representation manifests in the subversive genre of the lyric essay.

Winner of the Midwest Book Award!

Lyric essayists draw on memoir, poetry, and prose to push against the arbitrary genre restrictions in creative nonfiction, opening up space not only for new forms of writing, but also new voices and a new literary canon. This anthology features some of the best lyric essays published in the last several years by prominent and emerging writers. Editors Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold situate this anthology within the ongoing work of resistance--to genre convention, literary tradition, and the confines of dominant-culture spaces. As sites of resistance, these essays are diverse and include investigations into deeply personal and political topics such as queer and trans identity, the American BIPOC experience, reproductive justice, belonging, grief, and more.

The lyric essay is always surprising; it is bold, unbound, and free. This collection highlights the lyric essay's natural capacity for representation and resistance and celebrates the form as a subversive genre that offers a mode of expression for marginalized voices. The Lyric Essay as Resistance features contemporary work by essayists including Melissa Febos, Wendy S. Walters, Torrey Peters, Jenny Boully, Crystal Wilkinson, Elissa Washuta, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and many more. Their work demonstrates the power of the lyric essay to bring about change, both on the page and in our communities.

A provocative look at historical trauma as bound, incarnated, and processed through intimate and sexual expression.

In an autotheoretical journey through bondage, domination, and intimacy, Leora Fridman uncovers how Jewish historical trauma can be challenged and explored in embodied relations. Drawing on her experiences as an American Jew in Germany, Fridman delves into BDSM practices and experimental communities from Oakland to Berlin. This work weaves personal encounters with critical analysis founded in feminist theory, queer literature, Holocaust history, and memory studies. Bound Up begins with kink and leads us through a sensual and intelligent approach to intergenerational trauma and lived politics. What kind of healing can take place in the relational and physical realm? How can intimacy contradict and complement the process of political reparations? Fridman layers a nuanced understanding of shame, responsibility, and power with explorations of cinema, contemporary art, and popular culture to shed light on topics from personal and political relationships to victimhood and blame. Both timely and timeless, this work is an address to history and the contemporary moment, relevant to Jews, diasporic scholars, and all exploring ethical relationships with history and with other humans.

Recounting a life--and language--by an esteemed scholar of African American rhetoric.

In this powerful coming-of-age memoir, author, scholar, and linguist Keith Gilyard presents a testament to the transformative power of language. From his earliest days in the segregated New York City public schools of the 1950s and '60s through his ascent in academia, the rhythm of Black America's vernacular and music provides the backdrop to Gilyard's intellectual awakening. He absorbed language through music, television, and radio, recognizing early on that his mother was a language chameleon, a woman from Georgia who never sounded Black southern. His journey intertwines personal growth with the multiplicity of language and the sociopolitical upheavals of the Cold War era and the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements. Through vibrant anecdotes and introspection, Gilyard brings his experiences and realizations to life from memories of barbershops, churches, and schools, to lessons from mentors and influencers like Ed Bullins, Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee (later Haki Madhubuti), Toni Morrison, and Paule Marshall. Each encounter brings clarity and a new lens through which to understand the world, revealing how language shapes our lives and how our lives shape language.

A dynamic kaleidoscope of story that honors the work of women.

Kin is a story and a celebration of Black womanhood, of resistance, and of perseverance--while simultaneously an indictment of American history. Kin is a tree--alive in places, broken in others--that offers shelter for women seeking respite in the midst of family-making. This tree depicts family grafted together by blood, law, or choice; its stories are voiced through blues-infused poetry, one-act plays, oral history, and reportage that are combined to form an orchestra of Black history and re-memory.

Centered on the labor of women, the movement of women through lives and time, and the work of building associations that make up the home, this book takes up the rhythms and multifarious forms of its inspiration, Cane, the 1923 novel by Jean Toomer. The roots from which it all grows are the ancestors who ensure from the spirit realm that the family remains grounded and verdant, despite the manifold threats to its health and well-being. Kin is a tribute to forebearers, a beacon to those calling homes into being, and a strata of stories for children not yet born.

A moving memoir exploring one family's legacy of African Americans with American Indian roots.

Finalist, 2024 American Legacy Book Awards, Autobiography/Memoir

Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony--only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance.

Buchanan was raised as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything she (and the rest of her family) didn't know. Tracing the arduous migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe--a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or maimed--and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse. Ultimately, Buchanan's nomadic people endured a collective identity crisis after years of constantly straddling two, then three, races. The physical, spiritual, and emotional displacement of American Indians who met and married Mixed or Black slaves and indentured servants at America's early crossroads is where this powerful journey begins.

Black Indian doesn't have answers, nor does it aim to represent every American's multi-ethnic experience. Instead, it digs as far down into this one family's history as it can go--sometimes, with a bit of discomfort. But every family has its own truth, and Buchanan's search for hers will resonate with anyone who has wondered maybe there's more than what I'm being told.

Journey to the edges of the Great Lakes in this engaging history of picnicking, wilderness, and foodways.

This stunning venture into the American picnic explores how innovation, exploitation, and the changing wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula have shaped the experience of eating outdoors. From a photo of her grandmother picnicking in 1911, to the outdoor lunches of miners and loggers, to the picnics of vacationing celebrities like Henry Ford and Ernest Hemingway, author Candice Goucher opens an aperture into historic memories of picnics past to consider what the picnic sparks in our senses and to bring the borderlands of humans and nature into view. Through pictures, postcards, paintings, and recipes, Goucher traces the creation of a modern notion of wilderness as it emerged in the North American imagination and popular culture to navigate an entangled environmental and culinary history of the Upper Peninsula. Drawing on themes from Indigenous knowledge and the African American experience to labor activism and women's history, this tantalizing chronicle offers a taste of Americana, seasoned by the changing global forces of industrialization, transportation, immigration, tourism, war, and climate.

Using an introduction to mythology by the master storyteller Ovid himself, the authors have prepared a unique teaching tool designed to achieve proficiency at Latin in one year at the college level, two years at the high school or intermediate level.

Using an introduction to mythology by the master storyteller Ovid himself, the authors have prepared a unique teaching tool designed to achieve proficiency at Latin in one year at the college level, two years at the high school or intermediate level. The volume provides students with imaginative, connected reading, beginning with introductory prose versions of Ovid's simple myth tales and progressing to the rich poetry of Ovidian Latin (with appropriate teaching aids) within forty lessons. The grammatical approach is traditional, but the central emphasis is on reading.

In each chapter the reading appears first, followed by the vocabulary, the grammar, exercises, and etymology relating to the vocabulary. The exercises begin with a group of questions in Latin (based on the reading), to be answered in Latin. Each tale is preceded by a brief discussion in English of the story and its mythological significance. The myths retold by Ovid and the attractive format are conceived to impel the student into acquiring the skill to read the author in the original language.

For additional complimentary materials on this topic, please see the accompanying text Practice, Practice: A Latin Via Ovid Workbook by Norma Goldman and Michael Rossi.

Isabelle Huppert's modernist performance style illustrated through detailed readings of key films, demonstrating her immense social impact.

Isabelle Huppert's oeuvre constitutes perhaps the most significant feminist body of work to have emerged in the wake of the second wave of the women's movement, a period of intense social change. The emphasis on autonomy, or the anti-victim, which comes to define Huppert's persona, is supported by a modernist style of performance. Huppert's refusal to surrender herself to the viewer through a character one fully knows disrupts the expectations of identification, inviting a distinctive approach to her characters. By creating a character informed by who she is, Huppert signals a process usually kept invisible. Huppert's performances invite an active form of critical reading, directing one to fill in gaps and consider the character in relation to the social world. The directors she works with welcome her collaboration; Huppert's performance, in conjunction with the mise-en-scène, generic conventions, and the film in its totality, creates the meaning of the film. Thus, Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance demonstrates its premise through close readings considering how performance must be read in tandem with the whole.

Artfully wrought poems tracing the intimate contours of self, nature, and history.

An engrossing and deeply immersive book-part love song, part monument, part elegy, wholly unforgettable. -- Roxane Gay

Immersed in the rugged beauty and complex history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, M. Bartley Seigel steers his poetry collection through the terrain of the tangible and the mythical to capture the essence of the region's mining towns and dense forests and the vastness of Lake Superior. Through a cumulation of sonnets, prose poems, and open forms, In the Bone-Cracking Cold unfolds across a year, beginning and ending in winter. Seigel carefully weaves and unravels the complexities of love and loss, the legacy of colonialism, and the deep bond between nature, people, and place. Poems like Beach Glass highlight Seigel's lyricism, while his series of sonnets and a variety of open forms reveal joyfully flexible innovation. With a voice that is both striking and unpretentious, Seigel's poems remain hopeful regardless of uncertainty and curious despite the threat of apathy, inviting readers to connect with a landscape as iconic as it is misunderstood.

Modern poems conceived first in Anishinaabemowin and then in English.

Margaret Noodin explains in the preface of her new poetry collection, What the Chickadee Knows (Gijigijigaaneshiinh Gikendaan), Whether we hear giji-giji-gaane-shii-shii or chick-a-dee-dee-dee depends on how we have been taught to listen. Our world is shaped by the sounds around us and the filter we use to turn thoughts into words. The lines and images here were conceived first in Anishinaabemowin and then in English. They are an attempt to hear and describe the world according to an Anishinaabe paradigm. The book is concerned with nature, history, tradition, and relationships, and these poems illuminate the vital place of the author's tribe both in the past and within the contemporary world.

What the Chickadee Knows is a gesture toward a future that includes Anishinaabemowin and other indigenous languages seeing growth and revitalization. This bilingual collection includes Anishinaabemowin and English, with the poems mirroring one another on facing pages. In the first part, What We Notice (E-Maaminonendamang), Noodin introduces a series of seasonal poems that invoke Anishinaabe science and philosophy. The second part, History (Gaa Ezhiwebag), offers nuanced contemporary views of Anishinaabe history. The poems build in urgency, from observations of the natural world and human connection to poems centered in powerful grief and remembrance for events spanning from the Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850, which resulted in the deaths of more than four hundred Ojibwe people, to the Standing Rock water crisis of 2016, which resulted in the prosecution of Native protesters and, ultimately, the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred land.

The intent of What the Chickadee Knows is to create a record of the contemporary Anishinaabe worldview as it is situated between the traditions of the past and as it contributes to the innovation needed for survival into the future. Readers of poetry with an interest in world languages and indigenous voices will need this book.

In this book, Smitherman makes a substantial contribution to an understanding of Black English by setting it in the larger context of Black culture and life style.

In her book, Geneva Smitherman makes a substantial contribution to an understanding of Black English by setting it in the larger context of Black culture and life style. In addition to defining Black English, by its distinctive structure and special lexicon, Smitherman argues that the Black dialect is set apart from traditional English by a rhetorical style which reflects its African origins. Smitherman also tackles the issue of Black and White attitudes toward Black English, particularly as they affect educational policy.

Documenting her insights with quotes from notable Black historical, literary and popular figures, Smitherman makes clear that Black English is as legitimate a form of speech as British, American, or Australian English.