Adult Nonfiction

From the historic streets of Charleston, where flooding tides now rise with alarming frequency, Pulitzer Prize finalist Tony Bartelme takes readers deep into the heart of the climate crisis. With the eye of an investigative reporter and the soul of a storyteller, Bartelme makes the invisible visible-whether it's carbon dioxide drifting from a tailpipe, disappearing plankton beneath the waves, or the subtle collapse of ecosystems we barely understand.

Rising Waters is a story of science, wonder, and urgency. Traveling from the Lowcountry to Greenland, the Sahara, and beyond, Bartelme introduces readers to NASA scientists, Inuit shamans, coral whisperers, and chemical detectives, all working to decode the planet's fever. And he always brings it back home-to the marshes, reefs, and communities of the American Southeast, where the battle between water and land is no longer possible to ignore.

This book is a call to see clearly, think deeply, and act meaningfully-before more of our world slips beneath the surface.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“A vivid account of a remarkable life.” —The Washington Post

In this comprehensive, revelatory biography—fifteen years of interviews and research in the making—historian Jane Sherron De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence.

At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs is her Jewish background, specifically the concept of tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to “repair the world,” with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II.

Ruth’s journey begins with her mother, who died tragically young but whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism. It stretches from Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School to Cornell University to Harvard and Columbia Law Schools; to becoming one of the first female law professors in the country and having to fight for equal pay and hide her second pregnancy to avoid losing her job; to becoming the director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and arguing momentous anti-sex discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to become the second woman on the Court, where her crucial decisions and dissents are still making history. Intimately, personably told, this biography offers unprecedented insight into a pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence, American society, and our American character and spirit will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.

REVISED AND UPDATED WITH A NEW AFTERWORD

Harm reduction is one of the most important movements of the 20th century, and yet a compilation of its critical stories and voices was, until now, seemingly nowhere to be found. Saving Our Own Lives, an anthology of essays from long-time organizer Shira Hassan, fills this gap by telling the stories of how sex workers, people of color, queer folks, and trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit people are building systems of change and support outside the societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation. This is a collective story of Bad Date sheets passed between sex workers in Portland, leading to the identification of a serial killer. It is the story of clean syringes, “liberated” from empathetic doctors offices and passed between punks in squats in the East Village by women of color, and the early AIDS activists who made sure that everyone knew how to use them. It is the story of transwomen of color, street-based sex workers, who created shared housing to ensure that young people had safe places to sleep. It is the story of Black Panthers creating a free breakfast program to feed a revolution and the Young Lords taking over Lincoln Park Hospital in the Bronx to demand and ultimately create community-accessible drug treatment programs.
At a political moment when Liberatory Harm Reduction and mutual aid are more important than ever, this book serves as an inspiration and a catalyst for radical transformation of our world.

Seahorses is a groundbreaking anthology that shares the experiences of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people who have navigated pregnancy.

What can trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people expect from pregnancy? What roles do supportive friends, family members, and care providers play? What are some of the fabulous family structures folks are creating?

This collection brings together a wide spectrum of voices to share unique stories about navigating family building, pregnancy, fertility treatments, conception, loss, healthcare, abortion, childbirth, the early days of parenting, and the intersections of legal, political, and cultural contexts. Alongside individual stories, this book features collaborative round-table discussions where contributors address shared questions about personal journeys, community, advice and information, and pregnancy care.

Seahorses is both a vital resource for trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive communities and an invitation for readers of all genders to get a glimpse of trans joy and resilience that will stick with you and inspire you to love a little deeper. This book is an essential addition to conversations about gender, pregnancy, and family.

Contributors include Amari Ayomide, Amber Hickey, Felix Aster, g k somers, Halo Dawn, Jacoby Ballard, J. Workman, Jamie Cayley, Jess F Gutfreund, Kara Johnson Martone, Kathy Slaughter, LÍfthrasir Green, Aakash Kishore, Simon Knaphus, Simone Kolysh, Tom, and Zillah Rose.

Unlock the secrets of successful Southern gardening with this comprehensive guide that tackles the unique challenges of growing in the South's distinctive climate. From mastering the region's infamous humidity to understanding soil types and proper drainage, this detailed handbook covers everything you need to know. The book spans 16 information-packed chapters addressing crucial topics like plant selection, soil health, watering techniques, pest management, and garden design. Perfect for newcomers to Southern gardening or experienced gardeners seeking to refine their skills, it provides practical knowledge gained from real-world experience. Learn essential techniques for pruning, propagation, and creating beautiful shade gardens, while discovering how to work with the South's six distinct growing seasons. Whether you're tending a small balcony garden or managing a sprawling country plot, this thorough guide offers tested wisdom to help you cultivate a thriving Southern garden.

A prize-winning sociologist’s radical vision of the social power of erotic life. 

“Fearless, candid, and bold, Sex in Public is necessary reading for anyone interested in imagining a different kind of world, one that approaches eroticism and freedom as fundamentally linked.” —Jennifer C. Nash, author of Black Feminism Reimagined

Whether we are contending with shame, healing from trauma, or experimenting in the bedroom, there is a common tendency to cast anything sexual as a problem best solved in private. Fears of judgment fuel an air of oppression around something that should be liberating. According to feminist sociologist Angela Jones, we must reject this solitary vision of desire to claim the pleasure fundamental to our freedom.

Sex in Public offers a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding sexuality. Sex is never strictly personal, but relentlessly social, shaped by power relations, and possessing outsized power of its own. To make this case, Jones charts the inner and interrelated workings of our desires, behaviors, identities, relationships, and communities. 

Guiding readers through field-leading sociology, sexual science, and the voices of sexual rule-breakers worldwide, Jones pinpoints the repressive forces that distort eroticism’s power, but also reveals our means of breaking free. Championing a rebellious spirit that uplifts bodily autonomy, justice, and care, Sex in Public makes a tantalizing promise: better sex lives and empowerment await, if only we dare to know our sexualities fully, reimagining society as we do.

A vision of the first decade of socialism in the United States. The diverse multinational working class has achieved political supremacy and is actively eliminating bigotry, racism, and national oppression as it expands economic, social, and political democracy.

“This courageous and visionary book provides a realistic and realizable socialist alternative to our decaying predatory capitalist civilization! It grounds a grand socialist reconstruction of the present US regime in our present sufferings and struggles, especially in the crucial role of an awakening of working peoples! Genuine hope trumps despair in this prophetic text!”
—DR. CORNEL WEST

"Every project that is fed up with the failed capitalist system must develop a vision for socialism that builds the confidence of people that such a post-capitalist world is possible. Sharp clarity of thought based on experiments by people around the world defines this crucial book, a roadmap for our work."
—VIJAY PRASHAD

"This book is a great political and pedagogical tool for everyone who dares to imagine the end of capitalism and oppressive structures in the United States. It comes at a crucial time and should be utilized by organizers as a conversation starter within every community in the US to explore the concrete ways in which socialism can and must be constructed as a real social, economic and political project."
—CLAUDIA DE LA CRUZ

I was a quiet boy with loud dreams. But dreams don't grow well in a house full of fear.

As a gay child in a home where silence meant survival, I learned to vanish. For years, I kept my voice hidden - not just from the world, but from myself.

Then came music. Drag. Glitter. Applause.

And, for a time, freedom. Onstage, I could be someone bigger than the pain. For twenty years, I sang and performed my way into pieces of joy I never thought I'd know.

But trauma has its own rhythm.

In the quiet of the covid years, the past came roaring back. I lost my voice again - this time to adulthood pain, depression, and the unhealed echoes of my childhood. Stillness and Survival is a story of silence and expression, queerness and survival, collapse and return. It is about finding your own voice - again and again - even when the world tries to take it away.

This is not just a memoir.

It's a reclaiming.

The definitive account of the Stonewall Riots, the first gay rights march, and the LGBTQ activists at the center of the movement. 

“Martin Duberman is a national treasure.”—Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, was raided by police. But instead of responding with the typical compliance the NYPD expected, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. The five days of rioting that ensued changed forever the face of gay and lesbian life.

In Stonewall, renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman tells the full story of this pivotal moment in history. With riveting narrative skill, he re-creates those revolutionary, sweltering nights in vivid detail through the lives of six people who were drawn into the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Their stories combine to form an unforgettable portrait of the repression that led up to the riots, which culminates when they triumphantly participate in the first gay rights march of 1970, the roots of today's pride marches. 

Fifty years after the riots, Stonewall remains a rare work that evokes with a human touch an event in history that still profoundly affects life today.

An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman lurches through a city skyline begging Steve to stop her. A twisted queen of sorority row crashes her convertible trying to escape her queer shame. A suave butch emcee introduces the sequined and feathered stars of the era’s most celebrated drag revue. For an unsettled and retrenching postwar America, these startling figures betrayed the failure of promised consensus and appeasing conformity. They could also be cruel, painful, and disciplinary jokes. It turns out that an obsession with managing gender and female sexuality after the war would hardly contain them. On the contrary, it spread their campy manifestations throughout mainstream culture.
 
Offering the first major consideration of lesbian camp in American popular culture, Suffering Sappho! traces a larger-than-life lesbian menace across midcentury media forms to propose five prototypical queer icons—the sicko, the monster, the spinster, the Amazon, and the rebel. On the pages of comics and sensational pulp fiction and the dramas of television and drive-in movies, Barbara Jane Brickman discovers evidence not just of campy sexual deviants but of troubling female performers, whose failures could be epic but whose subversive potential could inspire.

Supplemental images of interest related to this title: George and Lomas; Connie Minerva; Cat On Hot Tin; and Beulah and Oriole.

By: Caitlin Cass (Author), 2024, Hardback

New Yorker contributing cartoonist Caitlin Cass traces the fight for suffrage in the U.S. from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This intersectional history of women and voting rights chronicles the suffrage movement’s triumphs, setbacks, and problematic aspects.

Best Art Books of 2024, Hyperallergic

“She put in her work, but there’s so much left to do.” Begun in the Antebellum era, the song of suffrage was a rallying cry across the nation that would persist over a century. Capturing the spirit of this refrain, New Yorker contributing cartoonist Caitlin Cass pens a sweeping history of women’s suffrage in the U.S. ― a kaleidoscopic story akin to a triumphant and mournful protest song that spans decades and echoes into the present.

In Suffrage Song, Cass takes a critical, intersectional approach to the movement’s history ― celebrating the pivotal, hard-fought battles for voting rights while also laying bare the racist compromises suffrage leaders made along the way. She explores the multigenerational arc of the movement, humanizing key historical figures from the early days of the suffrage fight (Susan B. Anthony, Frances Watkins Harper), to the dawn of the “New Women” (Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell), to the Civil Rights era (Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker). Additionally, this book sheds light on less chronicled figures such as Zitkala-Ša and Mabel Ping Hua-Lee, whose stories reveal the complex racial dynamics that haunt this history.

The interiors include 4 foldouts, most notably a 4-page map detailing where women could vote in the US in 1919, leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Impeccably researched and rendered in an engaging and accessible comics style, Suffrage Song is sure to spark discussion on the vital issue of voting rights that continues to resonate today.

Full-color illustrations throughout

By: Shuli Branson (Editor), Raven Hudson (Editor), Bry Reed (Editor), Mimi Thi Nguyen (Foreword)

Surviving the Future is a collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition—of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheteronormative society—this collection refuses the bribes of inclusion in a system built on our expendability. Though the mainstream media saturates us with the boring norms of queer representation (with a recent focus on trans visibility), the writers in this book ditch false hope to imagine collective visions of liberation that tell different stories, build alternate worlds, and refuse the legacies of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. The work curated in this book spans Black queer life in the time of COVID-19 and uprising, assimilation and pinkwashing settler colonial projects, subversive and deviant forms of representation, building anarchist trans/queer infrastructures, and more. Contributors include Che Gossett, Yasmin Nair, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Adrian Shanker, Kitty Stryker, Toshio Meronek, and more.

Edited by Sarah A. Rogers and Baker A. Rogers, 2025, paperback

First of its kind, this outstanding collection features 12 testimonies from trans men of diverse backgrounds who chronicle their journeys of trauma, struggle and survival in America’s prison industrial complex. Original and unabridged, the voices compiled here tell in very personal and relatable terms how folks living on the margins of gender, race, ethnicity, and class become ensnared in one of America’s most insidious systems designed to exploit human vulnerabilities for profit. While these men have been victimized, they live today with the hope, dignity, and wisdom that their journeys have gifted them.

"This collection shines a glaring light on the oft-ignored lived experiences of transgender men caught up in the web of the criminal legal system. Through a collection of first-person narratives, a diverse group of formerly incarcerated men reveal the myriad traumas that contributed to their offending, defined their carceral experiences, and shaped their post-incarceration lives. Harrowing stories of violence and injustice are offered alongside tales of resilience and fortitude, painting a picture that reveals the complexities and depth of both the prison industrial complex as well as the men that find themselves at the center of it."
Emily Lenning, Professor of Criminal Justice, Fayetteville State University

"This collection is a must-read for anyone committed to understanding the intersections of trans masculine identity, criminalization, and resistance. Through deeply personal and moving testimonies, this book reveals the pervasive injustices faced by trans men navigating social stigma, family trauma, institutional violence, systemic racism and discrimination. At the same time, these powerful accounts illuminate the ways that trans men survive hostile social conditions and find ways to build community, enact self-determination, and resist oppression."
S. Lamble, Professor of Criminology and Queer Theory and Co-founder of Bent Bars Project.

"Stories that will fry your eyeballs combined with a humanity and an unwillingness to be broken by a broken system that shines through every chapter. The voices of trans men who have survived with their genders and dignity intact adds a long missing perspective on trans-over incarceration in the PIC."
Riki Wilchins, When Texas Came for Our Kids: How Evangelical Extremists Launched a War on Transgender Teens

Through essays, short stories, and poems, Swagger documents the butch experience by highlighting butch stories and butch voices, which often go unheard or are misunderstood. Books can be mirrors and windows-reflecting our lives back to us or opening them up to others.

The writers featured in the pages inside have bravely shared their stories and their hearts with the intent that this anthology be both.