Books You May Have Missed 2022: Adult Nonfiction

A comprehensive history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century "Exhaustively researched and finely written."-Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times "An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience. . . . This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny...

"Amanda Prowse has built a bestselling career on the lives of fictional women. Now she turns the pen on her own life. I guess the first question to ask is, what kind of woman am I? Well, you know those women who saunter into a room, immaculately coiffed and primped from head to toe? If you look behind her, you’ll see me. From her childhood, where there was no blueprint for success, to building a career as a bestselling novelist against all...

A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world. A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world...

"A ravishing volume of poems that explore appetite, desire, and our gratitude for one another and the vanishing world. Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection. In lucid, musically rich poems, she appeals to a dwindling natural world and summons moments from the lives of literary forbearers-Milton's visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust-unveiling...

Benoit Cohen dives into his new life as a cab driver with the idea of turning it into a screenplay for a future film, but the material he collects from this social experiment marks him deeply, leading down unsuspected paths. The project transforms into an autobiographical novel interspersed with reflections on the creative process.

Publisher Annotation: Nationally best-selling author Julissa Arce interweaves her own experiences with cultural commentary in a powerful polemic against the myth that assimilation leads to happiness and belonging for immigrants in America. Instead, she calls for a celebration of our uniqueness, our origins, our heritage, and the beauty of the differences that actually make us Americans. 208pp., 75K

"Contemporary research on Black Americans has focused mainly on the plight of the poor and paid little attention to internal variation and status differentiation in the broader Black community. In Divergent Currents, the authors explore the backgrounds and experiences of an understudied subset of the Black population in the U.S.: the Black Elite. Although the descendants of enslaved Africans, the children of immigrants, and the offspring of intermarried...

"The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prizewinning poet. In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives. The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings-a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family-finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity....