Opinions is a collection of Roxane Gay's best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics--politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more--with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay's devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.
The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members with a mission to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies. To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a two-term battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the extent of states’ rights.
Jasmine Yang arrives in New York City from her rural Chinese village without money or family support, fleeing a controlling husband, on a desperate search for the daughter who was taken from her at birth, another female casualty of China's controversial One Child Policy. Meanwhile, publishing executive Rebecca Whitney seems to have it all: a prestigious family name and the wealth that comes with it, a high-powered career, a beautiful home, a handsome husband, and an adopted Chinese daughter she adores. But when an industry scandal threatens to jeopardize not only Rebecca's job but her marriage, this perfect world begins to crumble and her role in her own family is called into question.
Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other?
In three seasons, Patrick Mahomes has won a Super Bowl and competed in another, earned the titles of First Team All-Pro, NFL Offensive Player of the Year, and league MVP, and turned the Kansas City Chiefs from famed playoff failures into the most successful team in the NFL. With his unique and groundbreaking playing style, and winning personality both on and off the field, Mahomes has become a truly transcendent quarterback in a journey that mirrors and accentuates the rebirth of the once swingin’ cow town of Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City and Mahomes represent the story of the midwestern American city—how they grew, how they shaped the country, how the sport of football came to mean so much to them, how they failed, and how they are changing.
In Myth America, historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of historians to provide textured analysis that explains what we get wrong about the past. Drawing on their immense knowledge of scholarship and their own primary research, these contributors provide correctives to the ways conservatives distort history to serve the needs of their anti-democratic agenda. Taken together, the essays unveil how corporate interests and right-wing politicians use bad history to fan the flames of white resentment and unravel America's social safety net.
After his estranged father’s mysterious death, Charlie Remick returns to Seattle to help with the funeral. His father left him two parting gifts: the keys to the family record store and a strange black case containing four antique records that, according to legend, can open a gate to the land of the dead. When Charlie, his sister, and their two friends play the records, they unwittingly open a floodgate of unspeakable horror. As the darkness descends, they are stalked by a relentless, malevolent force and see the dead everywhere they turn. The only person who can help them is Charlie’s resurrected father, who knows firsthand the awesome power the records have unleashed.
Cassie Greenberg loves being an artist, but it’s a tough way to make a living. On the brink of eviction, she’s desperate when she finds a too-good-to-be-true apartment in a beautiful Chicago neighborhood. Her new roommate Frederick J. Fitzwilliam is far from normal. He sleeps all day, is out at night on business, and talks like he walked out of a regency romance novel. He doesn’t look half bad shirtless. But when Cassie finds bags of blood in the fridge that definitely weren’t there earlier, Frederick has to come clean. Cassie’s sexy new roommate is a vampire. And he has a proposition for her.
At age six, Sasha DiGiulian stepped into a climbing gym for the first time and was competing within a year. With a fierce love for the climb and incredible natural talent, Sasha soon won her first National Sport Climbing Championship at only seventeen, and a year later took the title of World Champion. But under the accolades, she was just another young woman learning how to handle the intense scrutiny of social media and dealing with body dysmorphia, all while quietly facing a potentially career-ending injury.
Piecemeal presents a way for cooks to create a flexible repertoire of meals without doing a ton of work at one time. Prepare the component when you have some time, then use it to enhance or center meals throughout the week, even on your most hectic evenings. The three recipes that pair with each component are fully prepared, from start to finish, in as little as 5 minutes and no more than 1 hour (for a project recipe with a bit more prep).
Massachusetts, 1954. Tess, Caroline, Evie, and Merritt become fast friends in the sanctuary of Alice Campbell's monthly reading club at The Cambridge Bookshop, where they escape the pressures of being newly independent college women in a world that seems to want to keep them in the kitchen. But they each embody very different personalities, and when a member of the group finds herself shattered, everything they know about each other--and themselves--will be called into question.
Bestselling advice columnist Vandy Guru built her career teaching others how to live honestly and courageously, but after the loss of her husband, Vandy's public veneer can barely conceal her grief. Aspiring choreographer Mallika Guru signs up for a genetic study to find out why she's so different from her accomplished family. But the results reveal her whole life to be a lie, and Rani seems to be the only one who knows the truth. Rani Parekh sacrificed everything for Vandy once. But to hold on to the life she's rebuilt, she must confront her troubled history and face Vandy and Mallika.
In Berkeley, California, in 1944, Homicide Detective Al Sullivan has just left the swanky Claremont Hotel after a drink in the bar when presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson is assassinated in one of the rooms upstairs. Strangely, Sullivan’s investigation brings up the specter of another tragedy at the Claremont ten years earlier: the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the Bainbridge family. The many threads of the case keep leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, now adults: Iris’s sister, Isabella, and her cousins Cassie and Nicole. Determined not to let anything distract him from the truth, Sullivan follows his investigation to its devastating conclusion.
It's rarely a quiet day for the Thursday Murder Club. Shocking news reaches them—an old friend has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. The gang's search leads them into the antiques business, where the tricks of the trade are as old as the objects themselves. As they encounter drug dealers, art forgers, and online fraudsters—as well as heartache close to home—Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim have no idea whom to trust. With the body count rising, the clock ticking down, and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out?
Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill.
When acclaimed naturalist Sy Montgomery and wildlife artist Matt Patterson arrive at Turtle Rescue League, they are greeted by hundreds of turtles recovering from injury and illness. Endangered by cars and highways, pollution and poachers, these turtles--with wounds so severe that even veterinarians would have dismissed them as fatal--are given a second chance at life. Sy and Matt immerse themselves in the delicate work of protecting turtle nests, incubating eggs, rescuing sea turtles, and releasing hatchlings to their homes in the wild. We follow the snapping turtle Fire Chief on his astonishing journey as he battles against injuries incurred by a truck
Celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored.
Drawing on mythology, history, and literature--alongside his trademark wit and charm--Tyson and StarTalk senior producer Lindsey Nyx Walker bring planetary science down to Earth and principles of astrophysics within reach. In this entertaining book, illustrated with vivid photographs and art, readers travel with him through space and time, starting with the Big Bang and voyaging to the far reaches of the universe and beyond. Along the way, science greets pop culture as Tyson explains the triumphs--and bloopers--in Hollywood's blockbusters: all part of an entertaining ride through the cosmos.
Traveling through the unforgiving landscape of a shattered nation in the midst of Reconstruction, former Union soldier John braves winter storms and confronts desperate people in pursuit of his quarry, the brutal murderer of John's beloved sister and her family. Untethered, single-minded in purpose, he will not be deterred. Not by the U.S. Marshal who threatens to arrest him for murder should he succeed. And not by Victoria Reavis, the telegraphist aiding him in his death-driven quest, yet hoping he'll choose to embrace a life with her instead.
After striking out on her own as a teen mom, Madi Price is forced to return to her hometown of Brandywine, Virginia, with her seventeen-year-old daughter. She scrapes together a living as a palm reader at the local farmers market where she reconnects with old high school flame Henry McCabe whose infant son, Skyler, went missing five years ago. Everyone in town is sure Skyler is dead, but when Madi reads Henry’s palm, she’s haunted by strange and disturbing visions that suggest otherwise. As she follows the thread of these visions, Madi discovers a terrifying nightmare waiting at the center of the labyrinth—and it’s coming for everyone she holds dear.
In Small Teaching, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of small but powerful changes that make a big difference―many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These are simple interventions that can be integrated into pre-existing techniques, along with clear descriptions of how to do so. Inside, you’ll find brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or student communication. These small tweaks will bring your classroom into alignment with the latest evidence in cognitive research.
Inspired by a personal moment of profound love and generosity, Trent Dalton, bestselling author and one of Australia's finest journalists, spent two months in 2021 speaking to people from all walks of life, asking them one simple and direct question: 'Can you please tell me a love story?' The result is an immensely warm, poignant, funny and moving book about love in all its guises, including observations, reflections and stories of people falling into love, falling out of love, and never letting go of the loved ones in their hearts. A heartfelt, deep, wise and tingly tribute to the greatest thing we will never understand and the only thing we will ever really need: love.
When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street, they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. But Margaret is staying. It’s her house. After four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun.
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. When Andrew Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? In a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .
ASSISTANT WANTED: Notorious, high-ranking villain seeks loyal, levelheaded assistant for unspecified office duties, supporting staff for random mayhem and terror, and other Dark Things In General. Discretion a must. Excellent benefits. With ailing family to support, Evie Sage's employment status isn't just important, it's vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn’s most infamous Villain results in a job offer—naturally, she says yes. No job is perfect, of course, but even less so when you develop a teeny crush on your terrifying, temperamental, and undeniably hot boss. Don’t find evil so attractive, Evie.
Vivvy Bouchet was only ten when she saved a boy’s life by making an impossible prediction. A wunderkind scientist, she just wants to be left in peace to scan the desert Texas sky with her telescopes in one of the darkest places on earth. When the boy she saved, now a Fort Worth cop, begs for her help on a cold case, she can’t turn him down. Conspiracy theorists feed the frenzy that Lizzie Solomon is still buried in the crumbling walls of a Victorian mansion while her mother, convicted of killing her, loudly proclaims her innocence. Vivvy falls into the mystery of why Lizzie has never been found.
Journalist and scholar Stephanie Saldaña, who lived in Syria before the war, sets out on a journey across nine countries to meet refugees and learn what they salvaged from the ruins when they escaped. Now, in the narratives of six extraordinary women and men, from Mt. Sinjar to Aleppo to Lesvos to Amsterdam, we discover that the little things matter a great deal. Saldaña introduces us to a woman who saved her city in a dress, a musician who saved his stories in songs, and a couple who rebuilt their destroyed pharmacy even as the city around them fell apart. Together they provide a window into a religiously diverse corner of the Middle East on the edge of unraveling, and the people keeping it alive with their stories.
In this collection of insightful and hilarious essays, Thomas moves back to his perpetually misunderstood hometown of Baltimore (a place he never wanted to return, even to be buried) and behaving completely out of character. They say you can’t go home again, but what if you and home have changed beyond recognition? From attending his twenty-year high school reunion and discovering another person’s face on his name badge, to splattering an urgent care room with blood à la The Shining, to being terrorized by a plague of gay frogs who’ve overtaken his backyard, Thomas provides the nitty, and sometimes the gritty, details of wrestling with the life he thought he’d left behind while trying to establish a new one.
Modern Lunch is the new lunchtime hero for time-strapped, budget-conscious, and salad-fatigued people everywhere. Focusing on healthy, quick--and, yes, Instagrammable--recipes with minimal effort, Allison takes readers on a feasting journey inspired by fresh flavors and ingredients, and her travels. With dazzling recipes and photography, and smart tips on hacking the lunchtime game, Modern Lunch proves that a delicious, exciting, and inventive lunch can be achievable for any appetite, wallet, and busy schedule--and maybe even spark a little office envy.
Many years ago, Queen Penelope's husband Odysseus sailed to war with Troy and never came home. In his absence, Penelope uses all her cunning to keep the peace until the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra. Orestes' hands are stained with his mother's blood. Wracked with guilt, he is slowly losing his mind. Elektra has brought him to Ithaca to keep him safe. His uncle Menelaus, the battle-hungry king of Sparta, longs for Orestes' throne. If he can seize it, no one will be safe from his violent whims. Trapped between two mad kings, Penelope fights to keep her home from being crushed by a war that stretches from Mycenae and Sparta to the summit of Mount Olympus itself.
Kensington, Philadelphia, is distinguished only by its poverty. It is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized families in the United States. This is the story of their coming-of-age, which is beset by violence—the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the drug trade. In Kensington, eighteenth birthdays are not rites of passage but statistical miracles.
Jane is unhappy. There's only ever been one person she cared about, one person who truly understood her: Thalia. Jane's best and only friend nearly a decade ago during their Creative Writing days at Oxford. But then one night ruined everything.Thalia disappeared without a trace, and Jane has been unable to find her since. Until now. Because there she is, her name at the top of the New York Times bestseller list: A Most Pleasant Death by Thalia Ashcroft. Then Thalia posts on her website about attending a book convention in New York City in a week—“Can’t wait to see you there!”—Jane can’t wait either. This time, she will do things right. Jane won’t lose Thalia again.
There's a princess trapped in a tower. This isn't her story. Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once she's an adult, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. But nothing with fairies is ever simple. Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles. He's heard there's a curse here that needs breaking, but it's a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold.
When the United States invades Mexico in 1846, Nena and Nestor are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Néstor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros. But the shock of their reunion—and Nena’s rage at Néstor for seemingly abandoning her long ago—is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh. Unless Nena and Néstor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn.
Each of us began life as a single cell. From this humble origin, we embarked on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster. Yet, amazingly, we reached our destination intact, emerging as dazzlingly complex, exquisitely engineered assemblages of trillions of cells. This metamorphosis constitutes one of nature's most spectacular yet commonplace magic tricks--and one of its most coveted secrets. In From One Cell, physician and researcher Ben Stanger offers a breathtaking glimpse into what scientists are discovering about how life and the body take shape, and how these revelations stand to revolutionize medicine and the future of human health.
Three of the nation's top scholars - known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America - turn their attention from the country's poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America's most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.
Since childhood, night watchman Dave Torres has battled terrors and nightmares. Sometimes those battles leak into his waking life, with disastrous consequences for those he loves. The morning after Independence Day, traffic signals blink from red to green over empty intersections. Storefronts remain locked up tight. Every radio station whispers static. And all over town, there are bodies, lying right dead right where they slept. Dave—along with his ex-girlfriend, Katie, his best friend, Matteo, and Linda, a nurse he’s just met—struggle to unravel the mystery before sleep overtakes them all. Now Dave and his friends must straddle the liminal boundary between life and death as they fight to save everyone they’ve ever loved—and to keep their eyes open.
John Muir, the most famous naturalist in American history, protected Yosemite, co-founded the Sierra Club, and is sometimes called the Father of the National Parks. His idealistic belief in the spiritual benefits of holistic natural systems led him to a philosophy of preserving wilderness unimpaired. Gifford Pinchot founded the U.S. Forest Service and advised his friend Theodore Roosevelt on environmental policy. Pinchot’s pragmatic belief in professional management led him to a philosophy of sustainably conserving natural resources. Although many people today think of public lands as an American birthright, their very existence was then in doubt, and dependent on a merger of the talents of these two men.
Rosie the Riveter meets A League of Their Own in New York Times bestselling novelist Jennifer Chiaverini's lively and illuminating novel about the "munitionettes" who built bombs in Britain's arsenals during World War I, risking their lives for the war effort and discovering camaraderie and courage on the soccer pitch.
When her husband's car is found abandoned and on fire--in the middle of a rainstorm--Eve Roth becomes the police's number one suspect. Eve has no idea why her husband disappeared. Jonah Kendrick appears on their doorstep with a theory. He's seen Eve's husband, bound and bleeding in a barn. Claiming to be a psychic detective who dreams of the lost, Jonah has helped find missing people his entire life. As a firm believer in the laws of nature, Eve rejects anything to do with psychics, but their investigations soon collide. As the temperature drops and Iowa turns to ice, Eve and Jonah race across the state to discover what happened to the people they've lost.
Three days prior to [a living] wake, this novel traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, the Dominican Republic and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo's inimitable voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces--one family's journey through their history helping them better navigate all that is to come.
Zeynep Ton is here to show you: why good jobs combined with strong operations lead to higher productivity and increased competitiveness for the business. And why, more than ever, in a world with tight labor markets, failing to provide good jobs will catch up with you and threaten your business. With expertise drawn from time spent on the front lines with workers and their managers, she knows what's keeping most companies mired in mediocrity and how implementing a good jobs system makes them more competitive, more resilient, and more likely to attract and retain loyal customers and dedicated employees.
In this quietly radical book, science journalist Erica Gies introduces us to innovators in what she calls the Slow Water movement who start by asking a revolutionary question: What does water want? Using close observation, historical research, and cutting-edge science, these experts in hydrology, restoration ecology, engineering, and urban planning are already transforming our relationship with water.
Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that: 1) European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; 2) Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; 3) The first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; 4) California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; 5) The Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; 6) Twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy.
In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots—fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled “HAP,” he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio–a past spent hunting humans. When Hap unwittingly alerts robots from Gio’s former life to their whereabouts, Gio is captured and taken back to his old laboratory in the City of Electric Dreams. So together, the rest of Vic’s assembled family must journey across an unforgiving and otherworldly country to rescue Gio from decommission, or worse, reprogramming.
At the cusp of graduation, Katie Shaw had big dreams, a devoted boyfriend, and a little brother she protected fiercely. Until the day a violent stranger changed the fate of her family forever. Years later, still unable to live down the guilt surrounding what happened to her brother, Chris, and now with a child of her own to protect, Katie gets the phone call: Chris has gone missing and needs his big sister once more. Meanwhile, Detective Laurence Page is facing a particularly gruesome crime. All the leads point back to two old cases: the gruesome attack on teenager Christopher Shaw, and the despicable crimes of a notorious serial killer who, legend had it, could see the future.
When the U.S. began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, Homeira Qaderi was marked for death at the hands of the Taliban as a celebrated author, academic, and champion for women's liberation. As evacuation planes departed above, Homeira tried and failed to secure escape for her and her eight-year-old son, Siawash, along with her parents and the rest of their family. Meanwhile, a young American diplomat named Sam Aronson learned that the CIA had established a secret entrance into the airport and started bringing families directly through. On the last day of the evacuation, Sam was contacted by Homeira's literary agent, who persuaded him to help her escape. Together they braved gunfire by Afghan Army soldiers. To enter the airport, Homeira and Siawash would have to leave behind their family and everything they had ever known.
"Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other alive during Trump, fascism, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future."
Disabled journalist Ben Mattlin lifts the veil on a thriving disability culture—from social media to high fashion, Hollywood to Broadway—showing how the politics of beauty for those with marginalized body types and facial features is sparking widespread change. He also explores the movement’s shortcomings, particularly the erasure of nonwhite and LGBTQIA+ people that helped give rise to Disability Justice. He delves into systemic ableism in health care, the right-to-die movement, institutionalization, and the scourge of subminimum-wage labor that some call legalized slavery. And he finds glimmers of hope in how disabled people never give up their fight for parity and fair play.
There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with. Michelle Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress.
Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.
Kari James, Urban Native, is a fan of heavy metal, ripped jeans, Stephen King novels, and dive bars. She spends most of her time at her favorite spot in Denver, a bar called White Horse. There, she tries her best to ignore her past and the questions surrounding her mother who abandoned her when she was just two years old. But soon after her cousin Debby brings her a traditional bracelet that once belonged to Kari’s mother, Kari starts seeing disturbing visions of her mother and a mysterious creature. When the visions refuse to go away, Kari must uncover what really happened to her mother all those years ago.