Melville House Publishing

In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle School, a military-style boarding school for Indians in Pennsylvania, founded and run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt considers himself a champion of Native Americans. His motto, ''To save the man, we must kill the Indian,'' is severely enforced in both classroom and dormitory: Speak only English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white. As the young students navigate surviving the school, they begin to hear rumours of a ''ghost dance'' amongst the tribes of the west - a ceremonial dance aimed at restoring the Native People to power, and running the invaders off their land. As the hope and promise of the ghost dance sweeps across the Great Plains, cynical newspapers seize upon the story to whip up panic among local whites. The US government responds by deploying troops onto lands that had been granted to the Indians. It is an act that seems certain to end in slaughter. As news of these developments reaches Carlisle, each student, no matter what their tribe, must make a choice: to follow the white man''s path, or be true to their own way of life...''(A) powerful and sincere depiction of Native American history''

Renowned culture critic Ron Rosenbaum discovered not only the world-changing music of early Bob Dylan, but the man himself in the 1960s, when Rosenbaum was a young journalist living in Greenwich Village and working for the legendary alt-newspaper, The Village Voice. Rosenbaum, in fact, lived around the corner from Dylan, and shared mutual friends. It was the time, and the place, where an essential idea of Dylan''s character was formed - that of the whip-smart, angry, too-cool-for-school icon, a kind of James Dean in denim. The raspy voice, not to mention the brilliantly cutting lyricism, only somehow added to his cultural dangerousness. Dylan has had many changes of character since then, and throughout, Dylan would tell people, ''I''m not that person anymore,'' whatever previous character he was asked about. In a probing and personal literary appreciation, Rosenbaum deep-dives into Dylan''s lyrics and writings and his infrequent interviews (including Rosenbaum''s own 10-day interview of Dylan in 1978) from throughout his career. What sparked the various conversions and adaptations? And what precisely did Dylan''s Jewishness, his mysticism, and his visits with psychics have to do with it all? As Dylan continues to tour the world nonstop with his band and continues to compose new songs, while refusing to play old songs the same way, Rosenbaum offers a moving and involving portrait of an icon who may have been more constant than it appeared.

From ancient times to the modern world, the idea of the Faustian bargain - the exchange of one''s soul in return for untold riches and power - has exerted a magnetic pull upon our collective imaginations. Scholar Ed Simon takes us on a historical tour of the Faustian bargain, from biblical themes to the Charlie Daniels Band, and illustrates how the instinct for sacrificing our principles in exchange for power models all kinds of social ills, from colonialism to nuclear warfare, and even social media, climate change, and AI. In doing so, Simon conveys just how much the Faustian bargain shows us about power and evil... and about ourselves.

When a famous conceptual artist''s installation project suddenly vanishes, the sinister aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal. Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and gallerists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art. Rose''s characters are, as one of the puts it, in search of ''a gateway to the Un, the Ex, the Outer, the Under, the Anti, the Non, the Other Place, the Not,'' and it is those mysterious Other Places where C. D. Rose weaves his surreal magic. We Live Here Now spins a dazzling web that conveys, with eerie precision, the sheer strangeness of what it is like to be alive today.

Peck and Al have a good thing going. The two brothers own a bar and a hardware store and make a comfortable living. They also launder money for a criminal organization. Everything is perfectly fine until Peck begins to suspect that his brother is going to betray him to the local District Attorney. Things get even more complicated between them when Al''s hard drive with millions of dollars in Crypto goes missing - Peck was the only other person with access. What starts out as a family squabble turns into an international battle between competing crime organizations, moving from small town New England to San Francisco to Mexico. Along the way the brothers encounter betrayal, double-dealing, kidnapping, and ultimately, revenge.

Award-winning journalist John Beck recounts China''s persecution of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and its relentless pursuit of the few who escaped beyond its borders. Through intertwined literary narratives combined with snippets of original source material, including official directives and speeches, he pieces together the individual stories of what consecutive American administrations have described as genocide. The narrative moves from China to Kazakhstan, Turkey and the US, incorporating the tensions, discrimination, and occasional violence that characterised life in Xinjiang for decades. Then the dismantling of rights and escalating repression under President Xi Jinping that quickly accelerated into a crackdown of unprecedented scope and brutality. We follow 4 characters: a Kazakh writer and an Uyghur nurse who survived re-education camps before ultimately escaping abroad, a human rights advocate involved in securing their release and, an inadvertent exile spied on by Chinese authorities as his family back home was used as leverage against him. In their stories, the book explores identity, dehumanization, and censorship, the force of literature in dark times, and an all-pervasive apparatus of repression able to exist within miles of the White House.

In 2012, the far right Golden Dawn were building a significant street presence in Greece. Over the previous decade they had grown from a tiny group of neofascist brawlers to a formidable vigilante force responsible for multiples murders, street fights and shootings. Golden Dawn became a significant parliamentary presence and used it as a platform to escalate their terror campaigns against migrants and leftist across the country. They also became an inspiration for far right groups across Europe and the Americas. Strickland first arrived in Greece in 2015 to cover the European refugee crisis, eventually moving there in 2017. With an eye for journalistic detail that recalls Orwell''s reportage in Spain, Strickland traces the antecedents of Golden Dawn to the dark years of Nazi occupation and subsequent military dictatorship and looks at the post 2008 economic crisis that emboldened the far right. You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave provides an intimate portrait of the stories of migrants and activists resisting the growth of the far-right, as well as a vivid and shrewd analysis of the evolving political landscape in Greece and Europe.

The evidence from the investigation includes grand jury testimony from 55 witnesses, interviews by Smith''s criminal investigators with over 250 people, photographs, information from electronic devices and online records - including Trump''s social media account - and more. ''Our work rested upon the fundamental value of our democracy that we exist as ''a government of laws, and not of men...'' Simply put: the Department of Justice''s guiding mandate, which my Office strove to uphold, is that power, politics, influence, status, wealth, fear, and favour should not impede justice under the law... My Office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less... But for Mr. Trump''s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.'' - From Jack Smith''s Cover Letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland

Can we ever really change the past, or the future? What truth do we owe our families? What truth do we owe ourselves? In FLUX, a brilliant debut in the vein of William Gibson''s Neuromancer and Ling Ma''s Severance, Jinwoo Chong introduces us to three characters - Bo, Brandon and Blue - who are tortured by these questions as their lives spin out of control. After 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, his white father, attempting to hold their lives together, begins to gradually retreat from the family. 28-year-old Brandon loses his job at a legacy magazine publisher and is offered a new position. Confused to find himself in an apartment he does not recognize, and an office he sometimes cannot remember leaving, he comes to suspect that something far more sinister is happening behind the walls. 48-year-old Blue participates in a television expose of Flux, a failed bioelectric tech start-up whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him. Blue, who can only speak with the aid of cybernetic implants, stalks his old manager while holding his estranged family at arms-length. Intertwined with the saga of a once-iconic 80s detective show, Raider, whose star has fallen after decades of concealed abuse, the lives of Bo, Brandon and Blue intersect with each other, to the extent that it becomes clear that their lives are more interconnected and interdependent than the reader could have ever imagined.

James Earl Carter Jr. came from a background of farming and military service to forge an unlikely political career, first as governor of Georgia, and then as the 39th president of the United States. The interviews collected here - four of them never published in book form before - span the arc of Carter''s long career as a politician, a public servant, and a citizen diplomat. They range from an early joust with conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. to his final interview, a moving joint conversation with his wife Rosalynn on the occasion of their 75th wedding anniversary.. and, of course, including the notorious 1976 Playboy interview wherein Carter remarked that he had ''committed adultery in my heart many times.'' The result is a fascinating look into the mind and soul of one of our most admirable and principled presidents ever.

In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle school - a military-style boarding school for Indians run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt''s motto, ''Kill the Indian, Save the Man'' is enforced in the classroom as well as the dorm rooms: speak English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white. While the students navigate survival, they hear rumours of a sweeping tribal lands reservations in the west - the ''ghost dance,'' whereby desperate Native Americans engaged in frenzied dancing and chanting hoping it will cause the buffalo to return, the Indian dead to rise, and the white people to disappear. Local whites panic, and the government sends in troops to keep the reservations under control. When legendary medicine man Sitting Bull is killed by native police working for the government troops, each Carlisle resident is faced with the question: Whose side are you on? And what will you risk to gain your freedom?

bell hooks was a prolific, trailblazing author, feminist, social activist, cultural critic, and professor. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell used her pen name to center attention on her ideas and to honor her courageous great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. hooks’s unflinching dedication to her work carved deep grooves for the feminist and anti-racist movements. In this collection of 7 interviews, stretching from early in her career until her last interview, she discusses feminism, the complexity of rap music and masculinity, her relationship to Buddhism, the “politic of domination,” sexuality, and love and the importance of communication across cultural borders. Whether she was sparking controversy on campuses or facing criticism from contemporaries, hooks relentlessly challenged herself and those around her, inserted herself into the tensions of the cultural moment, and anchored herself with love.

Kurt Cobain burst into American consciousness with a vengeance with the release of Nevermind, an instant classic that defined a sound and a generation. Three years later, he was dead of suicide, leaving a meteoric career and a cultural influence that would never wane. As the lead singer and guitarist of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain changed American music as few musicians ever have. His instantly identifiable raspy croon, his slash-and-burn guitar playing, and his corrosive and poetic lyrics made him a hero to a generation of lost souls. In interviews Cobain was funny, thoughtful, sarcastic, impassioned, and even kind. This collection of interviews provides a look at a man who was too often misunderstood.

Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity . . . doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Odell sees our attention as the most precious--and overdrawn--resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent.

From the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Ecstasy of Influence comes a new collection of essays that celebrates a life spent in books More Alive and Less Lonely collects over a decade of Jonathan Lethem's finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appreciations of forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp critical essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries. Only Lethem, with his love of cult favorites and the canon alike, can write with equal insight into classic writers like Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, modern masters like Lorrie Moore and Thomas Pynchon, graphic novelist Chester Brown, and science fiction outlier Philip K. Dick. Sharing his infectious love for books of all kinds, More Alive and Less Lonely is a bracing voyage of literary discovery and an essential addition to every booklover's shelf.

An academic and activist takes an entertaining look at the Nordic welfare state and shows us how we, too, can have a far more equal and just economic system In America, many Democrats invoke Scandinavia as a promised land of equality, while most Republicans fear it as a hotbed of liberty-threatening socialism. But the left and right can usually agree on one thing: that the Nordic system is impossible to replicate here at home. The US is too big, or too individualistic, or too puritan, or too . . . something. Whatever the reason, it's impossible, and we shouldn't bother to try. Enter George Lakey. A longtime activist and academic, Lakey has spent decades studying the economies of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland, and in"Viking Economics, "he reveals that Scandinavia's deep commitment to the welfare state is much more recent than we think. Not long ago, Scandinavia was a far more unequal place, with a much weaker commitment to the social welfare of its citizens. There's nothing inherently Scandinavian about greater equality . . . so why not try it here? "Viking Economics"is more fun and entertaining than any economics book you've ever read. And, very possibly, more convincing! As he ranges from twentieth-century Norwegian history to the details of Swedish childcare policies, Lakey never loses his sense of humor or his expansive, generous vision of a better, more equal future. By explaining that even Scandinavia's grandest experiments in social equality are rooted in recent political struggles, Lakey explains shows how we can do it, too conventional wisdom be damned."