A debut collection of love poems that resist subjection and ask how we might live together outside of capitalism, providing for each other through intimate acts of care and struggle

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead "Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

"Rich people, poor people, religious people, artists, musicians, everyone could become a hero at [Sanle's] Volta studio." --Florent Mazzoleni, The New York Times The studio photographs of Sory Sanlé and his participation in the vibrant music scene in Bobo-Dioulasso give us a picture of a cosmopolitan city shaping its independent identity in the 1960s through to the '80s, the heyday of West African independence movements. Vintage photographs, seven-inch record sleeves and studio accessories are all reproduced in the most extensive portrayal to date of photography and music as key popular art forms with local, national and international resonance. With the colorful full title of Volta Photo: Starring Sory Sanlé and the Good People of Bobo-Dioulasso in the Small but Musically Mighty African Country of Burkina Faso, this book also includes essays on photography and sound in Africa as well as a CD with hit songs by Volta Jazz, Echo del Africa Nacional and other star bands. Born in Burkina Faso in 1943, Sory Sanlé runs a portrait studio in Bobo-Dioulasso. He opened his business in 1960, the year that Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) declared independence from France. For many years, Sanlé also organized music parties around the city; he served as the official photographer for Volta Jazz, a key popular music orchestra in the 1960s and '70s.

One of today’s most original thinkers on gender offers a provocative take on the current feminist movement, exploring “desire as the force shaping our identifies, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition” (Bookforum). “[Females] is always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart.” —Vice Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race—men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she’s just projecting. A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the “second wave” of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.

Brice Dellsperger's Body Double is the first monograph ever published on the artist's already cult film productions, with a long essay by art historian Marie Canet that addresses filmic remake, but also issues of models, gender politics, and representational chaos. Consisting in a large body of unpublished images, the book also invites the reader backstage--as in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, after which this book is modeled--into the Dellspergian camp film factory, to get a closer look at the characters and personas that populate the Body Double series, and that are creations both of the artist and of his main performer and muse, Jean-Luc Verna. Co-published with Toastink Press