This fall, East of Borneo will publish the first anthology of Esther McCoy’s landmark writing about Southern California. Esther McCoy (1904-1989) was a keen literary stylist and an ingenious architectural historian who chronicled mid-century modernist design as it was being created. Her 1960 book Five California Architects has long been acknowledged as an indispensable classic. As Reyner Banham observed: “No one can write about architecture in California without acknowledging her as the mother of us all." Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader (Fall 2011), edited and with an introduction by Susan Morgan, presents an unprecedented selection of McCoy’s work—innovative articles, out-of-print essays, unpublished lectures, and personal memoir—and roundly recognizes this brilliant American original, the pre-eminent voice of West Coast modernism.

From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: “Has the makings of an American classic.” —Ann Patchett Growing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver. And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds—the natural one and our own—“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.” Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut. “Magnificent . . . Readers will savor each page and the many gems of wisdom they contain.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

2018 Newbery Honor Book and Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner: a beautiful, powerful coming of age story 'Important and deeply moving' JOHN GREEN 'Timely and timeless' JACQUELINE WOODSON Jade is a girl striving for success in a world that seems like it's trying to break her. She knows she needs to take every opportunity that comes her way. And she has: every day Jade rides the bus away from her friends to a private school where she feels like an outsider, but where she has plenty of opportunities. But some opportunities Jade could do without, like the mentor programme for 'at-risk' girls. Just because her mentor is black doesn't mean she understands where Jade is coming from. Why is Jade always seen as someone to fix? But with a college scholarship promised at the end of it, how can Jade say no? Jade feels like her life is made up of hundreds of conflicting pieces. Will it ever fit together? Will she ever find her place in the world? More than anything, Jade just wants the opportunity to be real, to make a difference. NPR's Best Books of 2017 A 2017 New York Public Library Best Teen Book of the Year Chicago Public Library's Best Books of 2017 A School Library Journal Best Book of 2017 Kirkus Reviews' Best Teen Books of 2017 2018 Josette Frank Award Winner

An examination of Lee Lozano's greatest experiment in art and endurance—a major work of art that might not exist at all. The artist Lee Lozano (1930–1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano's Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave. And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozano's most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artist's entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano's act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of Dropout Piece in the context of the artist's practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.

In No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, American architect Michael Maltzan traces the transformations that have taken place in the city of Los Angeles from the early nineties to the current state of a modern metropolis and its relationship with its changing surroundings. In a series of conversations on real estate speculation and future urban development, issues such as identity, infrastructure, landscape, resources, site density, urban experience, political structure, commerce, and community are introduced to supplement traditional models of urban development. This is meant to facilitate defining how the "City of Angels" has to respond to turn of the tide in the identity of the metropolitan region, one that has recently become much more complex. Contributors to the volume are Iwan Baan, Catherine Opie, Sarah Whiting, Charles Waldheim, Matthew Coolidge, Geoff Manaugh, Mirko Zardini, Edward Soja, James Flanigan, Charles Jencks, and Qingyun Ma.

"The five architects - Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, and R.M. Schindler - whose work and lives are presented here were seminal figures in American architecture. As Californians they were less influenced than their Eastern contemporaries by the European styles that prevailed in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, and each of them devised an original style that has had a profound effect on younger generations of American architects."--The inside cover

International bestseller The Break is the first in Katherena Vermette's heart-rending, utterly immersive Indigenous family saga that includes The Strangers and The Circle. When Stella, a young Mé tis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break — a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house — she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime. But when they arrive, no one is there; scuff marks in the compacted snow are the only sign anything may have happened. In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim — police, family, and friends — tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night. Lou, a social worker, grapples with the departure of her live-in boyfriend. Cheryl, an artist, mourns the premature death of her sister Rain. Paulina, a single mother, struggles to trust her new partner. Phoenix, a homeless teenager, is released from a youth detention centre. Officer Scott, a Mé tis policeman, feels caught between two worlds as he patrols the city. Through their various perspectives a larger, more comprehensive story about lives of the residents in Winnipeg' s North End is exposed.