A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • This magisterial, intimate look at Black womanhood "follows three women whose various traumas haunt them literally and metaphorically, as it explores what it means to be a Black woman in America today" (The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice). A middle-aged woman feed slots at a secret back-room parlor. A new mother descends into a devastating postpartum depression, wracked with the fear that she is unable to protect her children. A daughter returns home to join the other women in her family waging spiritual combat with the ghosts of their past. An Autobiography of Skin is a dazzling and masterful portrait of interconnected generations in the South from a singular new voice, offering a raw and tender view into the interior lives of Black women. It is at once a powerful look at how experiences are carried inside the body, inside the flesh and skin, and a joyous testament to how healing can be found within—in love, mercy, gratitude, and freedom.

The first volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, author of ‘The Grass is Singing’ and ‘The Golden Notebook’, and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Winner of the James Tait Black Prize 1994.

In The Skin, Curzio Malaparte extends the great fresco of European society he began in Kaputt. There the scene was Eastern Europe, here it is Italy during the years from 1943 to 1945; instead of Germans, the invaders are the American armed forces. In all the literature that derives from the Second World War, there is no other book that so brilliantly or so woundingly presents triumphant American innocence against the background of the European experience of destruction and moral collapse.

Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead is Frank Meeink's raw telling of his descent into America's Nazi underground and his ultimate triumph over drugs and hatred. Frank's violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate, while addiction made him easy prey for a small group of skinhead gang recruiters. By 16 he had become one of the most notorious skinhead gang leaders on the East Coast and by 18 he was doing hard time. Teamed up with African-American players in a prison football league, Frank learned to question his hatred, and after being paroled he defected from the white supremac.

National Book Award Longlist TIME's 10 Best YA and Children's Books of 2020 NPR's Best Book of 2020 Shelf Awareness's Best Books of 2020 Publishers Weekly's Big Indie Books of Fall Amazon's Best Book of the Month AICL Best YA Books of 2020 CSMCL Best Multicultural Children's Books of 2020 PRAISE "Stirring.... Raw and moving." —TIME "Beautiful imagery and with words that soar and scald." —The Buffalo News "Easily one of the best books to be published in 2020. The kind of book bound to save lives." —LitHub "A powerful narrative about identity and belonging." —Paste Magazine FOUR STARRED REVIEWS ★ "Timely and important." —Booklist, starred review ★ "Searing yet dryly funny." —The Bulletin, starred review ★ "Exceptional." —Shelf-Awareness, starred review ★ "Captivating." —School Library Journal, starred review The term "Apple" is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly "red on the outside, white on the inside." In APPLE (SKIN TO THE CORE), Eric Gansworth tells his story, the story of his family—of Onondaga among Tuscaroras—of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

"There was very fine, an elegant pain, hardly a pain at all, like the swift and fleeting burn of a drop of hot candle wax...Then the blood welled up and began to distort the pure, stark edges of my delicately wrought wound. "The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh." There are an estimated two to three million "cutters" in America, but experts warn that, as with anorexia, this could be just the tip of the iceberg of those affected by this little-known disorder. Cutting has only just begun to enter public consciousness as a dangerous affliction that tends to take hold of adolescent girls and can last, hidden and untreated, well into adulthood. Caroline Kettlewell is an intelligent woman with a promising career and a family. She is also a former cutter, and the first person to tell her own story about living with and overcoming the disorder. She grew up on the campus of a boys' boarding school where her father taught. As she entered adolescence, the combination of a family where frank discussion was avoided and life in what seemed like a fishbowl, where she and her sister were practically the only girls the students ever saw, became unbearable for Caroline. She discovered that the only way to find relief from overpowering feelings of self-consciousness, discomfort, and alienation was to physically hurt herself. She began cutting her arms and legs in the seventh grade, and continued into her twenties. Why would a rational person resort to such extreme measures? How did she recognize and overcome her problem? In a memoir startling for its honesty, humor, and poignancy, Caroline Kettlewell offers a clear-eyed account of her own struggle to survive this debilitating affliction.

The unflinching story of a professional oboist who finds order and beauty in music as her personal life threatens to destroy her. Music was everything for Marcia Butler. Growing up in an emotionally desolate home with an abusive father and a distant mother, she devoted herself to the discipline and rigor of the oboe, and quickly became a young prodigy on the rise in New York City's competitive music scene. But haunted by troubling childhood memories while balancing the challenges of a busy life as a working musician, Marcia succumbed to dangerous men, drugs and self-destruction. In her darkest moments, she asked the hardest question of all: Could music truly save her life? A memoir of startling honesty and subtle, profound beauty, The Skin Above My Knee is the story of a woman finding strength in her creative gifts and artistic destiny. Filled with vivid portraits of 1970's New York City, and fascinating insights into the intensity and precision necessary for a career in professional music, this is more than a narrative of a brilliant musician struggling to make it big in the big city. It is the story of a survivor. One of 2017's 35 over 35 One of the Washington Post's Top 10 Classical Music Moments of the Year