Torbjorn Rodland is to photography what the Pet Shop Boys are to pop: a master of the delicately orchestrated cliche overload, a surcharge of the too obvious, too cute or too inane, played to the point where, drained of all trace of common sense, it suggests a new sense of silence, of mystery. Rodland has a knack for producing images that make you ask what are, in fact, appropriate motives for art photography: Images of single audio or video cassettes? Bleak black-and-white renditions of countryside churches? George W. Bush's favorite ice cream? A black banana? Girls and pets, pets and girls? He creates a complex of readings that inveigles the viewer into spending time with each single image, to reconsider its meaning and relevance. White Planet, Black Heart makes no excuses as it reinvents the romantic impulses of popular culture. This is Rodland's first book.

Writer and adventurer Leslie Anthony has spent his life on two planks, racing down hills, searching for the next perfect ride. His real baptism, however, began in the early nineties when Alaska emerged as the ski world’s Next Big Thing. Steep faces and vast tracks of powder snow, were captured on film and beamed to audiences around the world. The result was a freeskiing revolution. With insight and humor, White Planet, traces an arc through the new ski culture, in a rock ‘n’ roll adventure that follows a diaspora to far-flung corners of the globe. Along the way, Anthony introduces many of the daredevils, visionaries and entrepreneurs who are bringing the sport to such unexpected places as Mexico, China, Lebanon and India.

Christian Gauss Award Shortlist Winner of the ASAP Book Prize A Literary Hub Book of the Year “Makes the case that the gimmick...is of tremendous critical value...Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Ngai exposes capitalism’s tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks.” —New Statesman “One of the most creative humanities scholars working today...My god, it’s so good.” —Literary Hub “Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life...Highly original.” —4Columns “It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing...is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.” —Bookforum “A page turner.” —American Literary History Deeply objectionable and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention). When we call something a gimmick, we register misgivings that suggest broader anxieties about value, money, and time, making the gimmick a hallmark of capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.

In book three of the Curse Workers series, “the perfect end to this gem of a trilogy” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), trust is a priceless commodity and the lines between right and wrong become dangerously blurred. Cassel Sharpe knows he’s been used as an assassin, but he’s trying to put all that behind him. He’s trying to be good, even though he grew up in a family of con artists and cheating comes as easily as breathing to him. He’s trying to do the right thing. And he’s trying to convince himself that working for the government is the right choice, even though he’s been raised to believe they are the enemy of all curse workers. But with a mother on the lam, the girl he loves about to take her place in the Mob, and all new secrets coming to light, what’s right and what’s wrong become increasingly hard to tell apart. When the Feds ask him to do the one thing he said he would never do again, he starts to wonder if they really are the good guys, or if it’s all a con. And if it is, Cassel may have to make his biggest gamble yet—on love. Love is dangerous and trust is priceless in Holly Black’s “powerful, edgy, dark” fantasy series (Publishers Weekly).

A series of poems describes all the baffling changes at home and at school in twelve-year-old Joylin's transition from tomboy basketball player to not-quite-girly girl.

“Riveting. . . a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters.”—New York Times Book Review This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit known as “the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’s so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the country’s most dangerous location at its most dangerous time. Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks, suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring a chronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heart platoon—1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion—descended, over their year-long tour of duty, into a tailspin of poor discipline, substance abuse, and brutality. Four 1st Platoon soldiers would perpetrate one of the most heinous war crimes U.S. forces have committed during the Iraq War—the rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the cold-blooded execution of her and her family. Three other 1st Platoon soldiers would be overrun at a remote outpost—one killed immediately and two taken from the scene, their mutilated corpses found days later booby-trapped with explosives. Black Hearts is an unflinching account of the epic, tragic deployment of 1st Platoon. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with Black Heart soldiers and first-hand reporting from the Triangle of Death, Black Hearts is a timeless story about men in combat and the fragility of character in the savage crucible of warfare. But it is also a timely warning of new dangers emerging in the way American soldiers are led on the battlefields of the twenty-first century.

A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist Shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition. The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives. Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order. Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere. Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood is a call to action for repairing what white supremacy still breaks. Includes historical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history of residential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racial oppression.