The New Press

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A powerful, in-depth look at the imprisonment of immigrants, addressing the intersection of immigration and the criminal justice system, with a new epilogue by the author

“Argues compellingly that immigrant advocates shouldn’t content themselves with debates about how many thousands of immigrants to lock up, or other minor tweaks.” —Gus Bova, Texas Observer

For most of America’s history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws.

Migrating to Prison takes a hard look at the immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. A leading voice for immigration reform, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explores the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s and looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law.

Now with an epilogue that brings it into the Biden administration, Migrating to Prison is an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of who belongs in the United States.

NOW IN PAPERBACK  The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian

“An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein

A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, the hardcover edition of The Privatization of Everything elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book on a Best Nonfiction list, calling it “a far-reaching, comprehensible, and necessary book,” and Publishers Weekly dubbed it a “persuasive takedown of the idea that the private sector knows best.”

From Diane Ravitch (“an important new book about the dangers of privatization”) to Heather McGhee (“a well-researched call to action”), the rave reviews mirror the expansive nature of the book itself, covering the impact of privatization on every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military. Cohen and Mikaelian also demonstrate how citizens can—and are—wresting back what is ours: A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the state of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code.

“Enlightening and sobering” (Rosanne Cash), The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a wide range of issues and offers what Cash calls “a progressive voice with a firm eye on justice [that] can carefully parse out complex issues for those of us who take pride in citizenship.”

How do underdogs, facing far stronger opponents, sometimes win? In the tradition of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce’s Practical Radicals offers winning strategies, history, and theory for a new generation of activists.

Based on interviews with leading organizers, Practical Radicals combines “the hard-earned wisdom of our movement ancestors, the rigorous theory of serious practitioners and academics and the functional tools organizers need to spring into action” (In These Times). Incorporating stories of organizations and movements that have won, including Make the Road NY, the St. Paul Federation of Educators, the welfare rights movement, the Working Families Party, New Georgia Project, Occupy Wall Street, 350.org, the Fight for 15, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Practical Radicals “takes inspiration from successful social movements to identify tactics that pay off.” (The Guardian).

With a sweeping new afterword by the authors addressing the challenges of 2025 and beyond, the authors explore how the seven strategies the book highlights can provide a toolkit for underdogs looking both to resist authoritarianism and to win alternatives. At a time of immense uncertainty inside the United States, “this crucial book is for everyone who cares about the future of racial, gender, and economic justice and the future of democracy.” (Dorian Warren, president of Community Change).

For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored one critical question: what can economic and cultural loss do to pride? What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, in a work called “one of the year’s most important books” by Counterpunch, when the people of a hard-hit, long-ignored, region are grappling with a loss of pride while being confronted with a powerful political appeal—one that makes it feel “stolen”?

Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where the city is reeling: coal jobs have left, crushing poverty persists, and a deadly drug crisis has struck the region. Although Pikeville was in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district’s population voted for Donald Trump.

Hochschild, “a curious and skilled listener” (Financial Times), focuses on a group swept up in the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. In small churches, hillside hollers, roadside diners, trailer parks, and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, she introduces us to unforgettable people, and offers an original lens through which to see them and the wider world.

The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South, but award-winning and New York Times–bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly highlights the book’s “stellar” writing, and reveals that King of the North “makes a persuasive case that Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign for racial justice has been significantly misrepresented.”

In this bold retelling, “Theoharis depicts a complex, radical King whose fight against Northern racism alternately inspires and infuriates” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). King emerges here as someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who—despite his flaws—depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.

In a book Democracy Now! calls “a major reexamination of the civil rights leader,” King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today.

A new generation of Americans has declared that another world is possible. And yet, the stubborn problems of inequality, climate change, and declining health seem as intractable as ever. Where might different answers lie?

Intrepid journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata has traveled around the world, from Costa Rica to Uganda, and Estonia to Singapore, uncovering how “other nations have successfully addressed social conditions that continue to vex America” (The New York Times Book Review). The product of in-depth reporting, including interviews with senior government officials, activists, industry professionals, and the ordinary people affected by their policies, Another World Is Possible was named a LitHub Most Anticipated title of 2025, which highlighted that it “offers international solutions to American problems.”

From Singapore’s approach to providing affordable public housing, to Costa Rica’s biodiversity law, to Finland’s universal public school system, in each instance Hakimi Zapata provides a clear-eyed assessment of the history, challenges, cost-effectiveness, and real-world impact of these programs. The result is a compelling, frame-shifting account of how we might live differently and create a safer, healthier, more sustainable future.

A “distinctive” (Library Journal) work of keen analysis as well as enormous heart and optimism, Another World Is Possible is destined to crack the mold of current debates, offering “a fascinating and inspiring glimpse of how rational governance operates” (Publishers Weekly).

Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family’s past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society. “Stylistically nuanced and psychologically astute,” Playing in the Light is as powerful in its depiction of Marion’s personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa’s bizarre, brutal history (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Wicomb’s majestic novel Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality telling the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the “Father of South African Poetry.”

In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the fictional biographer summons the spirit of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave; Hinza, Pringle’s adopted black South African son; and seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando), Sir Nicholas Green, all of them joining the author to help her write her book. Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle’s life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.

Set mostly in the South African city of Cape Town and the Scottish city of Glasgow, this collection of short stories straddles two worlds, translating each character’s experience and life from one culture to another. With an array of expertly drawn characters, twelve tales explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family, and the fraught yet often intimate relations between those who serve and those who are served.

Full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments of startling insight, The One That Got Away showcases this award–winning author at the height of her ability.

In October, acclaimed fiction writer Zoë Wicomb tells the story of Mercia Murray, a South African woman of color in the midst of a difficult homecoming. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-six years, Mercia returns to South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by alcoholism and buried secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her South African roots, Mercia recollects the past and assesses the present with a keen sense of irony. October is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.

Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zoë Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers—such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee—and by reviewers as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman).

“The first-ever sweeping history of how artists and organizers have worked together to advance an array of social movements,” (The GIA Reader), Ken Grossinger’s updated paperback edition of his celebrated Art Works “truly illustrates how art can be a weapon, an organizing tool, and a mirror for activists and organizers to view their own work” (The Progressive) .

Distilling lessons and insights from grassroots leaders and luminaries such as Ai Weiwei, Courtland Cox, and Shepard Fairey, and drawing from historical and present-day examples—including Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Legacy Museum, and the Art for Justice Fund—Grossinger “tells the complicated and fascinating story of the recent history of activism and the arts and points to new ways in which the arts, pop culture, and institutions are aligning themselves to address issues of violence, beauty, capitalism, and justice” (Laurie Anderson).

With a new preface and a postscript describing how to combat authorianism in this new political era, along with new illustrations Art Works offers a rich tapestry of tactics and successes that speak directly to the challenges and needs of today’s activists and artists.

In this concise, incisive guide, that Kirkus Reviews describes as a “call to action,” celebrated journalist Jennifer C. Berkshire and renowned education scholar Jack Schneider expose what’s driving these coordinated attacks and explain why schools are now so vulnerable. They tackle complex topics in “compact and accessible terms” (Jacobin), unpacking everything from book-banning trends and voucher schemes to the real stakes behind the “parents’ rights” rhetoric.

The Education Wars is more than an alarm; it’s a vital handbook for parents, educators, and citizens who care about the future of public education. Packed with timely information and actionable insights, this book charts a powerful “path for protecting the fundamentals of what makes public schools so important” (Booklist).

On the day fifteen-year-old Diamond from the Bay Area stopped going to school she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school. A decade later, Black girls continue to be the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system.

On the tenth anniversary of its publication, Pushout, Monique Couvson’s groundbreaking book, hailed by educator Lisa Delpit as “imperative reading,” remains as urgent and necessary as ever. Couvson chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose complex lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Painting “a chilling picture of the plight of Black girls and women today” (The Atlantic), Couvson exposes a world of confined potential, and supports the rising movement to challenge the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures.

Pushout’s message is more relevant than ever. This tenth-anniversary edition is truly a book “for everyone who cares about children” (The Washington Post), serving as both a call to action and a testament to the lives and futures we must protect.

For the past two decades, the Marguerite Casey Foundation has dedicated its resources to building a movement of low-income families advocating on their own behalf. Now, founding president Luz Vega-Marquis offers a history of the foundation, intertwined with her own history as a Nicaraguan immigrant whose family was exiled, plunged into poverty, and forced to start over in the United States. Ask, Listen, Act is riveting in its description of the evolution of an iconoclastic foundation and of Vega-Marquis herself as she rises from a bookkeeper to become the first Latina to lead a major national foundation.

In a powerful counter to the blame-laden narrative we tell ourselves about poverty in this nation, Vega-Marquis explores how the foundation has worked to eliminate poverty through intensive listening, movement building, and the leadership of families who have experienced poverty firsthand. The founder of Hispanics in Philanthropy and a member of numerous philanthropic boards, Vega-Marquis offers a vivid look at the worlds of philanthropy, social change, and, most importantly, the families we are most likely to ignore.

Beautifully written and filled with moving stories, Ask, Listen, Act explores the world of philanthropy from the perspective of someone who is at once an insider and an outsider, offering illuminating insights for all.

Jacques Books is a bespoke imprint of The New Press, dedicated to publishing culturally significant books that might not otherwise garner the attention of a trade publisher.

The 2024 U.S. presidential election reverberated internationally, a global event whose outcome has already reshaped trade, migration, security, and rising authoritarianism across the world. Inside the United States, we are swamped by a news cycle; but how does the wider world see and interpret what is happening under Trump?

In How We See It, twelve of some of the most talented and insightful journalists from around the world probe their home countries’ complex relationship with the United States—and especially, how this has swerved under the new administration. A diverse, international cast of writers examines:

• how Turkey’s recent history helps us understand America’s slide into autocracy
• how Argentina’s century-long obsession with the dollar has changed under Trump
• the new wave of anti-American tourism activism in Italy
• what Elon Musk gets wrong about South Africa
• how Taiwan is navigating the uncertainty of Trump’s response in the event of a Chinese invasion
• the newly fraught view of the U.S. among Canadians

Featuring all new pieces commissioned by The Dial, the celebrated magazine of culture, politics, and ideas from around the world, How We See It both shifts and expands our frame of reference, our self-awareness, and our understanding of how much our world has changed since the fateful election of 2024.

In Silver Repetition, Lily Wang’s endless, perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return, combine to create a formally inventive coming-of-age novel. Told from the perspective of a young Asian immigrant thoughtfully navigating dual identities, grief, family, migration, and modern relationships, this is a novel infused with the rich language of a poet.

Having left China for Canada with her parents as a child, Yuè Yuè yearns to discover who she is as she nears the end of her undergraduate degree and starts a new relationship. In urgent poetic fragments, she seeks common ground with her Canadian-born younger sister and grieves the beloved cousin she lost touch with back home. After Yuè Yuè receives a call from a girl making accusations, her date ghosts her. Meanwhile, her mother’s illness advances like snow. On a walk in the woods, Yuè Yuè sees a little girl digging in the mud, but when she peeks behind the curtain of black hair, her own face haunts her.

In a moving reunion, Yuè Yuè’s cousin comes to visit and everyone is caught, laughing, in the rain. The novel shows how, despite the weight of grief, isolation, and difference, even the most delicate family bonds can knit together tightly enough for the future to overcome the past.

A stunningly original and timely collection that makes the case for "socialism, American style"

It's a strange day when a New York Times conservative columnist is forced to admit that the left is winning, but as David Brooks wrote recently, "the American left is on the cusp of a great victory." Among Americans under thirty, 43 percent had a favorable view of socialism, while only 32 percent had a favorable view of capitalism. Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans questioned the fundamental tenets of capitalism and expressed openness to a socialist alternative.

We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style offers a road map to making this alternative a reality, giving readers a practical vision of a future that is more democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable. The book includes a crash course in the history and practice of democratic socialism, a vivid picture of what democratic socialism in America might look like in practice, and compelling proposals for how to get there from the age of Trump and beyond.

With contributions from some of the nation's leading political activists and analysts, We Own the Future articulates a clear and uncompromising view from the left—a perfectly timed book that will appeal to a wide audience hungry for change.

Table of Contents

"A timely, intensely intimate, and relevant exposé." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The Pulitzer Prize finalist's powerful examination of the hidden stories of workers overlooked by #MeToo

Apple orchards in bucolic Washington State. Office parks in Southern California under cover of night. The home of an elderly man in Miami. These are some of the workplaces where women have suffered brutal sexual assaults and shocking harassment at the hands of their employers, often with little or no official recourse. In this heartrending but ultimately inspiring tale, investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Bernice Yeung exposes the epidemic of sexual violence levied against the low-wage workers largely overlooked by #MeToo, and charts their quest for justice.

In a Day's Work reveals the underbelly of hidden economies teeming with employers who are in the practice of taking advantage of immigrant women. But it also tells a timely story of resistance, introducing a group of courageous allies who challenge the status quo of violations alongside aggrieved workers—and win.

Now part of the eponymous HBO docuseries written and directed by Raoul Peck, “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a brilliant intellectual history of Europe’s genocidal colonization of Africa—and the terrible myths and lies that it spawned

“A book of stunning range and near genius. . . . The catastrophic consequences of European imperialism are made palpable in the personal progress of the author, a late-twentieth-century pilgrim in Africa. Lindqvist’s astonishing connections across time and cultures, combined with a marvelous economy of prose, leave the reader appalled, reflective, and grateful.” —David Levering Lewis

“Exterminate All the Brutes,” Sven Lindqvist’s widely acclaimed masterpiece, is a searching examination of Europe’s dark history in Africa and the origins of genocide. Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his point of departure, the award-winning Swedish author takes us on a haunting tour through the colonial past, interwoven with a modern-day travelogue. Retracing the steps of European explorers, missionaries, politicians, and historians in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward, “Exterminate All the Brutes” exposes the roots of genocide in Africa through Lindqvist’s own journey through the Saharan desert. As he shows, fantasies not merely of white superiority but of actual extermination—“cleansing” the earth of the so-called lesser races—deeply informed the colonialism and racist ideology that ultimately culminated in Europe’s own Holocaust.

Conquerors’ stories are the ones that inform the self-mythology of the West—whereas the lives and stories of those displaced, enslaved, or killed are too often ignored and forgotten. “Exterminate All the Brutes” forces a crucial reckoning with a past that still echoes in our collective psyche—a reckoning that compels us to acknowledge the exploitation and brutality at the heart of our modern, globalized society. As Adam Hochschild has written, “Lindqvist’s work leaves you changed.”

Winner, Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award

The groundbreaking book on race in schools that has become an essential handbook for teachers working to create antiracist classrooms

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and nationwide protests against police brutality, it’s never been more important for educators and parents to ensure they’re cultivating antiracist learning environments. For years, teachers who recognized the importance of cultural responsiveness in the classroom have turned to Everyday Antiracism, the essential compendium of advice from some of America’s leading educators.

Pathbreaking contributors—among them Beverly Daniel Tatum, Sonia Nieto, and Pedro Noguera—describe concrete ways to analyze classroom interactions that may or may not be “racial,” deal with racial inequality and “diversity,” and teach to high standards across racial lines. Topics range from using racial incidents as teachable moments and responding to the “n-word” to valuing students’ home worlds, dealing daily with achievement gaps, and helping parents fight ethnic and racial misconceptions about their children. Questions following each essay prompt readers to examine and discuss everyday issues of race and opportunity in their own classrooms and schools.

Everyday Antiracism is an essential tool for all of the educators and parents who are determined to create not only more just classrooms, but also a more just world.

Contributors include:

• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
• Prudence Carter
• Thea Abu El-Haj
• Ron Ferguson
• Patricia Gándara
• Ian Haney López
• Vivian Louie
• Maria Ong
• Paul Ongtooguk
• Christine Sleeter
• Angela Valenzuela

The award-winning “radically original” (The Atlantic) restorative justice leader, whose work the Washington Post has called “totally sensible and totally revolutionary,” grapples with the problem of violent crime in the movement for prison abolition

A National Book Foundation Literature for Justice honoree

A Kirkus “Best Book of 2019 to Fight Racism and Xenophobia”

Winner of the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice Journalism Award

Finalist for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice

In a book Democracy Now! calls a “complete overhaul of the way we’ve been taught to think about crime, punishment, and justice,” Danielle Sered, the executive director of Common Justice and renowned expert on violence, offers pragmatic solutions that take the place of prison, meeting the needs of survivors and creating pathways for people who have committed violence to repair harm. Critically, Sered argues that reckoning is owed not only on the part of individuals who have caused violence, but also by our nation for its overreliance on incarceration to produce safety—at a great cost to communities, survivors, racial equity, and the very fabric of our democracy.

Although over half the people incarcerated in America today have committed violent offenses, the focus of reformers has been almost entirely on nonviolent and drug offenses. Called “innovative” and “truly remarkable” by The Atlantic and “a top-notch entry into the burgeoning incarceration debate” by Kirkus Reviews, Sered’s Until We Reckon argues with searing force and clarity that our communities are safer the less we rely on prisons and jails as a solution for wrongdoing.

Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of survivors of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends in ways that are meaningful to those they have hurt—none of which happens in the context of a criminal trial or a prison sentence.

The definitive primer on anarchist thought and practice, from the thinker the New York Times Book Review calls “the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet”

“The essence of anarchism [is] the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.” —Noam Chomsky

With the specter of anarchy being invoked by the Right to sow fear, a cogent explanation of the political philosophy known as anarchism has never been more urgently needed. In On Anarchism, radical linguist, philosopher, and activist Noam Chomsky provides it. Known for his brilliant evisceration of American foreign policy, state capitalism, and the mainstream media, Chomsky remains a formidable and unapologetic critic of established authority and perhaps the world’s most famous anarchist.

On Anarchism sheds a much-needed light on the foundations of Chomsky’s thought, specifically his constant questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. The book gathers his essays and interviews to provide a short, accessible introduction to his distinctively optimistic brand of anarchism. Chomsky eloquently refutes the notion of anarchism as a fixed idea, suggesting that it is part of a living, evolving tradition, and he disputes the traditional fault lines between anarchism and socialism, emphasizing the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.

Including a retrospective interview with Chomsky where the author assesses his writings on anarchism to date, this is a book that is sure to challenge, provoke, and inspire. Profoundly relevant to our times, On Anarchism is a touchstone for political activists and anyone interested in deepening their understanding of anarchism and the power of collective action.

In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of "sundown towns"—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren't welcome—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.

Written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America.

In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face "second-generation sundown town issues," such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.

The shocking story of the judges who were found guilty in federal court of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to send thousands of kids to a for-profit juvenile detention facility in exchange for cash payments—and who were finally ordered to pay hundreds of millions in damages to the victims of their scheme

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning Philadelphia Inquirer reporter William Ecenbarger comes the exposé of a shocking scandal that ruined thousands of young lives. As the Boston Globe wrote, “the story is incredible: thousands of children wrongfully sentenced to juvenile detention centers, many without legal representation and after cursory hearings, by two rogue judges in northern Pennsylvania who received millions of dollars in bribes from the private institutions’ owners.” The story has all the elements of a true-crime legal thriller—mafia connections, colorful characters, corruption—and was made into a documentary of the same title released in theaters in 2014. But the survivors of the harrowing ordeal have finally gotten some justice: in August 2022, it was ordered that the disgraced judges must pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensatory and punitive damages to the victims.

When it was first released, Kids for Cash brought the story to national attention, where it has stayed ever since. As the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, this is the “worst stain on Pennsylvania, a state with more than its share of stains. . . . Ecenbarger offers a detail-packed, sickening account of the scandal and its impact. Anyone caring about courts, justice, or children should read it.”

Riveting and inspiring first-person stories of how “taking a knee” triggered a political awakening among athletes of all ages and levels, from the celebrated sportswriter

“With profiles of courage that leap of the page, Zirin uncovers a whole national movement of citizen-athletes fighting for racial justice.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning

Hailed by Publishers Weekly in a starred review as “an enthralling look at the impact of peaceful protest by sports figures at the high school, college, and professional levels,” The Kaepernick Effect explores the story of how quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s simple act of “taking a knee” spread like wildfire throughout American society, becoming the preeminent public symbol of resistance to America’s persistent racial inequality.

In this powerful book, critically acclaimed sports journalist and author Dave Zirin chronicles “the Kaepernick effect” for the first time, through “a riveting collection of first-person stories” (The Nation) from high school athletes and coaches, college stars and high-powered athletic directors, and professional athletes across many different sports—from Megan Rapinoe to Michael Bennett. In each case, he uncovers the fascinating explanations and motivations behind what became a mass political movement in sports.

“Necessary reading for all, especially those who want to make a difference in promoting social justice, equity, and inclusion, and end police brutality” (Library Journal, starred review), The Kaepernick Effect is for anyone seeking to get involved in the new movement for racial justice in America: “Take a knee, everyone, and start a revolution” (Kirkus Reviews).

Based on years of research by the criminal justice organization Worth Rises—best known for campaigns that have revolutionized prison telecom and made prison and jail communication free in cities and states around the country—The Prison Industry maps the range of ways in which private corporations, often with their government partners, make money off incarceration. It further details the gross extraction of wealth from incarcerated people and their families, who have been brutalized by overpolicing, mass incarceration, and mass surveillance.

Chapters on labor, telecom, healthcare, community corrections, and more explore the origin story of privatization for each sector and how much money is in it for the corporations involved. Stretching far beyond private prisons to look at all the sectors that benefit from incarceration, the authors illuminate the methods used to extract resources from public coffers and communities, which corporations are most active and how they partner with governments, and the harms these profit-based approaches to justice cause people, families, and communities.

Ultimately, The Prison Industry makes a compelling case for dismantling the prison industry and prison abolition more broadly. It serves as a tool for the tearing down of our wholly oppressive carceral system—the ashes of which we can use to create a better world built on care, not cages.

In recent years, a whole new field of inquiry on the connections between social class and health has arisen from the work of leading social scientists and medical researchers around the world. This pioneering two-volume reader collects for the first time the substance of their main finding: that variations of health within a population are primarily related to sociostructural factors, including income inequality, educational differences, lack of opportunities, and racism.

Featuring sixteen original essays by preeminent researchers in the field, The Society and Population Health Reader: A State and Community Perspective, includes in-depth studies of the links between health and childhood development, race and ethnicity, social status, stress, and other sociocultural factors. It also features a section on the implications of its findings at the state and municipal level, and suggestions for policy changes that would improve health throughout society. Contributors include Michael Marmot, Ichiro Kawachi, Benjamin C. Amick III, J. Fraser Mustard, Richard G. Wilkinson, David R. Williams, Clyde Hertzman, and Stephen B. Fawcett.

Sure to provoke widespread debate and controversy, The Society and Population Health Reader brings to professional, academic, and general readers the most important research findings and dramatic implications for public policy of this fascinating new field.

A companion volume, The Society and Population Health Reader: Income Inequality and Health, edited by Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy, and Richard G. Wilkinson, is also available from The New Press.

The inspiring people and grassroots organizations that are on the front lines of the battle to save the planet

As the world's scientists have come together and declared a "climate emergency," the fight to protect our planet's ecological resources and the people that depend on them is more urgent than ever. But the real battles for our future are taking place far from the headlines and international conferences, in mostly forgotten American communities where the brutal realities of industrial pollution and environmental degradation have long been playing out.

The World We Need provides a vivid introduction to America's largely unsung grassroots environmental groups—often led by activists of color and the poor—valiantly fighting back in America's so-called sacrifice zones against industries poisoning our skies and waterways and heating our planet. Through original reporting, profiles, artwork, and interviews, we learn how these activist groups, almost always working on shoestring budgets, are devising creative new tactics; building sustainable projects to transform local economies; and organizing people long overlooked by the environmental movement—changing its face along the way.

Capturing the riveting stories and hard-won strategies from a broad cross section of pivotal environmental actions—from Standing Rock to Puerto Rico—The World We Need offers a powerful new model for the larger environmental movement, and inspiration for concerned citizens everywhere.

Essays on the lives of workers, the formation of class during the Gilded Age, and the lives of African American enslaved people and freedmen

Finally available in paperback, Power and Culture is the last work by America's most influential labor and social historian, the late Herbert Gutman. Edited and introduced by Gutman's colleague Ira Berlin, the book includes original, unpublished essays from throughout Gutman's career and important but unavailable works from journals and periodicals, as well as an extended interview with Gutman and a comprehensive bibliography of his works.

Power and Culture features essays on the lives of workers and the formation of class during the "Gilded Age" of American corporations, and on the lives of African American enslaved people and freedmen—the studies for which Gutman became famous. But it also shows the range of his thought on such subjects as Roots and popular historical awareness. With Berlin's critical and biographical introduction, Power and Culture is an important reappraisal of a major scholar.

Winner of a National Book Critics Circle award, a rollicking and unforgettable memoir by the man who helped bring the music of the blues into the mainstream

“Without Lomax it’s possible that there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet Underground.” —Brian Eno

A self-described “song-hunter,” the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s and ’40s, armed with primitive recording equipment and a keen love of the Delta’s music heritage. Crisscrossing the towns and hamlets where the blues began, Lomax gave voice to such greats as Leadbelly, Fred MacDowell, Muddy Waters, and many others, all of whom made their debut recordings with him.

The Land Where the Blues Began is both a fascinating recollection of a pivotal time in American music history and an intimate portrait of the struggles blues musicians faced in the Jim Crow South. The blues were an organic expression of Black humanity in a place where slavery had been outlawed but where segregation, violence, and racial inequality were still the law of the land. Lomax’s role as a liaison to white America, relating the emotion and musical virtuosity displayed by those musicians, would change American popular music forever. Through candid conversations with bluesmen and vivid, firsthand accounts of the landscape where their music was born, Lomax’s “discerning reconstructions . . . give life to a domain most of us can never know . . . one that summons us with an oddly familiar sensation of reverence and dread” (The New York Times Book Review).

Artistic expression has always been a way for oppressed peoples to speak truth to power, assert their dignity, and simply live in a world rife with injustice. The Land Where the Blues Began is an enthralling chronicle of the journey to bring this irrepressible art out of the Delta where it began and into the ears of every American.

From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization

"[Gurnah’s novels] recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world." —Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “breakthrough” work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy’s coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.

Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf’s eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a “vibrant” and “powerful” work that “evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.”

Hailed as “a valuable addition” and a “Top Tech Book” by Wired.com, The Know-It-Alls offers a prescient chronicle of the rise of Silicon Valley as a political and intellectual force. Showcasing this new class of super geeks, former New York Times technology reporter Noam Cohen sketches “finely researched portraits” (Nature) of the smart guys, including Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg, who fell in love with a radically individualistic, anti-government ideal—and then mainstreamed it.

Now, in this completely revised and updated edition, published one year after DOGE came to town, Cohen shows how the know-it-alls came to Washington, providing a richly documented account of how their influence has metastasized, their wealth has exploded, and their technologies have frayed America’s social and political fabric. The know-it-alls claim that they support Trump because the Democrats abandoned them; Cohen reveals that Trump gave them the political opening they’d been waiting for, all along.

From the decisive influence of the pandemic, to the emergence of Elon Musk as a national political force, and the appearance of new characters and technologies, Cohen’s “unabashed critique” (Library Journal) is the essential guide to the real power players on today’s political scene.

A trenchant analysis of how public education is being destroyed in overt and deceptive ways—and how to fight back

“A powerful analysis of the predatory, profit-seeking forces that threaten our nation’s public schools. . . . If you care about the future of our society, read this book.” —Diane Ravitch, author of Slaying Goliath and Reign of Error

In the “vigorous, well-informed” (Kirkus Reviews) A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the co-hosts of the popular education podcast Have You Heard expose the potent network of conservative elected officials, advocacy groups, funders, and think tanks that are pushing a radical vision to do away with public education.

“Cut[ing] through the rhetorical fog surrounding a host of free-market reforms and innovations” (Mike Rose), Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire lay bare the dogma of privatization and reveal how it fits into the current context of right-wing political movements. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door “goes above and beyond the typical explanations” (SchoolPolicy.org), giving readers an up-close look at the policies—school vouchers, the war on teachers’ unions, tax credit scholarships, virtual schools, and more—driving the movement’s agenda.

Called “well-researched, carefully argued, and alarming” by Library Journal, this smart, essential book has already incited a public reckoning on behalf of the millions of families served by the American educational system—and many more who stand to suffer from its unmaking. “Just as with good sci-fi,” according to Jacobin, “the authors make a compelling case that, based on our current trajectory, a nightmare future is closer than we think.”

There’s no defeating white supremacist myths without real data. Hailed as “an important resource for anyone seeking a better understanding of . . . Black America” (Benjamin Todd Jealous, former NAACP president and CEO), this completely revised and updated edition of Black Stats offers new facts, critical analyses, and information on the current state of Black life in the United States, at the quarter-century mark, unhindered by jargon and assumptions.

Monique Couvson, author of the acclaimed Pushout, has compiled statistics from a broad spectrum of telling categories that illustrate the quality of life and the possibility of (and barriers to) advancement for a group at the heart of American society. With fascinating information on a wide range of topics including education, entertainment, sports, and the arts, the environment, health, justice, military service, money and jobs, science and technology, and more, this “invaluable resource” (International Journal of Communications) will enrich and inform many public debates while challenging commonly held yet often misguided perceptions.

Called a “great tool offering descriptive statistics on the condition of our nation’s promise of freedom, justice, equality and economic opportunity for all” by Marc H. Morial, president and CEO, National Urban League, Black Stats simultaneously highlights measures of incredible progress, conveys the disparate impacts of social policies and practices, and surprises with revelations that span many subjects. It is an essential tool for advocates, educators, and anyone seeking racial justice and to understand the complex state of our nation.

In this unique look at one of our most pervasive national myths, Studs Terkel persuades an extraordinary range of Americans to articulate their version of "The American Dream." Beginning with an embittered winner of the Miss U.S.A. contest who sees the con behind the dream of success and including an early interview with a highly ambitious Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terkel explores the diverse landscape of the promise of the United States—from farm kids dreaming of the city to city kids determined to get out, from the Boston Brahmin to the KKK member, from newly arrived immigrants to families who have lived in this country for generations, these narratives include figures both famous and infamous. Filtered through the lens of our leading oral historian, the chorus of voices in American Dreams highlights the hopes and struggles of coming to and living in the United States. Originally published in 1980, this is a classic work of oral history that provides an extraordinary and moving picture of everyday American lives.

The National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller that became a guide and balm for a country struggling to understand the election of Donald Trump

"A generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party. . . . This is a smart, respectful and compelling book."
—Jason DeParle, The New York Times Book Review

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, "Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild's 'strangers in their own land' and a new elite." Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called "humble and important" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande, Hochschild's book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others.

The paperback edition features a new afterword by the author reflecting on the election of Donald Trump and the other events that have unfolded both in Louisiana and around the country since the hardcover edition was published, and also includes a readers' group guide at the back of the book.

The New Press's Abridged Teaching Edition of A People's History of the United States has made Howard Zinn's original text available specifically for classroom use. With exercises and teaching materials to accompany each chapter, Volume I spans American Beginnings to Reconstruction.

Few in the Polish LGBTQ community could have foreseen how quickly this deeply conservative and Catholic country would change since it joined the European Union. Back in 2004, gay rights marches were banned in Warsaw and homosexuality was a taboo subject. Since then, as the economy has grown, the LGBTQ community has become more widely accepted.

In OUT, award-winning Warsaw-based photographer Maciek Nabrdalik, whose work has been published in Smithsonian, L'Espresso, Stern, Newsweek, and the New York Times, takes us deep into this community. Exploring issues of identity and citizenship and taking its inspiration from the passport photo format, OUT features dozens of formal portraits of writers, artists, and everyday people working in a variety of occupations from across Poland. Each portrait is accompanied by a short interview and is shaded to indicate how comfortable that person is with revealing their own sexuality publicly.

Intimate and profoundly humane, OUT is a testament to the great strides that can be made in the struggle for LGBTQ rights in a short space of time—a document that will be inspiring to other nations where the queer community does not enjoy the same freedoms.

OUT was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

From the bestselling author of The Lover, Marguerite Duras’s haunting memoir of suffering and survival in a time when Europe was torn asunder

Written in 1944 and first published in 1985, Duras's riveting account of life in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation depicts the harrowing realities of World War II–era France "with a rich conviction enhanced by [a] spare, almost arid, technique" (Julian Barnes, The Washington Post Book World ). Duras, by then married and part of a French resistance network headed by François Mitterand, tells of nursing her starving husband back to health after his return from Bergen-Belsen, interrogating a suspected collaborator, and playing a game of cat and mouse with a Gestapo officer who was attracted to her. The result is "more than one woman's diary . . . [it is] a haunting portrait of a time and a place and also a state of mind" (The New York Times).

Seventy percent of the U.S. economy relies on consumer demand, yet nearly 40 percent of Americans earn less than the cost of living. Despite massive growth, nearly all economic gains made in the last several decades have gone to the top 1 percent and Wall Street, while working families whose spending habits drive the economy have fallen further behind, and our economy has suffered as a result.

In Pay the People!, John Driscoll, former Walgreens executive and healthcare CEO, and Morris Pearl, former BlackRock executive and board chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, pin the blame squarely on short-term corporate greed and policies of both government and employers that impose austerity on some of the hardest-working employees and families. They argue that business leaders’ refusal to pay wages that workers can live on and Congress’s failure to raise the federal minimum wage trap millions of workers in cycles of poverty. At the same time, Driscoll and Pearl demonstrate, these policies undermine the economy for all of us and threaten the foundation of democratic capitalism.

This thought-provoking book rebukes current wage practices and congressional paralysis and outlines a clear path to stable, inclusive growth. In an issue that is too often covered as a zero-sum game where there’s a winner and a loser, Driscoll and Pearl offer resounding evidence to the contrary.

From a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children, a timely investigation into how big tech is hijacking childhood—and what we can do about it

“Engrossing and insightful . . . rich with details that paint a full portrait of contemporary child-corporate relations.” —Zephyr Teachout, The New York Times Book Review

Even before COVID-19, digital technologies had become deeply embedded in children’s lives, despite a growing body of research detailing the harms of excessive immersion in the unregulated, powerfully seductive world of the “kid-tech” industry.

In the “must read” (Library Journal, starred review) Who’s Raising the Kids?, Susan Linn—one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of Big Tech and big business on children—weaves an “eye-opening and disturbing exploration of how marketing tech to children is creating a passive, dysfunctional generation” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). From birth, kids have become lucrative fodder for tech, media, and toy companies, from producers of exploitative games and social media platforms to “educational” technology and branded school curricula of dubious efficacy.

Written with humor and compassion, Who’s Raising the Kids? is a unique and highly readable social critique and guide to protecting kids from exploitation by the tech, toy, and entertainment industries. Two hopeful chapters—“Resistance Parenting” and “Making a Difference for Everybody’s Kids”—chart a path to allowing kids to be the children they need to be.

In this major work of daring criticism and analysis, scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and Israel-Palestine expert Mitchell Plitnick spotlight how one-sided pro-Israel policies reflect the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States. Except for Palestine argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians. In doing so, the authors take seriously the political concerns and well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians, demonstrating the extent to which U.S. policy has made peace harder to attain. They also unravel the conflation of advocacy for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel.

Hill and Plitnick provide a timely and essential intervention by examining multiple dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, including Israel’s growing disdain for democracy, the effects of occupation on Palestine, the siege of Gaza, diminishing American funding for Palestinian relief, and the campaign to stigmatize any critique of Israeli occupation. Except for Palestine is a searing polemic and a cri de coeur for elected officials, activists, and everyday citizens alike to align their beliefs and politics with their values.

When New Press founder André Schiffrin first published Division Street in 1967, Studs Terkel’s reputation as America’s foremost oral historian was established overnight.

Approaching Chicagoans as emblematic of the nation at large, Terkel set out with his tape recorder and spent a year talking to over seventy people about race, family, education, work, prospects for the future—all topics that remain deeply contentious today. Subjects included a Black woman who attended the 1963 March on Washington, a tool-and-die maker, a baker from Budapest, a closeted gay actor, and a successful but cynical ad man. As Tom Wolfe wrote, Studs was “one of those rare thinkers who is actually willing to go out and talk to the incredible people of this country.”

Most interviewees shared the hope for a good life for their children and the wish for a less divided and more just America, but the real Chicago street referenced in the title takes on a metaphorical meaning as a symbol of the acute social divides of the 1960s—and highlights the continued relevance of Terkel’s work in our polarized times.

Now, over fifty years later, Melissa Harris and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mary Schmich have created the remarkable Division Street Revisited podcast, coming in January 2025, in which they have found and interviewed descendants of Terkel’s original subjects in seven rich episodes. Schmich’s foreword to the reissue and the extraordinary podcast—along with the new edition of Division Street—together demonstrate Studs Terkel’s prescience and the enduring importance of his work.

“A damning investigation of dark money by a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee” (Kirkus Reviews) with a new preface on recent disclosures about efforts to influence the Court

“There’s no senator I can think of who’s done more sleuthing to figure out the money trail in American politics, particularly as it affects the courts.”—Jane Mayer, author of the national bestseller Dark Money

As the story of Supreme Court malfeasance and ethics violations repeatedly makes front-page news, the paperback version of The Scheme comes at a time of crisis for the American judiciary.

Following his book Captured on corporate capture of regulatory and government agencies, and his years of experience as a prosecutor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, whom Senator Elizabeth Warren calls a “a powerful voice in defending our American democracy against the relentless, pervasive—and often hidden—power of corporate special interests,” here turns his attention to the right-wing scheme to capture the United States Supreme Court. Whitehouse chronicles a hidden-money campaign using an armada of front groups, helped by the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, employing the Federalist Society as an appointments turnstile, and with the same small handful of right-wing billionaires and corporations enticing the Senate to break rules, norms, and precedents to confirm wildly inappropriate nominees who would advance their anti-government agenda.

Now available in an affordable paperback edition with a new preface addressing the Reverend Schenck disclosures about politicking the justices and Justice Thomas’s recently disclosed conflicts of interest, The Scheme offers what Kirkus Reviews calls “a maddening indictment of a corrupt and corrupted judiciary.”