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Detective Vicky Paterson has seen more than her fair share of murders in the town of Fort Halcott, New York. But this one is the strangest yet, an unnerving ritualistic killing of a woman with hoarding disorder discovered amid the already horrific backdrop of her home. Meanwhile, hot on the trail of a missing girl, professional fixers Will and Alicia stumble on another disturbing ritual in an abandoned factory that seems to stretch the boundaries of what is possible. Vicky is ready to blame her case on a potential serial killer; Will and Alicia are willing to call the ritual nothing more than the work of a deranged sex cult. But both investigations stumble to a halt when the world erupts in a cicada emergence of biblical proportions. Far from the harmless, droning creatures one would expect, these cicadas are driven to attack, forcing themselves down humans’ throats and taking residence there. As people everywhere fight to survive, Vicky, Will and Alicia begin to wonder: How is this infestation related to their cases? And how can they ever hope to stop a swarm so immense?

Even if they lack the drive to infest and kill, a cicada emergence can feel like an invasion. The Swarm, Andy Marino’s latest horror novel, pulls on this thread and amplifies it. Marino turns cicadas’ already otherworldly drone into a malevolent force, their haphazard way of flying into a learning algorithm bent on human destruction. While that premise might seem hokey to anyone who has spent time around harmless, bumbling cicadas, in execution, it is anything but. Marino’s insects are horrifying, alien creatures with unshakable drives and unknowable goals. And they don’t just come in ones and twos. In the tradition of Hitchcock’s seminal classic The Birds, the cicadas of The Swarm are inescapable, blotting out the sky in great streams of wings and writhing masses of bodies. Marino balances this ecological horror with a sympathetic look at a cast of characters whose lives were already on the brink far before the cicada emergence. Sometimes gruesome and always creepy, The Swarm rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation.

Andy Marino rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation in The Swarm, a tale of a cicada emergence of biblical proportions.

Run

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Run by Blake Crouch is a thriller that dips its toe just far enough into the world of science fiction to be deeply unsettling. In the lower 48 states of America, an aurora borealis has beamed brainwashing light into the eyes of unwitting citizens, turning them into homicidal, cultish maniacs.

Crouch’s story follows a single family, the Colcloughs. After a narrow escape from several people of murderous intent, they head north from their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, looking for anywhere that could provide shelter. For the entirety of Run, Crouch focuses on the beat-to-beat action of their journey, providing a ground-level view of the world going to hell, through the eyes of one family in a greater apocalypse.

Those affected by the aurora can spot others affected, but the unaffected are none the wiser, which makes every encounter with humans outside the family a chance encounter with death. The various antagonists in Run are psychopathic and brutal: Those affected by the aurora enjoy killing those who are not. They hack their victims with knives, burn them at the stake or crucify them, and there is no hesitation or regret during their assault—they even go so far as to joke with one another while slaughtering their victims. They also instinctively work together, forming bands of roving vehicles that round up the unaffected for mass execution. All of this sets the tone for the Colcloughs (and the reader) early on: There is no negotiating or appealing with these aggressors. The result is a sense of absolute, uncompromising fight-or-flight.

In the midst of this extreme and violent world, our protagonists are incongruously human, grounding the story in realism. Patriarch Jack is struggling to reconnect with his wife, Dee. Their daughter, Naomi, is an angsty teen who hasn’t felt close to her father in years. Their son, Cole, is a child, too young to really understand what is going on but too old to forget the images he will most likely carry forever. Each of the characters feels realistic: Naomi never wanders into “You just don’t understand me” tropes, nor do Jack and Dee devolve into petty, drama-for-drama’s-sake arguments.

Taut and sparsely written, Blake Crouch’s Run is an unnerving thriller set in the early days of the apocalypse.

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry (The Magician’s Daughter and The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep) provides a dazzling escape for lovers of magical universities and fantastical adventures that span both the human realm and the wilder, more unpredictable faerie world. When Clover Hill gets the opportunity to attend the school of her dreams, Camford University of Magical Scholarship, she is initially met with the ostracization that she expected as the only student not from an affluent magical Family. Clover does her best to keep her head down, determined to learn how to undo a possibly fatal fae curse that was inflicted upon her older brother during the Great War. But much to her surprise, one of the most popular students in school, Alden Lennox-Fontaine, takes an unexpected interest in “the scholarship witch,” and his posse of equally elite and fabulous friends takes her under their wing. But even as Clover befriends Alden, Hero and Eddie, dark and sometimes unforgivable secrets are revealed that will test not only their bond, but also the tradition of the Families and the students’ trust in the revered institution of Camford itself. 

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is an excellent magical twist on dark academia, drawing upon now-beloved tropes such as ivy-strewn, cobblestone pathways and cavernous libraries, then adding a dash of spellcasting and hedgewitchery: The pathways can shift in the blink of an eye, and the library is guarded with enchantments. But the novel offers more than the superficial pleasures of the aesthetic, as Parry explores in detail the very human relationships at play during Clover’s time at Camford, from the platonic to the romantic and everything in between.

Clover’s adventures with her charming new companions are entrancing, and Parry infuses them with a never-ending series of exciting twists, keeping readers on their toes. Clover initially sees both Camford and her friendships through rose-colored lenses, describing the campus in romanticized, atmospheric terms. The reader is therefore often at the mercy of the protagonist’s perspective—tricked, as in one of the fae’s infamous deals, into thinking we’ve figured her situation out. Parry keeps the magic flowing as her characters battle to save the early 20th-century human world from dangerous faerie magic, constantly surprising readers in this accomplished take on the popular dark academia aesthetic.

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is a magical twist on dark academia that presents an entrancing vision of an alternate post-World War I England.
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With his breakthrough 2014 novel, The Troop, which was one of the most acclaimed horror novels of the last decade, Nick Cutter established himself as a writer of propulsive, muscular, unrelenting journeys into terror. His latest book, The Queen, reaffirms his place as one of the genre’s most entertaining storytellers, delivering a creature feature and the story of a doomed friendship in one unputdownable package.

Told over the course of a single day, the novel follows Margaret Carpenter, a young woman still reeling from the disappearance of her best friend, Charity Atwater. Margaret wakes up to find that an iPhone has been mysteriously delivered to her doorstep, and it begins pinging with messages from someone claiming to be her vanished friend. The Queen soon descends into something even darker, as Margaret embarks on a journey to find Charity and get to the bottom of an increasingly violent mystery that’s gripping their small town. 

Cutter wastes no time in throwing Margaret into the deep end, and the book moves like a freight train even when he’s pulling off some surprisingly tender moments between characters. Margaret’s narration is crisp, relatable and full of the kind of urgency that you’d expect from a someone in such an extreme situation, but Cutter’s great gift is his ability to go beyond that, to build a world even as he’s building a character. There are no trade-offs in his prose, no sense that we’re slowing down to lay the groundwork for something that’ll come next. It’s all multipurpose, expertly designed to keep you turning the pages as the book’s horrors grow deeper.

As for those frights, many of which involve a fascination with insects and how they interact with the natural world, Cutter is once again in top form. If you loved the body horror of The Troop, you’re going to get that in spades, along with an element of Promethean, sci-fi terror that’s almost cosmic in its levels of dread—and, of course, buckets of gore.

Because of these ingredients, and so many more, The Queen is a must-read for horror fans, for Nick Cutter fans and for anyone hoping to stay up late with a good scary yarn.

The Queen reaffirms Nick Cutter’s place as one of the horror genre’s most entertaining storytellers.
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Comforting, kindhearted and soulful, Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes offers a welcome reprieve from the dreary and violent stab-a-thons that often dominate the fantasy genre. Pull up a chair, grab your favorite mug and sink into this lovely debut’s warm embrace.

Tao, a fortune teller from the Empire of Shinara, loves her life of solitude. Crisscrossing the neighboring kingdom of Eshtera with her covered wagon and faithful mule, she makes a living telling small fortunes wherever she goes. You may be wondering, “What is a small fortune?” Well, Tao can tell when the spring rains will come, how many calves will be born this year or when the inn’s common room will be full again. However, when one of her fortunes reveals a missing girl is still alive, Tao finds herself enlisted to help Mash, the girl’s ex-mercenary father, and his similarly reformed companion, former thief Silt, track her down. But what about Tao’s coveted peace and quiet? Being alone is the only way she can keep her secret safe, because Tao can tell big fortunes: ones that can hurt people. As their journey continues, Tao must decide how much to tell her companions about her true powers, even as time runs short to help an innocent in need.

In The Teller of Small Fortunes, Leong paints with primary colors, leaving very few shadows in her portrait of friendship and family. Each member of Tao’s party has distinct regrets and murky pasts, but these backgrounds simply reveal how the characters will heal one another. Leong homes in on small moments, carefully calibrating each step toward trust and companionship. But that is not to say that The Teller of Small Fortunes does not have tension. The party’s mission to find the lost girl is not without real pain. But always there is a sense of peace, that whatever happens, the group will endure and grow.

If you’re looking for an epic told at the end of a bloody sword, this one may not be for you. But in between all the hacking and slashing, sometimes you find yourself in need of a pleasant diversion. Sweet-natured and therapeutic, The Teller of Small Fortunes is the perfect pick for such times. It feels like coming home.

Sweet-natured and therapeutic, Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes is cozy fantasy done right.
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Beauty and the Beast truly is a tale as old as time. There’s a charm to it that seems evergreen—the idea of a beast softened and redeemed by love. But what about what the Beast’s love does for Beauty? Can it lift her out of a life in which she feels trapped? Can it awaken feelings in her that she’d never known were possible?

And most pressingly, can it bail her out of jail?

A jail cell is, in fact, where a series of mishaps leads Alexandra Brightwall in the opening scene of Julie Anne Long’s The Beast Takes a Bride. Her long-estranged husband, the war hero Colonel Magnus Brightwall—popularly known as Brightwall the Beast—is able to get her released, upon which he proposes a bargain. Magnus has a chance of being elevated to the nobility, and if Alexandra will appear on his arm and boost his reputation over the next several weeks, he’ll provide the resources for her to have a comfortable life, far away from him. But if she lets him down—again—she’ll be on her own, and she’ll never have a chance to make amends for the terrible mistake that drove them apart on their wedding night five years earlier. 

Fans of Long and her Palace of Rogues series will not be surprised to learn that the couple’s home base for Operation Reputation Restoration is the Grand Palace on the Thames, the boardinghouse by the London docks that is always filled with colorful characters and endearing old friends. (Newcomers might wish for a bit less time spent with previously established characters: not because they aren’t delightful, but because they take time away from our main couple.) All of Long’s creations have warmth, wit and sparkle to spare, but most especially the two leads. Alexandra is absolutely enchanting—utterly lovely inside and out. And while Magnus is decidedly unlovely at first glance, he is a fierce, sharp-witted force to be reckoned with, someone who loves with everything he has, which is quite a lot. Their passion is intense in their sensual moments together, but it’s also intensely sweet in the quieter scenes as they strain and struggle and inch toward a common understanding. As Beast rescues Beauty and Beauty redeems Beast, it’s the love they find together that saves them both.

Julie Anne Long’s latest historical romance has warmth, wit and sparkle to spare as it puts a Regency spin on Beauty and the Beast.
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Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, an enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe and a former advisor on homelessness and Native American issues in the Obama administration, loves data. When she noticed that the number of people self-identifying as “American Indian or Alaska Native” on the U.S. Census has more than doubled since 2000, while the number of enrolled members of federally recognized tribes has remained low, she wanted to know why. In The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America, Schuettpelz not only details how these records hide a history of racism, genocide and erasure, but also how they continue to affect Native people.

The federal government has recorded the number of Native Americans throughout its history, with varying degrees of accuracy. Before ejecting Natives from their land and forcing them on death marches to reservations, the counts were expansive. But when records were used to mete out some kind of reparative benefit, the government’s definition of “tribe” or “Indian” was contracted to exclude as many people as possible. These rules also dictated tribal policy: To receive recognition from the federal government, tribes must have a constitution with similarly restrictive qualifications for membership.

Schuettpelz uses archival records to divulge insights into America’s disastrous history with Native people, while her in-depth interviews with present-day Indigenous Americans reveal how their lives and identities continue to be shaped by that history. For example, the Meskwaki constitution requires its members to trace their ancestry patrilineally. Tricia Long, one interviewee, is “the epitome of what it means to be part of a tribe,” yet she cannot pass her Meskwaki membership onto her older son because his father is white. Her younger son, whose father is Meskwaki, is entitled to tribal benefits like “land rights on the settlement, per capita payments, access to health care, housing assistance.” Her older son is entitled to none of this. 

Schuettpelz herself has questions about her own identity. She is enrolled as a Lumbee member because one of her grandparents was Lumbee, but she did not grow up in the Lumbee community. Is she, she asks herself, Native enough? Her questions are open-ended, and her responses are invitations to further conversations in this powerful and important read.

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz’s powerful The Indian Card considers the history of Native American tribal membership and its impacts on people today.
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Bethany Bennett’s latest historical romance has a heroine with a secret life as an erotica writer; a hero who smolders, yearns and pines; and a mystery that begins in a library. A promising start to Bennett’s Bluestocking Booksellers series, Good Duke Gone Wild excels when it comes to its earnest, evenly matched main characters.

Dorian Whitaker, the widowed Duke of Holland, has made the tough decision to finally part with his late wife’s library. He approaches Martin House Books, where he meets bookseller Caroline Danvers, niece of the shop owners. Caro agrees to help catalog and liquidate his wife’s library, but doesn’t expect to stumble across evidence of an affair: love letters from a mysterious man. The pair sets out to confront this scoundrel, but while Caro is helping Dorian uncover this secret, she has her own deceptions to protect. 

Caro grew up as a vicar’s daughter, but when her father discovered that she was writing erotic novels under a pen name, he threw her out, leaving her to find her way to London and her aunt and uncle’s bookshop alone. Getting tangled up with a titled man like Dorian only further jeopardizes her, putting her secret identity as a writer at risk of discovery.

As the series name suggests, this is a romance for all kinds of book lovers: rare book collectors, those who dream of having their own personal library and romance readers alike. Caro loves reading and writing romance, and she adamantly refuses to let anything stand in the way of those dreams. Starchy and unapproachable on the surface, Dorian is completely undone by Caro, making him a worthy and delicious addition to the ranks of heroes who fall first.

Despite their difficult individual circumstances, both Dorian and Caro have managed to find and build wonderful support systems of people who will advocate for them, but also give them the reality checks that they need. It’s a wholesome and sweet complement to the spicy situations and sexual tension that characterize their interactions as a couple. 

I can hardly wait to find out what bookish appreciation awaits us in future titles, but for now, we have Good Duke Gone Wild to tide us over, a reading (and rereading!) experience that’s sure to be punctuated by dreamy sighs and the false promise of “just one more chapter.” Caro Danvers would approve.

Bethany Bennett’s Good Duke Gone Wild is a sweet but still sexy romance starring a bookseller heroine with a secret life as an erotica writer.

The work of award-winning actor and comedian Jenny Slate—whether her stand-up comedy, voice performances (Bob’s Burgers, The Great North), acting (Parks and Recreation, It Ends With Us), or beloved Marcel the Shell With Shoes On multimedia universe—leaves an indelible impression. Unsurprisingly, the prolific creator’s first memoir-in-essays, 2019’s Little Weirds, had the same effect thanks to its inventive language and poignant, poetic takes on her life thus far.

In Lifeform, Slate again beckons readers into her wonderfully idiosyncratic, colorfully kaleidoscopic mind as she recounts her latest adventures in five pivotal phases: Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby and Ongoing. Of course, fans know that despite Lifeform’s organizing principle, the author isn’t inclined to stick to prescribed formats or expectations. Instead, she dances through multifaceted, playful musings that tip over into surrealism, and dwells in quiet spaces alongside her insecurities and fears.

Fabulist inner monologues abound, as in “Stork Dream: Scroll,” wherein the mythical baby-deliverer embodies “how bizarre this experience is of making a lifeform while being a lifeform. I woke myself up laughing, and the laughter was like a string of bells being pulled from inside of me.” Slate tackles waking-hour concerns in her series of whimsical yet pointed “Letters to a Doctor.” In one, she expresses her frustration with traditional dinner-party seating: “Why would you split a couple up against their wills? It is already so incredibly hard to come together and become a couple.”

Intimate and vulnerable revelations simmer throughout, too, such as the bittersweet experience of watching her ailing grandmother and baby Ida “sip soup together, two beings with caretakers who make sure that they stay clean and can get the food into their mouths.” Birth and death, beginnings and ends, are on Slate’s mind (and in her dreams) as she assumes the new role of mother and ponders how she has changed as the phases of her life have unfurled. Fans old and new will revel in Lifeform’s self-effacing humor and imaginative writing style. It’s a delightful, memorable immersion in the lifeform that is Jenny Slate: “Mother/New Wife/Jenny/Wart-Gobbler Goblin/Bad Visual Artist/Fine Clown.”

In her new memoir, Lifeform, Jenny Slate beckons readers into her wonderfully idiosyncratic, colorfully kaleidoscopic mind as she recounts her latest adventures with signature whimsy.

When the first white flurries twirl on the frosty air where I live, I am instantly transported back to my 7-year-old self, running off to find my snow boots and mittens. But for many others, winter’s inexorable return means a depressing lack of light, bone-cold mornings and messy roads. Kari Leibowitz’s How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days offers a guide for discovering the magic of the season. 

Leibowitz once counted herself among those who dreaded the onslaught of frigid air, precipitation and fading light, admitting that “as a high school senior, I used to refuse to drive my little brother—a freshman—to class unless he preheated my car to a toasty warmth each morning.” Years later, as a psychologist, she was studying the common diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder. Perplexingly, when she researched northern communities, even ones near the Arctic Circle, her expected findings—a rise in the number of people with depression during the long, dark winters—didn’t pan out. Needing to see it for herself, Leibowitz went to Tromsø, Norway, where, for two months of the year, the sun doesn’t rise. Its inhabitants seemed utterly unfazed: “Once, in a blizzard, I saw a man out for a run in a pair of shorts,” she reports. 

Investigating customs from places as far-flung as Reykjavik, Iceland; the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland; and Tokyo, Leibowitz records the ways people have learned to slow down with the season and embrace what it has to offer. Even the most winter-averse reader will be hard-pressed not to hitch their breath at Leibowitz’s description of sinking into a steaming Japanese bath as the snow begins to fall, or of gazing into a crackling fire as the wind howls outside a traditional thatched cottage in the hinterlands of Scotland. No passport is necessary, however: Peppered with activities and tips for incorporating similar comforting winter practices into your own life, How to Winter is a cozy field guide for not just surviving, but flourishing, in the long dark.

How to Winter is a cozy field guide that will show you how to survive and flourish when days shorten and temperatures drop.

We meet Sarah LaBrie in 2017, when her grandmother calls to tell her that LaBrie’s mother is experiencing delusions and paranoia. Brie is living in Los Angeles, writing commissioned opera libretti that explore generational and racial trauma on a broad scale. Since she eagerly left her childhood home in Houston, Texas, her education and career as a TV writer and librettist have carried her from coast to coast. Now, LaBrie’s focus must shift from her career in California to her mom’s well-being back in Houston. In her poignant debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, LaBrie faces her own generational trauma, and her work gets personal. 

LaBrie has often been the subject of her mother’s ire, finding herself banished to a closet as a child and subjected to incessant questioning as an adult. Her family has a history of men leaving, and women and children fending for themselves. As a result, her female relatives have developed a pattern of disassociating or isolating themselves when faced with difficult situations. As LaBrie enters her 30s and life with a partner, she fears that marriage and motherhood will be opportunities to repeat her family history.

As she tries to untangle how her mother’s deteriorating mental illness—she is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia—and her own environment, family history and socioeconomic status have shaped her, LaBrie also writes of her equally tangled unpublished novel. “I’ve become so fixated on not allowing myself to go crazy, I’ve lost touch with the feelings that the story needs to work,” she writes. Her agent suggests, instead, that LaBrie try writing about her mother. But she resists: “Her illness is unfolding according to no rules at all, and no matter how I try to hold it together, the structure falls to pieces.”

She leans into that feeling in the memoir, which ranges widely, leaping across locations and ideas, and threatens to come apart just as the author’s life seems ready to detonate. But thanks to LaBrie’s remarkable intellect and frankness, these multifaceted streams of thought coalesce. Ambitious in scope, No One Gets to Fall Apart examines family dynamics, mental health, Blackness, literature, friendship, the #MeToo movement and more as LaBrie illustrates her desire to embrace her own emotions, even as the temptation to suppress them looms.

 

With remarkable insight and frankness, TV writer and librettist Sarah LaBrie mines her family history of mental illness in her ambitious debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart.

With incandescent prose and vibrant imagery, André Aciman evokes the rich, kaleidoscopic and sensual experiences of his coming-of-age in his memoir, Roman Year.

Just before the Six Years War broke out between Israel and Egypt, 16-year-old Aciman fled Egypt with his deaf mother and younger brother. Packing all their belongings in 31 suitcases, the once prosperous family moved from an Egyptian mansion to a former brothel on an ill-lit, noisy Roman street. During their first afternoon in that shabby apartment in a strange place, “waves of gloom” wash over the family, and the young Aciman feels a “persistent, undefinable numbness that eventually overtakes you and won’t let go.” Aciman doesn’t like the street, Via Clelia, nor does he like Rome: “I belonged elsewhere, but I didn’t know where.” 

While his brother and his mother adapt to their new lives, Aciman buries himself in books and spends much of his year reading: Proust, Woolf and Joyce are among the authors who enchant him. Eventually, as he and his brother explore Rome, Aciman’s affection for the city starts to develop. After he spends Christmas break in Paris, wandering the streets of the City of Light, whiling away time in cafes, visiting Shakespeare and Company and doing research for a study of literary existentialists, Aciman feels as if he might have found his elsewhere. He reluctantly returns to Rome, where he is surprised to find that his love for the Eternal City blossoms, in part because of his intimacy with several women and his connection to the texts that he reads.  

The Call Me By Your Name author glories in the little moments when “there were colors everywhere, everything and everyone was beautiful.” At the end of the year, as he and his family prepare to move to New York City, he finds that “Rome never asked to be loved . . . and I wouldn’t know that I loved it or wanted to love it until I was about to lose it.” Roman Year is a gem of a memoir that sparkles with light that reflects off every facet of Aciman’s pivotal year.

Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman recounts his pivotal coming-of-age in Rome in his sparkling memoir, Roman Year.

There have been other iterations of The 1619 Project, the groundbreaking reframing of American history that centers the Black experience. It was first a series of essays published in the New York Times Magazine in 2019, and it’s also been a podcast, an anthology, a children’s picture book and a documentary TV series. With The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience, the project’s original editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, presents its definitive version. This new volume combines seven powerful essays from the original series with visual elements that deepen their message and, as Hannah-Jones writes in the preface, create “an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act.” 

It’s one thing to read about the slave trade, for example, but another to see a high-resolution photograph labeled “A child’s iron shackles” with this stark explainer: “Because governments determined by the ton how many people could be fitted onto a slave ship, enslavers considered children especially advantageous: they could fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing more human capital in the cargo hold.” A chapter titled “Fear” includes an essay co-written by historian Leslie Alexander and her sister, The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, that reframes police brutality as a result of the same white fear that can be traced back to the very beginnings of American history. The essay is intercut with various photographs from demonstrations, including photojournalist Robert Cohen’s shot of a Black man in a stars-and-stripes shirt throwing a container of tear gas back at the police in Ferguson, Missouri. Woven throughout the book’s 288 pages are 13 original artworks from celebrated visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems, multiple archival photographs of happy Black families and a vibrant spread of a Beyoncé concert. This visual history is an invaluable addition to a revelatory project and an essential selection for any American classroom or family library.

The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience complements the storied New York Times series with visual art and photography that deepens our understanding of how slavery has profoundly shaped American life.

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