Set in Tehran in the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 elections, Missaghi’s searching, formally innovative narrative is as much an exploration of the limits, purposes, and shapes of storytelling as a series of haunting stories itself. Unfolding in fragments, the book uses reportage, critical theory, and other documentary strategies to chart a woman’s search, first, for the statues that have suddenly disappeared from Tehran’s public places, and then for the missing demonstrators—or their bodies. A writer and translator both into and out of Persian, Missaghi, visiting assistant professor at the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute, raises urgent questions about language and memory while affirming the necessity of witness.

All weekend long, Friday, March 6 through Sunday, March 8, we invite Politics and Prose members to take advantage of 20% off almost all of our current in-store inventory—books, DVDs, and CDs!

Members' online and phone purchases will also receive the same discounts as long as the items selected are on our shelves and payment is provided at the time of the order. Discounts do not apply to specially ordered items.

Enjoy the benefits of your membership at any of our locations.

Click here to learn more about becoming a member!

Please note: Items purchased online during the member sale are not eligable for the "Pay at store" option.

Beams follows her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned—a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016—with a page-turner as thought provoking as it is viscerally fascinating. Set in 1871 but eerily contemporary, the narrative opens with Samuel Hood, a philosopher known for his romantic idealism, opening a school for girls. Though he has the best of intentions, the institution falls into chaos when the students begin manifesting strange symptoms, necessitating help from a predatory minister who subjects the patients to treatments as outrageous as their malady. In evocative, often lyrical prose, Beams explores issues of trust and authority and asks who has the right to young women’s bodies and stories.

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The anonymous narrator of Beyda’s elegant psychological thriller is selling popcorn in a small-town movie house when a stranger named Max hires her as a stand-in for Rosanna Feld, a troubled celebrity whose breakdown is keeping her out of the public eye. Studying videos and immersing herself in Feld’s life, the narrator gradually loses a sense of her own identity. Then, as she makes her public debut as Feld, she’s troubled by a host of questions: is Max being honest, or is he hiding something? What really caused Feld’s collapse--and will she recover? Could the same thing befall Feld’s body double? Written in the vein of du Maurier’s Rebecca, Beyda’s debut is a fast-paced and chilling exploration of identity.

In books including The Morning After, In Praise of Messy Lives, and Uncommon Arrangements, Roiphe has delved into complex and difficult subjects such as date rape, the moral disapproval surrounding divorce and single motherhood, and creative ways of approaching marriage. Her new work is a series of brief takes exploring the fraught relationship between women and power. Combining feminist investigation, her own experience, and the lives of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Sylvia Plath, Roiphe’s bold and provocative reflections expose the contradictions of contemporary womanhood and examine how—and more importantly, why—strong women tend to compromise their own talents and ambitions.

Ide introduced Isaiah Quintabe, an African American detective from a tough neighborhood in East L.A., in his phenomenal debut novel, IQ. Intended as a stand-alone mystery, the book won the Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus awards, and launched a bestselling series. Following Righteous and Wrecked, the fourth installment finds IQ calling on all his considerable powers of reasoning to reconstruct a murder. The problem isn’t a dearth of facts or even of a suspect. Instead, the main witness—the daughter of a West Coast arms dealer—has multiple personalities, and no one of the five saw everything. 

An assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Bonner focuses on African American history and the nineteenth-century United States. His illuminating study of citizenship starts from the Constitution’s vague definition of the term and charts the myriad ways Blacks in the ante-bellum free states used that ambiguity to claim certain specific rights and protections. Combining stories and analysis, Bonner traces the connections between these grassroots movements and Reconstruction-era constitutional developments, showing how Black people grappled with the limits of formal legal change and, through these efforts, helped shape the development of citizen status.

All weekend long, Friday, June 12 through Sunday, June 14, we invite Politics and Prose members to take advantage of 20% off almost all of our current in-store inventory—books, DVDs, and CDs!

Members' online and phone purchases will also receive the same discounts as long as the items selected are on our shelves and payment is provided at the time of the order. Discounts do not apply to specially ordered items.

Enjoy the benefits of your membership at any of our locations.

Click here to learn more about becoming a member!

Please note: Items purchased online during the member sale are not eligable for the "Pay at store" option.