Miami Book Fair/ WMR Specials

Karen Abbott is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City, and American Rose. She has written for the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian magazine, Salon, and other publications. In her most recent book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War (Harper Perennial), the “pioneer of sizzle history” (USA Today), tells the spellbinding true story of four women —a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow—who risked everything to become spies during the Civil War. Using a wealth of primary source material and interviews with the spies’ descendants, Abbott seamlessly weaves the adventures of these four heroines. With a cast of real-life characters including Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Stonewall Jackson, detective Allan Pinkerton, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, and Emperor Napoleon III, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy draws you into the war as these daring women lived it.

Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his work has been translated into over twenty languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He is the author of Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution (Ecco), a sweeping work of reportage set over the course of 2016, that recounts a surreal year of politics and an exploration of the third American existential crisis. Twice before in its history, the United States has been faced with a crisis so severe it was forced to reinvent itself in order to survive: first, the struggle over slavery, culminating in the Civil War, and the second, the Great Depression, which led to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the establishment of America as a social-democratic state. In a sequence of essays that excavate the past while laying bare the political upheaval of 2016, Ben Fountain argues that the United States may be facing a third existential crisis, one that will require a “burning” of the old order as America attempts to remake itself. Beautiful Country Burn Again is a searing indictment of how we came to this point, and where we may be headed.

Mark Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. Based in Washington, he specializes in national politics, media and profiles of figures in public life. He is the recipient of the of the National Magazine Award for profile writing, and the author of This Town and Citizens of the Green Room. Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times (Penguin Press) is a merciless probing of America's biggest cultural force, pro football. Like millions of Americans, Mark Leibovich has spent more of his life than he'd care to admit tuned into pro football. Leibovich kept his obsession relatively private. Still, every now and then Leibovich would reach out to Tom Brady to gauge his willingness to subject himself to a profile in the New York Times Magazine. To his surprise, Brady returned the call. So began a four-year odyssey that has taken Mark Leibovich deeper inside the NFL than anyone has gone before. Ultimately, this is a chronicle of what may come to be seen as "peak football," but also the moment when it all began to turn. Big Game is a journey through an epic storm. Pro football, this hilarious and enthralling book proves, may not be the sport America needs, but it is most definitely the sport we deserve.

Beth Macy is the author of the widely acclaimed and bestselling books Truevine and Factory Man. Based in Roanoke, Virginia for three decades, her reporting has won more than a dozen national awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (Little, Brown and Company) is the only book to fully chart the devastating opioid crisis in America: "a harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency" (New York Times) from a bestselling author and journalist who has lived through it. In this masterful work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs; from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns; it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows, astonishingly, that the only thing that unites Americans across geographic and class lines is opioid drug abuse.

Andrea Barnet is the author of All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930. The book was a nonfiction finalist for the 2004 Lambda Literary awards. She was a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review for twenty-five years, and her journalism has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times, Self, Harper's Bazaar, and Elle, among other outlets. Barnet’s latest work is Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World (Ecco). Together, these women—linked not by friendship or field, but by their choice to break with convention—showed what one person speaking truth to power can accomplish. In its review, the Dallas News writes, “Barnet [makes] clear that women’s history is longer, richer, more important and more interlinked by time and culture than many may have realized.”

Miriam Pawel is the author of In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar. Miriam weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead one hundred forty years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance. The magisterial story is enhanced by dozens of striking photos, many published for the first time.

James Miller is a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche; The Passion of Michel Foucault; Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977; and Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. He is the author of Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Today, democracy is the world’s only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work?James Miller offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished―and vexed―ideal.

Kate Schatz is a feminist writer, activist, and educator. She is the author of the New York Times best sellers Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide, and the accompanying journal, My Rad Life. Kate is the co-founder of Solidarity Sundays, a nationwide network of feminist activist groups, and she speaks often about politics, resistance, feminism, race, parenting, and more. In her latest book with Miriam Klein Stahl, Rad Girls Can (Ten Speed Press), you’ll learn about a diverse group of young women who are living rad lives, whether excelling in male-dominated sports like boxing, rock climbing, or skateboarding; speaking out against injustice and discrimination; expressing themselves through dance, writing, and music; or advocating for girls around the world. Each profile is paired with the dynamic paper-cut art that made the authors’ first two books New York Times best sellers. Featuring both contemporary and historical figures, Rad Girls Canoffers hope, inspiration, and motivation to readers of all ages and genders.

William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College. His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest book, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (W.W. Norton and Company) is the definitive biography of the transformational world leader. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him “difficult to understand.” Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced?

Robert Sikoryak is an animator, illustrator, and cartoonist living in New York with his wife. He is the author of Masterpiece Comics, and his comics and illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Onion,GQ, MAD, SpongeBob Comics, and Nickelodeon Magazine, as well as on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He is in the speakers program of the New York Council of the Humanities and teaches in the illustration department at Parsons School of Design. In The Unquotable Trump (Drawn and Quarterly), the master of the comic book mash-up finds the POTUS to be his ultimate super-villain. Reimagining the most famous comic covers, Sikoryak transforms Wonder Woman into Nasty Woman; Tubby Tompkins into Trump; Black Panther into the Black Voter; the Fantastic Four into the Hombres Fantasticos and Trump into Magneto fighting the Ex-Men. In perfect Trumpian fashion, The Unquotable Trump is a 48-page treasury annual―needlessly oversized and garishly colored; a throw-back to the past when both Comics and America were Great. This is the hugest comic, truly a great comic. You won’t want to miss this, trust me, you’ll see!