Politics and Prose Presents

Crafted during the reign of Augustus Caesar at the outset of the Roman Empire, Virgil's Aeneid is a tale of thrilling adventure, extreme adversity, doomed romance, fateful battles, and profound loss. Through its stirring account of human struggle, meddling gods, and conflicting destinies, the poem brings to life the triumphs and trials that led to one of the most powerful societies the world has ever known. Unlike its Homeric predecessors, which arose from a long oral tradition, the Aeneid was composed by a singular poetic genius, and it has ever since been celebrated as one of the greatest literary achievements of antiquity. 
This exciting new edition of the Aeneid, the first collaborative translation of the poem in English, is rendered in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the English meter that corresponds best, in its history and cultural standing, to Virgil's dactylic hexameter. Scott McGill and Susannah Wright achieve an ideal middle ground between readability and elevation, engaging modern readers with fresh, contemporary language in a heart-pounding, propulsive rhythm, while also preserving the epic dignity of the original. The result is a brisk, eminently approachable translation that captures Virgil's sensitive balance between celebrating the Roman Empire and dramatizing its human costs, for victors and vanquished alike. This Aeneid is a poem in English every bit as complex, inviting, and affecting as the Latin original. 
With a rich and informative introduction from Emily Wilson, maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, genealogies, extensive notes, and helpful summaries of each book, this gorgeous edition of Rome's founding poem will capture the imaginations and stir the souls of a new generation of readers.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324096436?ic_referral=ArJwJnVepb9uapMBQgBKENh2p-bNJjYnsfAi44nffUUwMzabD-YWhypoMh8rRHFl12n92KtPdWJ2ftP44QXhHd85VgVnb05-lDxqzkqIHYiWq0qpr6f5kFOexaOsWYcXGqCM6SQ

Scott McGill is Deedee McMurtry Professor in Humanities at Rice University. He lives in Houston, Texas.
Susannah Wright is an assistant professor of classical studies and Roman history at Rice University. She lives in Houston, Texas.

McGill and Wright will be in conversation with Nandini Pandey, an associate professor of classics at Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when white NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris, 10 years old at the time, felt the aftershocks of the tragedy in her community well beyond the four walls of her home across the street.

Now an award-winning historian, Harris uses eyewitness accounts, legal documents, civil rights pamphlets, and more to look through the lens of her childhood neighbor's life and death. She renders in a new light the history of anti-Black police violence and of the watershed anti-policing movement Eleanor Bumpurs's murder birthed.

So many Black women's lives have been stolen since--Deborah Danner, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Sonya Massey--and still more are on the line. This deeply researched, intimate portrait of Eleanor Bumpurs's life and legacy highlights how one Black grandmother's brutal police murder galvanized an entire city. It also shows how possible and critical it is to stand together against racist policing now.

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LaShawn Harris is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, the former managing and book review editor for the Journal of African American History (JAAH), and a scholar of African American and Black women's histories. Her first book, Se x Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy, won the Organization of American Historians' (OAH) Darlene Clark Hine Award for best book in African American women's and gender history and the Philip Taft Labor Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). Harris's work has been featured in several outlets, including TV-One, Glamour, Huffington Post, Vice, and the History Channel. Follow her on X @madameclair08.

Harris is in conversation with Sharita Jacobs Thompson, a Professor in the Social Sciences Department at Prince George’s Community College where she teaches courses in United States and African American History. She is a former Assistant Professor of Civil War Era Studies and Africana Studies at Gettysburg College. Her research focuses on Black Marylanders and their experiences during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. Thompson has presented her work at national conferences such as the Organization of American Historians, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Black Studies Conference, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. She appeared on the CSPAN3 series Lectures in American History and provided commentary for the History Channel documentary, Aftershock: Beyond the Civil War. Thompson appeared in an episode of CNN's This is Life with Lisa Ling. She has published book chapters, essays, and book reviews. Thompson recently completed a chapter included in an edited volume titled The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered and she is working on a monograph that will chronicle the experiences of Black Marylanders during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Following on his exquisite Stones, Kevin Young's new collection, written over the span of sixteen years, shapes stories of loss and legacy, inspired in part by other lives. After starting in the bayous of his family's Louisiana, Young journeys to further states of mind in "All Souls," evoking "The whale / who finds the shore / & our poor prayers." Another central sequence, "The Two-Headed Nightingale," is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American "Carolina Twins." Born into enslavement, stolen, and then displayed by P. T. Barnum and others, the twins later toured the world as free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonizing their own way. Young's poem explores their evolving philosophical selfhood and pluralities: "As one we sang, /we spake-- / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole." 

In "Darkling," a cycle of poems inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, Young expands and embroiders the circles of Hell, drawing a cosmology of both loneliness and accompaniment, where "the dead don't know / what to do / with themselves." Young writes of grief and hope as familiar yet surprising states: "It's like a language, / loss--," he writes, "learnt only / by living--there--." Evoking the history of poetry, from the darkling thrush to the darkling plain, Young is defiant and playful on the way through purgatory to a kind of paradise. When he goes, he warns, "don't dare sing Amazing Grace"--that "National / Anthem of Suffering." Instead, he suggests, "When I Fly Away, / Don't dare hold no vigil . . . Just burn the whole / Town on down." 

This collection will stand as one of Young's best--his voice shaping sorrow with music, wisdom, heartache, and wit.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593319628?ic_referral=-P_SflU1waGqoAO0pvFzxNxOvlEeNBQMiKIEKJ2kSY8wM81ghKyXult9z3zg-9uzsYh0BHcfqsuYptjcxN613sMywJ0_iiKghX2RCDLRsyjYtMZ4rapmT6J2-sNgDVwxYI7XAS0

Kevin Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, including his most recent, Night Watch. He is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, and the editor of eleven volumes, including A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925-2025 and the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He currently serves as the Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Young is in conversation with Steve Lickteig, a journalist, producer and filmmaker. He's currently the executive producer of podcasts at CNN.

“Compulsively interesting and beautifully written—there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it.” —Zadie Smith

Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.

With Nicholas Boggs's rich and subtle narration of Baldwin's public and personal stories and his lucid interpretation of Baldwin's work, this biography shows for the first time how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships--geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic--and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. In doing so, this book magnifies our understanding of one of the major literary and cultural figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.

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Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Boggs is in conversation with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. Sullivan is the author of three books: Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel; The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA; and the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. She has earned honors from Bread Loaf, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the NEA and others. Originally from Harlem, NY, she is Professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

More than at any time since World War II, liberalism is under pressure, even siege. On the right, some have given up on liberalism. They hold it responsible for the collapse of the family and traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority, and widespread immorality. On the left, some are turning their backs on liberalism. They think that it lacks the resources to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, racism, sexism, corporate power, and environmental degradation. But those opposed to liberalism do not depict it accurately; they offer a caricature, and they neglect its history.

In On Liberalism, former advisor to Presidents Obama and Biden and New York Times-bestselling author Cass Sunstein offers a timely and clear understanding of liberalism--of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, and why we need it more than ever. He also shows how and why liberalism has been, and should be, appealing to both left and right.

The book begins with a manifesto on behalf of liberalism, and then goes on to explore the central idea of "experiments of living," to which a liberal constitutional order gives pride of place. From there, it discusses John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, defining liberal thinkers; the rule of law as liberals understand it; freedom of speech (including the place of lies and falsehoods within that freedom); free markets, economic liberty, and regulation; Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, with its social and economic guarantees; and finally, the concept of opportunity.

Never more urgently needed, On Liberalism moves the conversation well beyond the reductive and inflammatory political sound bites of our moment and advances a compelling argument on behalf of liberalism as the foundation of freedom and self-government.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780262049771?ic_referral=B3RR1gTdzNewUOhVEDZ6R2pUf3TCfdcWglnk-XDK-nUwMzIy5BVT9M-W4VRgbHviyMcLAumopfcvVMN6Z4X4kx0sRaA8F3wsaKNVGSZ8hSw32lsrXpxG0eu5ZmetBeR7q0Chjr4

Cass R. Sunstein is Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University, where he is the cofounder and codirector of the Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Law. Former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, he is the author of The Cost-Benefit Revolution, How Change Happens, Too Much Information, Sludge (all published by the MIT Press), Nudge (with Richard H. Thaler), How to Become Famous, and other books.

"Why do you write?" the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.

Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639734740?ic_referral=pEjoVE2XNe-sAN9QTtO07AeaZktFqSSQL7676QgJzukwM9uj39GL07nRLA7WpCzX7puiCaeNaN68wuDxaNzwvoTjFcvoGCKWeZWXYoFtapnQFmSBhbhiey50bu5fdE_0vihwpoo

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

Toews is in conversation with Ron Charles. Charles writes about books for The Washington Post. He is also the book critic for CBS Sunday Morning.

Sifting through layers and layers of myth and legend--from nineteenth-century dime novels like Deadwood Dick, to HBO prestige dramas to the casino billboards outside of present-day Deadwood--Peter Cozzens unveils the true face of Deadwood, South Dakota, the storied mining town that sprang up in early 1876 and came raining down in ashes only three years later, destined to become food for the imagination and a nostalgic landmark that now brings in more than two and a half million visitors each year.

That Western romance, we're reminded by Cozzens--the prizewinning author of The Earth Is Weeping--retains its allure only as long as we willfully ignore the town's foundational sins. Built on land brazenly stolen from the Lakotas, Deadwood was not merely a place where outlaws lurked, like Tombstone or Dodge City, but was itself an outlaw enterprise, not part of any U.S. territory or subject to U.S. laws or governance. This gave rise to the gunslinging, stagecoach robbing, whiskey guzzling, rampant prostitution, and gambling Deadwood is known for. But it also bred a self-reliance and a spirit of cooperation unique on the frontier, and made it an exceptionally welcoming place for Black Americans and Chinese immigrants at a time of deep-seated discrimination.

The first book to tell this complex story in full, Deadwood reveals how one frontier town came to embody the best and worst of the West--a relic of humanity's eternal quest to create order from chaos, a greater good from individual greed, and security from violence.

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Peter Cozzens is the author or editor of eighteen acclaimed books on the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars. In 2002 he was awarded the American Foreign Service Association's highest honor, the William R. Rivkin Award, given annually to one foreign service officer for exemplary moral courage, integrity, and creative dissent. He lives in Kensington, Maryland.

Cozzens is in conversation with Ronald Collins. Collins is a retired law professor, co-founder of the History Book Festival, and  co-founder and co-chair of the First Amendment Salons. He is the editor of the weekly online blog First Amendment News ]and editor of Attention (an online journal on the life and legacy of Simone Weil). He is also the Lewes Public Library's Distinguished Lecturer. He is the author or co-author of 13 books on topics ranging from free speech to racial justice, from robotics to poetry, and from literature to jurisprudence. His biographical works have profiled the likes of Floyd Abrams, Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Simone Weil, and Emmett Till. He served as a Supreme Court fellow under Chief Justice Warren Berger and later was a Norman Mailer fellow. His latest book is Tragedy on Trial: The Story of the Infamous Emmett Till Murder Trial (2024). His next book is a novel titled Forbidden Freedom.

In The Parkinson's Plan, two doctors on the cutting edge of Parkinson's research detail the steps necessary to prevent, slow, and treat this debilitating condition. They show readers how to prevent the disease through the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the lifestyles we live. They introduce the "Parkinson's 25," the most detailed checklist ever created to allow anyone to lower their risk of Parkinson's. They interview the world's top scientists, clinicians, and thought leaders in the Parkinson's field to offer a detailed plan for treatment that includes cutting-edge methods and recent technological and medical advances.

The Parkinson's Plan takes the next step in winning the battle against Parkinson's, presenting a clear road map with the strategies and tactics necessary to create a world where the disease is increasingly rare and the treatments are more successful.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781541705388?ic_referral=wt6rpQNbE6RTIfOqr47bByhNa1pXxCqB3l6tXid7BqYwM2AL70C7SqAqJ3QLBnFZBV1OSdCm--rUZwnNpX9tD_n7f_dkzfSizk7s1zNm-dkdGqvShApurh0jBw01rkHA1m7vkrg

Ray Dorsey and Michael S. Okun are two of the world's most published, read, cited, and well-known neurologists. Together they have educated hundreds of thousands of families affected by Parkinson's, cared for ten thousand individuals with the disease, and trained hundreds of clinicians. They are the coauthors of Ending Parkinson's Disease. Dorsey lives in Rochester, New York and Okun lives in Gainsville, Florida.

Dorsey and Okun are in conversation with Joanne Kenen, the Journalist in Residence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,  a contributing writer to Politico Magazine, a  panelist on the KFF “What the Health” podcast, and the co-author of the forthcoming book “Information Sick: How Journalisms Decline and Misinformation’s Rise Are Harming Our Health - and What We Can Do About It. (Oct. 2025).  She oversaw Politico’s health care coverage for nearly a decade, covered health and domestic policy on Capitol Hill for Reuters,  and writes for a variety of publications including the Washington Post.

The Second Emancipation, the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a "modern-day Copernicus." The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom--positions this liberation at the center of a "movement of global Blackness," with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), at its head. 
That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is "typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa's enormous role in the birth of the modern world." Determined to re-create Nkrumah's life as "an epic twentieth-century story," The Second Emancipation begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana's Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French's consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah's early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu--including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him "one of the greatest political leaders of our century"--and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947. 
Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana's first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah's radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power. 
In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history. 

PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324092452?ic_referral=JK9fIMy99dwxfS1Gjm5EetjX4aa_yoLoF7B2t1d5HikwM4bq9FXW8ZQAGTKQxNFfr3BY18rjJwp_-Z1rmeyNMzxG8Mdpotth9i2hh8UWdlG_a4ag-tveQwn59HDhISKEKU3o3nA

Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City.

French is in conversation with Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a senior opinion writer and columnist with more than 20 years of experience covering politics, policy and law. She is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, a frequent panelist on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and co-host of the popular Politicon legal news podcast #SistersInLaw.

During his fourteen years as the head of the NFL Players Association, DeMaurice Smith was a front line advocate for football players through some of the most tumultuous crises in NFL history: Colin Kaepernick's protests, Deflategate, a lockout, two collective bargaining agreements, and more. But after witnessing the league's troubling response to discrimination and racial unrest, both within the league and beyond, Smith realized it was time to pull back the curtain and speak truth to power.

Drawing from his years of unprecedented access and unparalleled knowledge of America's favorite sport, Smith documents his years leading the NFLPA and explains how the NFL distorts the truth, telling partial stories to insulate itself and grow its $20-billion-a-year brand--and the players' battles to protect themselves.

From contract negotiations to battles over suspensions, Smith shows us how the union fought to protect players from the greed, racism, and dishonesty the league is built on. He also takes readers inside closed-door meetings and unreported conversations and confrontations with the industry's most powerful figures such as Robert Kraft, Jerry Jones, Tom Brady, and Roger Goodell.

Turf Wars puts every NFL crisis--both familiar and lesser known--within a broader cultural and historical context, framing the league's extraordinary rise as a mirror to America's own history. Revelatory and profound, Turf Wars is a book about the soul of football: its degradation, and how to save it.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593729427?ic_referral=IL2G9E_HzW8fDbGeyzWl1W8nIok2RB8cqGV7IcpHXFwwMzRVJiEtGZeR2KGgV6ncXkvdgPzOBlpnY5dGNxE8Q-44OV5XuTNy8rL3s31KgyYQOuuDjkVjUPFTruYi3SGvoP4sEY0

DeMaurice Smith is the former executive director of the National Football League Players Association. Prior to the NFLPA, Smith was an assistant United States attorney, counsel to the US deputy attorney general, and a partner in major law firms. Smith is currently a law and business professor in residence.

Smith is in conversation with Dave Zirin, the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.