Politics and Prose Presents

A courtly man of Southern roots, Murray Kempton worked as a labor reporter for the New York Post, won a Pulitzer Prize while at Newsday, and was arrested at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago along the way. He wore three piece suits and polished oxfords and was known for riding his bicycle around New York City while listening to his CD Walkman and smoking a pipe with wild red hair that later turned white. He developed a taste for baroque prose and became, in the words of Robert Silvers, his editor at The New York Review of Books, ''unmatched in his moral insight into the hypocrisies of politics and their consequences for the poor and powerless.''

He went to court proceedings and traffic accidents and funerals and to speeches by people who either were or wanted to be rich and famous. He wrote about everything and anybody--Tonya Harding and Warren Harding, Fidel Castro and Mussolini, Harry Truman and Sal Maglie, St. Francis of Assisi and James Joyce and J. Edgar Hoover.

From dispatches from a hardscrabble coal town in Western Maryland, a bus carrying Freedom Riders through Mississippi, an Iowa cornfield with Nikita Krushchev, an encampment of guerrillas in El Salvador, and Moscow at the end of the Soviet Union (these last two assignments filed by a reporter in his 70s), Kempton's concerns and interests were extraordinarily broad. He wrote about subjects from H.L. Mencken to Tupac Shakur; organized labor and McCarthyism; the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; presidential hopefuls and Mafiosi; frauds and failures of all stripes; the "splendors and miseries" of life in New York City.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644214510?ic_referral=T7OWiKw14FY0qi2SbRyaxUCUMu1vaLjH_aXnVEFSUNIwM4mhKSFzYukvHqsjXQN9_5EycLz1xsRyzd2_EMP231qOtC8oFOPD7qQRfc7MY811dnCzvYYG0ny_ZO8sqjxlle9D980

Andrew Holter is a historian and writer based in Chicago, formerly of Frederick, Maryland, and Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Lapham's Quarterly, and other publications. As an independent historical researcher, he has contributed to books, radio programs, and museum exhibitions, and served as the primary archival consultant for Theo Anthony's 2016 documentary Rat Film, which the New Yorker called one of "62 Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking."

Holter is in conversation with Dave Zirin. Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation Magazine, their first sports editor in over 150 years of existence. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sport, including most recently The Kaepernick Effect. In addition, he is the co-producer and writer of the new documentary, Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL. Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,” Zirin is a frequent guest on ESPN, MSNBC, and Democracy Now! He also hosts The Nation’s Edge of Sports podcast and Edge of Sports TV on The Real News Network. 

*recorded 5/8/2025

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie's disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a "gem of a thousand facets--suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending," (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker's odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character's interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is a redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668063606?ic_referral=lmzJ3HJJHK8lVNsY0a05gSAIdEP8Wq1feoCjtKVMED8wMwhv57cGRUgI_hHui1BHbz0WX8vacF7Y5huautKuNZMrPKZLS5no0HVapAC1JmQmXDkcRo83q7GHzFr07pCong0hfQ

Amity Gaige is the author of four previous novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and Sea Wife. Sea Wife was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Mark Twain American Voice Award. Schroder was also a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2013 according to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, among others, and was shortlisted for UK's Folio Prize in 2014. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. In 2018, Amity was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. She lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.

Gaige is in conversation with Angie Kim, a Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and debut author of the international bestseller and Edgar winner Miracle Creek, named a "Best Book of the Year" by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show, among others. Kim has written for Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Glamour, and numerous literary journals.

*recorded 5/3/2025

Combining the powers of speculation of Kazuo Ishiguro and the sharp social critique of Aravind Adiga, Katy Family offers readers the ultimate experience of global fiction, stories bound and shaped by Katy, Texas, a place made by oil and capitalism. The stories weave between Bangladeshi characters experiencing the reality of the immigrant experience in America and those still in Bangladesh, wishing for the mythos of the American dream. Katy, an oil-rich suburb of Houston, serves as the background and ultimate symbol of global capitalism. The stories deliver the reality and impact of isolation, materialism, and the looming climate disaster. With sharp intelligence and humor, Wahhaj explores the oil industry's destructive effect on those who live within Texas and those far beyond its borders

Gemini Wahhaj is a Bangladeshi American writer living in the US. She wrote her debut novel The Children of This Madness as a new immigrant in the US, while she was a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and war raged in Iraq. She is grateful to publish the novel in December of this year, in the 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war, about Bengalis living in Texas, and their complicated history with both Iraq and the US.

Kurt Baumeister's Twilight of the Gods is satire and alternate history on an operatic, cinematic, and cosmic scale, with a cast that transcends time and space. The grinding of The Wheel of Fate is heard in Valhalla, as it is in Berlin and Boston. Can Odin's many schemes be undone? Who can rewire the robotic nightmare of politics and write a brighter future for humanity? Only humanity's champion, the long misunderstood, supposed force of evil, Loki. This is a tale of fallen gods and failing humanity, of love lost and found, of parents and children, magic and sex, art and lies, good, evil, and the end of Fate. This is the story of Loki. In his own words.

Kurt Baumeister is the author of the novels Pax Americana and the forthcoming Twilight of the Gods. An editor with 7.13 Books, his writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, and other outlets. Find him on the internet at kurtbaumeister.com.

Shimul Saha Mou, widely known as Shimul Mou, has been living in the United States for the past 26 years. Born into a family rooted in journalism and diplomacy, she was raised in a home where tradition, art, music, and politics were part of everyday life. Today, she proudly serves as a Senior IT Consultant with the Office of the Chief Technology Officer in Washington, D.C. A passionate advocate for women in technology, Shimul is equally committed to cultural preservation and community empowerment. She played a key role in founding the first Bangla School in the nation’s capital, nurturing identity and pride among Bangladeshi-American youth. She is also a core organizer of a nonprofit uplifting women in the DMV area—working to amplify voices, create sisterhood, and inspire the next generation of changemakers.

Javed Jahangir’s fiction has been published in LUMINA Literary Journal (Sarah Lawrence College), HIMAL Magazine, Smokelong Journal, LOST Magazine, Bengal Lights Journal, Six Seasons Review, Daily Star, Bangladesh and others. He was on the 2011 panel of judges for the RISCA (Rhode Island State Council Arts) Fiction Fellowship award. He was part of Jenna Blum’s Master Class at Grub
Street. He has contributed to, and been editor-in-chief for The Grub Street Writers’ 10 year Anthology, and has been a reader for the Harvard Review. His novel, Ghost Alley was published by Bengal Foundation Publishing, and debuted at the Hay Festival in 2014. Ghost Alley was reviewed in Wasafiri Journal. He is currently working on a second novel, and a collection of short stories. 

PURCHASE BOOKS HERE: https://politics-prose.com/wahhaj-baumeister

*recorded 4/26/2025

At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system's critics. From the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation to communists in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, the absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names―Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi―but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Ghandian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of the Cold War; and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founding father of degrowth.

Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics is true big history that illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374601089?ic_referral=rx3Qh39xaNNfdyXnSf7VRleNoW7PzpPSd6wqg_0-IFYwM94MoaEO0pjmV0L83k4W1F1c6Bmy5lup7CBz_VxZlTVCd4E8a3zdeJF_w8sIONmi0S1zwm_f1qqcDtrBiitcTkqE2A

John Cassidy is a journalist at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is the author of How Markets Fail and Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era and lives in New York City.

Cassidy is in conversation with Jared Bernstein, who was most recently the chair of President Biden's Council of Economic Advisers.

*recorded 5/14/2025

In a career that has spanned more than fifty years, Judith Viorst has captivated readers with her bestselling children's books and collections of poetry reflecting on each decade of life. Now in her nineties, Viorst writes about life's "Final Fifth," those who are eighty to one hundred years old. Her signature blend of humor and vulnerability infuses personal anecdotes and observations, drawing you into her world of memories and candid conversations.

She confesses, "I never ever send a text while driving, and not just because I don't know how to text." She discusses the afterlife (She doesn't believe in it, but if it exists, she hopes her sister-in-law isn't there). She complains to her dead husband ("I need you fixing our damn circuit breakers. I need you! Could you please stop being dead?"). And she explores the late-life meanings of wisdom and happiness and second chances and home.

With a wit that defies age, Viorst navigates the terrain of loss. It's a poignant dance between grief and levity that will resonate with those in their Final Fifth as well as anyone who has parents, relatives, or friends in their eighties and beyond. This is Judith Viorst at her best.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668068014?ic_referral=-LM-aJvAfOVouo8gWayBrgV5Kkw4RnsP2Dy8m5UrhuUwM2KZ1fnYZuzznF489sq8H-zuHIDvRMvrA-BIG9L7cZqjeLwC1T5eMTb_Zv-Ptzj0QIHSZUvIz2dBaFbBu6AKSpn3HQ

Judith Viorst is the author of the beloved Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which has sold some four million copies; the Lulu books, including Lulu and the Brontosaurus; the New York Times bestseller Necessary Losses; four musicals; and poetry for children and adults. Her most recent books of poetry include What Are You Glad About? What Are You Mad About? and Nearing Ninety. She lives in Washington, DC.

*recorded 5/13/2025

When Jennifer Hope Choi first stumbled upon the "curse" known as yeokmasal--an allegedly inheritable affliction causing one to roam farther and farther from home--she immediately consulted her mother. "Oh yeah," Umma quipped. "I have that." Technically this wasn't a revelation. Since 2007, the no-nonsense open-heart surgery nurse had moved suddenly from the Golden State to the Last Frontier, shuttling over the next decade through seven states.

For much of her adulthood, Choi had fancied herself nothing like her immigrant mother, late-blooming vagabond spirit and all--until life in Brooklyn imploded, spurring her to relocate to South Carolina and reckon with startling truths. Artmaking had left her in debt, single, and jobless. Questions hovered, gathering ragged like fractus clouds: Was it time to give up writing? Would she ever have a place of her own to call home? Or was she doomed to bunk up with Umma in the Deep South indefinitely?

This probing memoir follows Choi through her many former homes, from a crumbling Chinatown tenement to a haunted museum in Georgia. Connections emerge, between her curious trajectory and idiosyncratic Korean identity narratives: a mystical Korean dog breed, pro golfers, modern Korean cults, the four pillars of destiny, and Korean American art. One question lingers throughout her search: What might be gained from living in residence with uncertainty?

Told with whip-smart sensibility, The Wanderer's Curse is an electric mother-daughter story, exploring ideas of belonging, self-determination, and possibility, leaving readers to wonder what we take with us generation to generation, what we wish we could leave behind, and how we move on.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324035510?ic_referral=2QRRHRCDoJF0e58OPkjyXLqdOgQW1CYKxCD7F32bhDMwMwbuBxgIzZx8tZchh9X6oNjIeQYxi2mSm5_g2HYJVMSdt1b2q79X6pc1junDJstXKj6HbIJi5UriMsyH2tOunQksCOo

Jennifer Hope Choi is a National Magazine Award-nominated editor at Bon Appétit. Her writing has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, Lucky Peach, VQR, BuzzFeed, and the American Scholar.

Choi is in conversation with Chet'la Sebree, the author Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress. Her third poetry collection Blue Opening and debut essay collection turn (w)here: essays on (be)longing are forthcoming in 2025 and 2026, respectively.

*recorded 5/12/2025

Most Americans are likely to encounter the effects of government malfeasance or neglect close to home--from their governors, mayors, town councils, school boards, police, and prosecutors. In fact, deals shrouded in darkness are regularly made at the state and local levels, often the result of closed-door discussions between governments and industry without any scrutiny whatsoever from the public. Too often, as this groundbreaking new work of investigative reporting reveals, residents are intentionally kept on the outside, struggling to get information about significant issues affecting their communities--from car crashes and dirty drinking water, to failing safety gear--until the backroom deals are done and it's too late to challenge them.

A work of riveting narrative nonfiction based on years of original reporting, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards tells the story of five "accidental activists"--people from across the United States who started questioning why their local and state governments didn't protect them from issues facing their communities and why there was a frightening lack of transparency surrounding the way these issues were resolved. The secret deals, lies, and corruption they uncover shake their faith in government but move them to action.

For readers of Chain of Title and Superman's Not Coming, Spivack's revealing take on a hidden dimension of American politics will outrage and educate anyone who cares about the forces shaping their own communities.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781620978559?ic_referral=HB2YOstl_xp0d_smSX9wrcivWZKJiVf-LtZ6-OdDcJYwM6bb9EqaZ5pVZttiNxT30ikLJml1vyHgwOs0XVXhvAF7wBzsPQjpy_Y5mFFH3WA442KwVrY8KYv-YPy4LXLFO3Wh3A

Miranda S. Spivack is a veteran reporter and editor who specializes in stories about government accountability and secrecy. She spent twenty years as an award-winning editor and reporter for the Washington Post. A former Fulbright Scholar and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and the author of Backroom Deals in Our Backyards (The New Press), she lives in Maryland.

Spivack is in conversation with Leonard Downie Jr., the DC-based Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, was executive editor of The Washington Post from 1991 to 2008. During his 44 years in The Washington Post newsroom, he also was an investigative reporter, editor of the local and national news staffs, London correspondent, and, managing editor under executive editor Ben Bradlee. As deputy Metro editor, Downie helped supervise the newspaper’s Watergate investigation. He oversaw the newspaper’s coverage of every national election from 1984 through 2008. During his 17 years as executive editor, The Washington Post news staff won 25 Pulitzer prizes.

Downie is the author of eight books, including All About the Story, The New Muckrakers, The News About the News (with Robert Kaiser), The Rules of the Game, and 80: An Octogenarian’s Journal – A Daunting Yet Rewarding New Time in Life.

*recorded 5/10/2025

"You were dead, Sarah, you were dead." In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza's crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.

In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure--and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.

Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create "nation" and "history." Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

Purchase Book Here: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781646222438?ic_referral=b5d5DLi8b8bZrXEHAlYbxCDslGffNfxpDu0NWLxNuOowM0yxT_4Sxe7S5JGOzqL4zs2qX3-3o4-HPNFwmH09_Xj86e3bHGA7g_FyNpc-X6Qp7qgGFBIu6uQC164y-cf6M_NvF78

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in 'Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper's Magazine, Mizna, Lux, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Margins, and The Nation, among other publications.

Aziza is in conversation with Fargo Nissim Tbakhi. Tbakhi is a queer Palestinian-American performance artist and writer. He is the winner of the Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and a Taurus. He has received fellowships from Rhizome DC, VisArts, Desert Nights Rising Stars, Halcyon Arts Lab, Mosaic Theater, and RAWI. His writing appears in Foglifter, Mizna, Peach Mag, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, the Shallow Ends, Prolit, and select bags of Nomadic Grounds Coffee. His performance work has been programmed at OUTsider Fest, INTER-SECTION Solo Fest, the Rachel Corrie Foundation’s Shuruq Festival, the Alwun House Monster’s Ball, Mosaic Theater, and has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts. 

*recorded 5/10/2025

Many people know something of Plato's works, yet few are familiar with his life outside of his writings. In Plato and the Tyrant, acclaimed classicist James Romm uses a little-known set of Plato's personal letters to introduce the man behind the ethereal image, and to explore the formation of his most famous work, Republic. In the second half of his life, an already famous Plato involved himself in the affairs of the two Dionysii, a father and son who ruled Syracuse, at that time the greatest power in the Greek world. Plato's interventions in the violent contest between Dionysius the Younger and his brother-in-law, Dion--with whom Plato may have had a long love affair--were the backdrop and perhaps the motivation for his masterwork. In a thrilling narrative, Romm captures how Plato's experiment in enlightened autocracy spiraled into catastrophe and gives us a new account of the origins of Western political philosophy.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324093183?ic_referral=VQJBc71zOy1b6Kw33Vc76ylwOCHsv6TbHHdPzXleEcMwMzqGDYT2hYLCqZsHRw8As_5WcRN8mO0mwyss8MMPkAeVYn8GN48IAPZn8x1mEiZnpQ3WTb9UnjzVQ9Gt19ndyKCMkg

James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and editor of the Ancient Lives biography series from Yale University Press. He is the author of several other studies of Greek history, and his reviews and essays appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Review of Books.

Romm is in conversation with Mary Beard, one of the world's leading classicists and cultural commentators, and the author of bestselling and award-winning books, including SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and Women and Power: A Manifesto. A specialist in Roman history and art, she has also written and presented many television programs, from Civilisations and Meet the Romans to The Shock of the Nude.

*recorded 5/9/2025

Vivian Yin is dead. The first Chinese actress to win an Oscar, the trailblazing ingénue rose to fame in the eighties, only to disappear from the spotlight at the height of her career to live out the rest of her life as a recluse.

Now her remaining family members are gathered for the reading of her will, and her daughters expect to inherit their childhood home: Vivian's grand, sprawling, Southern California garden estate. But due to a last-minute change to the will, the house is passed on to another family instead--one that has suddenly returned after decades of estrangement.

In hopes of staking their claim, both families move into the mansion. As Vivian's daughters race to piece together what happened in the last weeks of their mother's life, disturbing visions and bizarre behaviors start to take hold of everyone in the house, forcing them to realize they are being haunted by something far more sinister and vengeful than their regrets. After so many years of silence, will the families finally confront the painful truth behind the house's origins and the last, tragic summer they spent there--or will they cling to their secrets until it's too late?

Told in dual timelines, spanning three generations, and brimming with romance, betrayal, ambition, and sacrifice, The Manor of Dreams is a thrilling family gothic that examines the true cost of the American Dream--and what happens when the roots we set down in this country turn to rot.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668051726?ic_referral=FjOJFVKIx8DgXVzwLCb-6feA_2H3aJ8PBNC05XRbpVQwM6vYeKHv16frMxxsyTmUTqvpt68MFhSw3NJbkpneVRi3XMr9qBzSYNY5kEyuR_FMGPnq9aCZ2EAtyW_wwBGWqBaunw

Christina Li is the award-winning author of children's and young adult books Clues to the Universe, Ruby Lost and Found, and True Love and Other Impossible Odds, which have been selected as a Washington Post summer book club pick, one of the NPR and New York Public Library Best Books of the Year, and recognized for the Asian Pacific American Librarians' Award for Best Children's Literature. She graduated from Stanford University with degrees in Economics and Public Policy. She grew up in the Midwest and California, but now resides in New York. The Manor of Dreams is her adult literary debut.You can follow her on Instagram @ChristinaLiWrites, X @CLiWrites, and TikTok @CLiWrites. For more information, visit her website at ChristinaLiWrites.com.

Li is in conversation with Martha Anne Toll. Toll recently published Duet for One, and her debut novel, Three Muses, was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize and won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. A book critic for NPR and The Washington Post, among others, Toll had a career in social justice after training as a classical viola player. She serves on PEN/Faulkner Foundation's board and lives in Washington, DC with her husband. They are the lucky parents of two adult daughters. Duet for One is Toll's second novel. 

*recorded 5/8/2025