Before

Recounts Hardin's first encounters with Tessa and their ensuing love affair that became a vortex pulling in everyone around them.

WINNER OF THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER OF THE CORETTA SCOTT KING AUTHOR AWARD National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson's stirring novel-in-verse explores how a family moves forward when their glory days have passed and the cost of professional sports on Black bodies. For as long as ZJ can remember, his dad has been everyone's hero. As a charming, talented pro football star, he's as beloved to the neighborhood kids he plays with as he is to his millions of adoring sports fans. But lately life at ZJ's house is anything but charming. His dad is having trouble remembering things and seems to be angry all the time. ZJ's mom explains it's because of all the head injuries his dad sustained during his career. ZJ can understand that--but it doesn't make the sting any less real when his own father forgets his name. As ZJ contemplates his new reality, he has to figure out how to hold on tight to family traditions and recollections of the glory days, all the while wondering what their past amounts to if his father can't remember it. And most importantly, can those happy feelings ever be reclaimed when they are all so busy aching for the past?

"Bringing together eighteenth-century legal discourse and prose fiction, the author gives a cross-disciplinary account of immigration history. She tells a revisionist history in which, for jurists, philosophers, and fiction writers, naturalization is a creative mechanism for national expansion"--

Three women, beset by trauma, temptation, and regret, find each other in this “rich, haunted, gripping” novel (Ruth Padel, award-winning author of Beethoven Variations). That was the day that Mama made the rules: If they come, run. Be quiet and run. But not together. Never together. If one is found, at least the other survives… During a cold British winter, three women, each suffering her own demons, reach a crisis point. Emily, an immigrant survivor of the Rwandan genocide, is existing but not living. Vera, a newly Christian Londoner, is striving to live a moral life, her happiness constantly undermined by secrets from her past. Lynn, battling with an untimely disease, is consumed by bitterness and resentment of what she hasn’t achieved and what has been snatched from her. Their lives have been torn open by betrayal: by other people, by themselves, by life itself. But as their paths interweave, they begin to unravel their beleaguered pasts, and inadvertently change each other’s futures. Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

What is the origin of the universe? What was there before the universe appeared? We are presently witnessing a second Copernican revolution: neither our Earth and Sun nor our galaxy nor even our universe is the end of all things. This account of recent developments in modern cosmology introduces how the Big Bang took place and what preceded it.

Covering famed surf spots all over the world, this unique full-color gift book and travel guide invites you to discover such unexpected gems as the Amazon and the Gulf of Alaska. From the frigid waters off Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula to Nazaré, Portugal, where in 2013 Garrett McNamara broke a world record for surfing the tallest wave (78 feet!), highlights also include: North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii Gold Coast, Australia Malibu, California Faroe Islands, Denmark Cocoa Beach, Florida Hossegor, France Grajagan, Indonesia Montauk, New York Thurso, Scotland Jeffreys Bay, South Africa And dozens more! Fifty Places to Surf takes readers on a wide-roving adventure, divulging the details that make each venue unique—and plenty of tips for those who aspire to surf there. Author Chris Santella writes in his introduction, “Surfing means different things to different people. For some it might mean longboarding mellow chest-high waves in board shorts, followed by a great sushi dinner; for others it may mean donning a six-millimeter wetsuit to brave near-freezing waters and triple overheads. Fifty Places to Surf Before You Die attempts to capture the spectrum of surfing experiences—from beginner-friendly to downright death-defying.” Featuring interviews with seasoned surfing experts such as pro surfer Joel Parkinson and Billabong executive Shannan North, Fifty Places to Surf Before You Die is an essential travel companion for surfers of all levels who are looking to catch that perfect wave.

In Neil's mind it started with the man in the park. Or, more specifically, with the vicious bite the man had given Neil. He was wrong about that. The December Plague had started weeks earlier, though no one knew it. The early symptoms were so mild that almost no one noticed them. A scratchy throat. A feeling of lethargy that you just can't shake. But then the slurring started. And an intense irritability. Finally, an irresistible urge to bite and consume accompanying an uncontrollable rage. The Infected cannot be reasoned with and there is no known cure. They cannot recognize even their closest friends. Anything that attracts their notice risks being torn apart, including one another. Quarantined in a desperate attempt to contain the December Plague, the patients and staff of Wing Memorial hospital are left to fend for themselves. When the small security force sent to aid them are wiped out, the Infected run loose in the halls and Neil is trapped inside with them. Even worse is the knowledge that containment has failed and the outside world has no idea what’s coming.

Draws a direct line between redlining, incarceration, and gentrification in an American city. This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. In Before Gentrification, Tanya Maria Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and policing work to displace and decimate the Black middle class. Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, Golash-Boza explores how DC came to be the nation's "murder capital" and incarceration capital, and why it is now a haven for wealthy White people. This troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first. Before Gentrification unveils a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities.