The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore

“Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate’s presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election.” —The Washington Post The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Includes an all new afterword that details the first year of the Trump presidency. “With a novelist’s flair for the dramatic scene and evocative detail, Sexton expertly marries the quotidian tedium of the campaign trail (so many hotel room beers) and the outlandish circumstances of this particular election season with his astute observations about our polarized national condition.” —Salon “This is the post–campaign book I was waiting for. Essential reading for understanding this country now and going forward.” —Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night

“Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate’s presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election.” —The Washington Post The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Includes an all new afterword that details the first year of the Trump presidency. “With a novelist’s flair for the dramatic scene and evocative detail, Sexton expertly marries the quotidian tedium of the campaign trail (so many hotel room beers) and the outlandish circumstances of this particular election season with his astute observations about our polarized national condition.” —Salon “This is the post–campaign book I was waiting for. Essential reading for understanding this country now and going forward.” —Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night

This provocative, “critically important” memoir of working-class boyhood in rural Indiana offers a searing cultural analysis of toxic masculinity in American culture (NPR). As progressivism changes American society, and globalism shifts labor away from traditional manufacturing, the roles that have been prescribed to men since the Industrial Revolution have been rendered obsolete. Donald Trump's campaign successfully leveraged male resentment and entitlement, and now, with Trump as president and the rise of the #MeToo movement, it’s clear that our current definitions of masculinity are outdated and even dangerous. Deeply personal and thoroughly researched, the author of The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore has turned his keen eye to our current crisis of masculinity using his upbringing in rural Indiana to examine the personal and societal dangers of the patriarchy. The Man They Wanted Me to Be examines how we teach boys what’s expected of men in America, and the long–term effects of that socialization―which include depression, shorter lives, misogyny, and suicide. Sexton turns his keen eye to the establishment of the racist patriarchal structure which has favored white men, and investigates the personal and societal dangers of such outdated definitions of manhood. “ . . . exposes the true cost of toxic masculinity . . . and takes aim at the patriarchal structures in American society that continue to uphold an outdated ideal of manhood.” —Book Riot

From writer and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton comes an eye-opening journey through American history that unearths and debunks the myths we've always told ourselves. Recent years have brought a reckoning in America. As rampant political corruption, stark inequality, and violent bigotry have come to the fore, many have faced two vital questions: How did we get here? And how do we move forward? An honest look at the past—and how it’s been covered up—is the only way to find the answers. Americans in power have abused and subjugated others since the nation’s very beginning, and myths of America’s unique goodness have both enabled that injustice and buried the truth for generations. In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton blends deep research with stunning storytelling, digging into each era of growth and change that led us here—and laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of the American imagination. Stirring, unequivocal, and impossible to put down, American Rule tells the truth about what this nation has always been—and challenges us to forge a new path.

In the follow-up to his critically lauded debut An End To All Things, Jared Yates Sexton presents twenty-three new stories that pick up where his first book left off. Whether they're set in a sweat-saturated sparring ring, the backroom of a gas station speakeasy, or in the kitchen of the house down the street, these are glimpses into an America that too-often goes unseen. Witness here the untold tales of the losers and the should've-beens, the dreamers and the hustlers, all of them just spoiling for their turn at glory or the inevitable one-two punch that puts them down for good.

This "gorgeously written" National Book Award finalist is a dazzling, heart-rending story of an oil rig worker whose closest friend goes missing, plunging him into isolation and forcing him to confront his past (NPR, One of the Best Books of the Year). One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mátyás has fallen into the sea. Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Mátyás's hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaw's encounters along the way with other lost and yearning souls—Mátyás's angry, grieving half-sister; lonely rig workers on shore leave; a truck driver who watches the world change from his driver's seat—bring us closer to his origins while also revealing the problems of a globalized economy dependent on waning natural resources. High as the Waters Rise is a stirring exploration of male intimacy, the nature of memory and grief, and the cost of freedom—the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labor.

Freedom. The Berber symbol adorns a monument outside the Museum of Slavery in The Gambia. It’s also an emblem of hope, that “never again” will such wrongheaded political mindsets cloud our judgment about “rights” and “freedoms,” now enshrined in human rights charters. Yet those fervent words—never again—as author Donald L. Lang points out, are also the title and rallying cry of a recent book on the aftermath of yet another mass high-school shooting. Where rights and freedoms are concerned, do politics trump all? Never Again: Why Human Rights Charters Fail to Fulfill Their Mandates explores the ongoing failures in the efficacy of human rights charters in fulfilling their mandates. At the outset, he plunges the reader into a deep well of analysis, starting with the first flaw in these charters: the human mind. At the book’s core is the wisdom and guidance of Roger Bacon, concerning the pursuit of truth. The book grapples with monumental questions such as: What makes a being a human being and not something else? Harking back to the philosophies of Marcus Aurelius and Immanuel Kant, complemented by modern thinkers such as Yuval Noah Harari and Robert B. Reich, the author teases out the true meaning of the word “good.” Lang questions the authenticity in which political leaders, philosophers, spiritual guides, big thinkers, business leaders, scientists, and the book’s primary audience—educators—meaningfully deal with humanity’s most fundamental issues. He posits the reality that what we, as humans, value lies on a continuum between authentic good and inauthentic good—or evil. Lang’s solution includes proposing rational-based humanism, a new philosophy of education, to rethink materialistic measures of success with the aim of equality of life, for all.

The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts “A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine “Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.