Americans consume over 1.5 billion pounds of peanut products every year, but few of us know the peanut's tumultuous history, or its intimate connection to slavery and freedom. Lyrical and powerful, Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions, revealing how demand for peanut oil in Europe ensured that slavery in Africa would persist well into the twentieth century.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own," but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? Award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge, evoking the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers including Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Neel.

Drawing on her own medical experience as well as fifteen years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, Meghan O’Rourke’s speaks to an urgent subject: the epidemic scale of autoimmune disease in America—even greater with the advent of “Long Covid”—and where we go from here.

Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet tells the incredible story of Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia—a tale that spans more than two centuries and captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age.

Gourevitch's unforgettable We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority: close to a million people murdered by their neighbors in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us a staggeringly vivid exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, denial and confession, vengefulness and forgiveness.

As a little boy, Pacifique Irankunda lived through the thirteen-year civil war in Burundi. From his own memories and those of his family, including his extraordinary mother, he recounts surviving vicious conflict between ethnic divisions through ingenious acts of kindness, and how a history of colonialism destroyed Burundi’s once-rich culture and traditions.

Based on the War and Peace virtual book club hosted by A Public Space and Yiyun Li, Tolstoy Together is a guide and companion to Tolstoy’s masterpiece, with Li’s daily observations on the novel, writing, and “the solidity and structure” literature provides in unsettled times, including highlights from each day’s conversation, prompts for readers, and newly commissioned essays.

Invisible Child follows the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, this book follows Dasani and her tight-knit family as they move from shelter to shelter, vividly illuminating some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.

Excavating his family’s history back to the Philippines’s geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, Japanese occupation, and American intervention, Albert Samaha fits his family's arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. By relating their personal history with affection but also clear-eyed skepticism, Concepcion explores what it means to reckon with imperialism's unjust legacy.

An exploration of the interconnectedness of the Iñupiat of Northwest Alaska, the Western Arctic Caribou Herd, and the larger Arctic region, revealing the fragile and intertwined lives of people and animals surviving on an uncertain landscape. Kantner’s lifetime on the tundra underpins his compelling account of the politics of caribou, race relations, and cultural priorities vs. resource extraction. Kantner’s stunning full-color photographs enhance his depiction of community, habitat, and the timeless passage of caribou throughout.