NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Clock Dance comes the story of four generations unfolding in and around the lovingly worn house that has always been the Whitshank family's anchor. • MAN BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE “Absorbing and deeply satisfying.” —Entertainment Weekly "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon ...” This is how Abby Whitshank always describes the day she fell in love with Red in July 1959. From Red’s parents, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to the grandchildren carrying the Whitshank legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, the Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate an indefinable kind of specialness, but like all families, their stories reveal only part of the picture: Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets.

Prior to the Revolutionary War, everything west of Albany was wilderness. Safer travel and the promise of land opened this frontier. The interaction between European settlers and Native Americans transformed New York, and the paths they walked still bear the footprints of their experiences, like the shrine to Kateri Tekakwitha in Fonda. Industry and invention flourished along these routes, as peace sparked imagination, allowing for art and the freedom to explore new ideologies, some inspired by Native American culture. The Latter Rain Movement took hold in the heart of the Burned-Over District. Utopian communities and playgrounds for the wealthy appeared and vanished; all that remains of the Oneida Community is its Mansion House. Follow New York's westward trails--the Erie Canal and Routes 5 and 20--that opened the west to the United States, beginning in Albany and moving westward to Buffalo.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Bread is an object that is always in process of becoming something else: flower to grain, grain to dough, dough to loaf, loaf to crumb. Bread is also often a figure or vehicle of social cohesion: from the homely image of “breaking bread together” to the mysteries of the Eucharist. But bread also commonly figures in social conflict - sometimes literally, in the “bread riots” that punctuate European history, and sometimes figuratively, in the ways bread operates as ethnic, religious or class signifier. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from the scriptures to modern pop culture, Bread tells the story of how this ancient and everyday object serves as a symbol for both social communion and social exclusion. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

At an unprecedented and probably unique American moment, laboring people were indivisible from the art of the 1930s. By far the most recognizable New Deal art employed an endless frieze of white or racially ambiguous machine proletarians, from solo drillers to identical assembly line toilers. Even today such paintings, particularly those with work themes, are almost instantly recognizable. Happening on a Depression-era picture, one can see from a distance the often simplified figures, the intense or bold colors, the frozen motion or flattened perspective, and the uniformity of laboring bodies within an often naive realism or naturalism of treatment. In a kind of Social Realist dance, the FAP’s imagined drillers, haulers, construction workers, welders, miners, and steel mill workers make up a rugged industrial army. In an unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor’s Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success. Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor’s Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal’s artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves.

Sixteen-year-old William Saxton, called Blue, lies awake every night listening to the buzzsaw of his sickly father's lungs and worrying about his mother. Blue writes to Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., asking for help, but she doesn't answer. With no more than food from the family icebox and a fishing pole, Blue runs away intending to hop the rails to D.C. where he plans to confront the First Lady. Blue is not prepared for the extent of the journey ahead, where he meets people who will help him, and others who have only their own interests in mind. Faced with hunger and the elements, but equipped with self-determination, Blue succeeds in reaching his destination. But the journey has changed his purpose, and Blue will never be the same.

Back in 1987, longing to get away from her domestic routine as a wife and mother but living uncomfortably close to the breadline, Fran Adams scrimped and saved until she had scraped together just enough cash to take her teenage sons on a cycling tour of Brittany. They found themselves having to deal with torrential rain and furious gales, frequent punctures and mechanical hitches and encounters with eccentrics from both sides of the English Channel, but in the end their tight budget did not stop them having the holiday of a lifetime and collecting some never-to-be-forgotten memories, so much so that the following year they went back for more. Travels on the Breadline is Fran’s memoir of two simple but happy holidays with her boys.

Issues for Jan 12, 1888-Jan. 1889 include monthly "Magazine supplement".