The final collection by the late Jason Shinder, "one of the finest of our new poets" (Gerald Stern) I close my eyes and try to remember when I was unopposed, when I started to die, buoyant, fragrant, shuddering with love. —from "Before" Jason Shinder's last poems are his moving testimonies to poetry, love, and friendship. With power, clarity, and disarming humor, the poems confront grief and mortality with a humility and fortitude that come only "with hope, stupid hope." Stupid Hope is Shinder's wry, penetrating, and wise farewell.

Hope Isn’t Stupid is the first study to interrogate the neglected connections between affect and the practice of utopia in contemporary American literature. Although these concepts are rarely theorized together, it is difficult to fully articulate utopia without understanding how affects circulate within utopian texts. Moving away from science fiction—the genre in which utopian visions are often located—author Sean Grattan resuscitates the importance of utopianism in recent American literary history. Doing so enables him to assert the pivotal role contemporary American literature has to play in allowing us to envision alternatives to global neoliberal capitalism. Novelists William S. Burroughs, Dennis Cooper, John Darnielle, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Colson Whitehead are deeply invested in the creation of utopian possibilities. A return to reading the utopian wager in literature from the postmodern to the contemporary period reinvigorates critical forms that imagine reading as an act of communication, friendship, solace, and succor. These forms also model richer modes of belonging than the diluted and impoverished ones on display in the neoliberal present. Simultaneously, by linking utopian studies and affect studies, Grattan’s work resists the tendency for affect studies to codify around the negative, instead reorienting the field around the messy, rich, vibrant, and ambivalent affective possibilities of the world. Hope Isn’t Stupid insists on the centrality of utopia not only in American literature, but in American life as well.

The “highly entertaining and thoroughly reprehensible” #1 New York Times bestseller—now with sixteen pages of photos and a new introduction (The New York Times). My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world. --from the Introduction Actual reader feedback: "I find it truly appalling that there are people in the world like you. You are a disgusting, vile, repulsive, repugnant, foul creature. Because of you, I don’t believe in God anymore. No just God would allow someone like you to exist." "I’ll stay with God as my lord, but you are my savior. I just finished reading your brilliant stories, and I laughed so hard I almost vomited. I want to bring that kind of joy to people. You’re an artist of the highest order and a true humanitarian to boot. I'm in both shock and awe at how much I want to be you."

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Barack Obama’s lucid vision of America’s place in the world and call for a new kind of politics that builds upon our shared understandings as Americans, based on his years in the Senate “In our lowdown, dispiriting era, Obama’s talent for proposing humane, sensible solutions with uplifting, elegant prose does fill one with hope.”—Michael Kazin, The Washington Post In July 2004, four years before his presidency, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Obama called “the audacity of hope.” The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama’s call for a different brand of politics—a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces—from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media—that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment. At the heart of this book is Barack Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats—from terrorism to pandemic—that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy—where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, Obama says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes—“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”

Glimmer of Hope is the official, definitive book from The March for Our Lives founders, who came together in the aftermath of one of the deadliest mass-shootings in American history to lead an ongoing movement to end gun violence in all communities. Glimmer of Hope illustrates how a group of teenagers channeled their rage and sorrow into action and went on to create one of the largest youth-led movements in global history. With personal essays from survivors and a close look at how their collective activism turned conversation into action — via rallies, social media postings, televised town halls, voter registration drives, and ultimately a march on Washington to mobilize for national reform — Glimmer of Hope offers a roadmap for meaningful, youth-led change. "Glimmer of Hope provides a blueprint for launching social change."—NPR.org *A Seventeen Magazine Best Book of 2018* "This is a clarion call to action for teens, by teens, and is moving and powerful."—Booklist, Starred Review March For Our Lives Action Fund is a nonprofit 501c4 organization dedicated to furthering the work of March For Our Lives students to end gun violence across the country. In keeping up with their ongoing fight to end gun-violence in all communities, the student leaders of March for Our Lives have decided not to be paid as authors of the book. 100% of net proceeds from this book will be paid to March For Our Lives Action Fund. The full list of contributors, in alphabetical order, are: Adam Alhanti, Dylan Baierlein, John Barnitt, Alfonso Calderon, Sarah Chadwick, Jaclyn Corin, Matt Deitsch, Ryan Deitsch, Sam Deitsch, Brendan Duff, Emma González, Chris Grady, David Hogg, Lauren Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Jammal Lemy, Charlie Mirsky, Kyrah Simon, Delaney Tarr, Bradley Thornton, Kevin Trejos, Naomi Wadler, Sofie Whitney, Daniel Williams, and Alex Wind.

You Stupid. This could be an offensive title to a book. Bert's mother, Lucille McDade, thought it was. But it is not meant to be that way. It is a humorous and slang way of making a point. In the pages of this book, Bert talks about life, love, religion—all in a way that will have you laughing one minute, possibly crying the next. You will see and feel the joy he felt in life. You will see the influence of his family, his childhood church, and the people in his life in general. He was a Southern boy who grew up in a rural community, and that Southern stamp is all over his words. He lived his life to the fullest, and those that he loved, he loved without reservation. This book provides his unique perspective that guided him his entire life.

Synopsis coming soon.......

The inspiring, unflinching true story of “blind” faith, as Major Scotty Smiley awakes in a hospital bed and realizes his world is permanently dark he must stretch his faith like never before. Courageous, heartfelt, and honest, Hope Unseen challenges readers to question their doubts, not their beliefs, and depend upon God no matter what. A nervous glance from a man in a parked car. Muted instincts from a soldier on patrol. Violent destruction followed by total darkness. Two weeks later, Scotty Smiley woke up in Walter Reed Army Medical Center, helpless . . . and blind. Blindness became Scotty’s journey of supreme testing. As he lay helpless in the hospital, Captain Smiley resented the theft of his dreams—becoming a CEO, a Delta Force operator, or a four-star general. With his wife Tiffany’s love and the support of his family and friends, Scotty was transformed—the injury only intensifying his indomitable spirit. Since the moment he jumped out of a hospital bed and forced his way through nurses and cords to take a simple shower, Captain Scotty Smiley has climbed Mount Rainier, won an ESPY as Best Outdoor Athlete, surfed, skydived, become a father, earned an MBA from Duke, taught leadership at West Point, commanded an army company, and won the MacArthur Leadership Award. Scotty and Tiffany Smiley have lived out a faith so real that it will inspire you to question your own doubts, push you to serve something bigger than yourself, and encourage you to cling to a Hope Unseen.

God whispered into my ear, “Admittedly, I am a failed engineer for manufacturing such sapiens. Oh dear!” Ordinary sapiens have a fixed mental matrix: he has his faith or convictions beyond which there are no other horizons. The definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is what we are doing to our global climate and sustainability. We need an advanced mind beyond sapiens to save us from ourselves—a mind that has no masters, like God or holy cows. In this context, we ask, “Who am I, the writer? Am I only sapiens?” I am definitely more than that. I have mentally mutated beyond sapiens into being an evolving future transcendent! Achieving such an advanced mind is the kernel of this book.

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker