Assessing a wide variety of particular books, book-like objects, and book collections, and working with millennia of variable and conflicting definitions of the book and its purposes, The Unfinished Book surveys the many things that books have been, and uncovers why the book's grip on the cultural imagination remains so tenacious.

For fans of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Girl, Interrupted, and A.S. King, National Book Award-finalist Adele Griffin tells the fully illustrated story of a brilliant young artist, her mysterious death, and the fandom that won't let her go. From the moment she stepped foot in NYC, Addison Stone’s subversive street art made her someone to watch, and her violent drowning left her fans and critics craving to know more. I conducted interviews with those who knew her best—including close friends, family, teachers, mentors, art dealers, boyfriends, and critics—and retraced the tumultuous path of Addison's life. I hope I can shed new light on what really happened the night of July 28. —Adele Griffin

A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the semiperiphery of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—precisely because of its historic weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not (yet) coalesced—was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on extensive archival research, Sarah J. Townsend reveals the importance of projects and texts that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy associated with the avant-garde: ethnographic operas with ties to the recording industry, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs about the wonders of technology, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for (but never performed at) a theater shut down by the police. Ultimately, the book makes the case that the very category of avant-garde art is bound up in the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.

This book invites readers into a growing, dynamic conversation among scholars and critics around a vibrant community of artists from an African American South. This constellation of creative makers includes familiar figures, such as Thornton Dial Sr., Lonnie Holley, and quiltmakers Nettie Young and Mary Lee Bendolph, whose work is collected in major museum and private collections. The artists represented extend to lesser-known but equally compelling creators working across a wide range of artistic forms, themes, and geographies. The essays gathered here, accompanied by a generous selection of full-color plates, survey subjects such as the artists' engagement with enslavement and liberation, the spiritual and religious dimensions of their work, the technical aspects of their work (such as the common use of "assemblage" as an artistic medium), the links between art and biography, and the evolving status of their reception in narratives of contemporary, modern, southern, and American art. Contributors are Celeste-Marie Bernier, Laura Bickford, Michael J. Bramwell, Elijah Heyward III, Sharon P. Holland, and Pamela J. Sachant.

WINNER! 2021 VLA Graphic Novel Diversity Award - Youth Category! FINALIST! National Jewish Book Awards 2021 Twelve-year-old Miriam doesn’t know much about Jewish mythology. She’s not even sure she wants to be Jewish. So, imagine her confusion when a peculiar angel whisks her off to finish the mythological Unfinished Corner, a place full of monsters and mystery. TWELVE-YEAR-OLD MIRIAM IS FULL OF QUESTIONS, BUT THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS COUNTING ON HER FOR ANSWERS. Jewish mythology has it that when God created the universe, one corner of it was left unfinished. Opinion is divided on why, but everyone agrees that the Unfinished Corner is a dangerous place full of monsters. Twelve-year-old Miriam neither knows nor cares about the Unfinished Corner. She's too busy preparing for her Bat Mitzvah, wrestling with whether she even wants to be Jewish--until a peculiar angel appears, whisking her, her two best friends, and her worst frenemy off to this monstrous land with one mission: finish the Unfinished Corner. An original graphic novel.

Newbery Medal winner Sharon Creech crafts a truly endearing story, one that is imbued with happiness, wonder, and an appreciation for all the little things that make life big. With beautiful, fresh new cover art, this is a gem of a book. In the winding stone tower of the Casa Rosa, in a quiet little village in the Swiss Alps, lives one very unlikely angel—one that is still awaiting her instructions from the angel-training center. What happens to an angel who doesn't know her mission? She floats and swishes from high above, watching the crazy things that "peoples" say and do. But when a zany American girl named Zola arrives in town and invades the Casa Rosa, dogs start arfing, figs start flying through the air, lost orphans wander in, and the village becomes anything but quiet. And as Zola and the angel work together to rescue the orphans, they each begin to realize their purpose and learn that there is magic in the most ordinary acts of kindness.

Filled with adventure, the New Testament book of Acts tells of thrilling escapes, people in peril, conflict and intrigue, travel through the ancient world, storms and shipwrecks, and steadfast faith amidst overwhelming obstacles. Join Pastor Ray Stedman in what he calls God's unfinished book, as he brings the history, adventure, and profound but practical meaning of this book to life in readable, everyday language.

A sweeping Elizabethan historical fantasy from an internationally renowned author that evokes the seafaring adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson and the magic of The Bear and the Nightingale Reynard, a young apprentice, seeks release from the drudgery of working for his fisherman uncle in the English village of Southwold. His rare days off lead him to strange encounters—not just with press gangs hoping to fill English ships to fight the coming Spanish Armada, but with strangers who seem to know him, one of whom casts a peculiar shadow. The village’s ships are commandeered, and after a fierce battle at sea, Reynard finds himself the sole survivor of his uncle’s devastated boat. For days he drifts, starving and dying of thirst, until he is rescued by a galleon, also lost—and both are propelled by a strange current to an unknown northern island. Here, Reynard must meet his destiny in a violent clash between humans and gods.

“It’s a time of change in the world, with dictators toppling and new opportunities rising, but any revolution that doesn’t create equality for women will be incomplete. The time has come to realize the full potential of half the world’s population.” —Christiane Amanpour, from the foreword The Unfinished Revolution tells the story of the global struggle to secure basic rights for women and girls, including in the Middle East where the Arab Spring raised high hopes, but the political revolutions are so far insufficient to guarantee progress. Around the world, women and girls are trafficked into forced labor and sex slavery, trapped in conflict zones where rape is a weapon of war, prevented from attending school, and kept from making deeply personal choices in their private lives, such as whom and when to marry. In many countries, women are second-class citizens by law. In others, religion and traditions block freedoms such as the right to work, study or access health care. Even in the United States, women who are victims of sexual violence often do not see their attackers brought to justice. More than 30 writers—Nobel Prize laureates, leading activists, top policymakers, and former victims—have contributed to this anthology. Drawing from their rich personal experiences, they tackle some of the toughest questions and offer bold new approaches to problems affecting hundreds of millions of women. This volume is indispensable reading, providing thoughtful analysis from a never-before assembled group of advocates. It shows that the fight for women’s equality is far from over. As Leymah Gbowee, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate says, “Women are not free anywhere in this world until all women in the world are free.”

Before the mid-seventeenth century, scholars generally agreed that it was impossible to predict something by calculating mathematical outcomes. One simply could not put a numerical value on the likelihood that a particular event would occur. Even the outcome of something as simple as a dice roll or the likelihood of showers instead of sunshine was thought to lie in the realm of pure, unknowable chance. The issue remained intractable until Blaise Pascal wrote to Pierre de Fermat in 1654, outlining a solution to the "unfinished game" problem: how do you divide the pot when players are forced to.