“An uncommonly powerful memoir about four decades in confinement . . . A profound book about friendship [and] solitary confinement in the United States.” —New York Times Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement—in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day, in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison—all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived at all was a feat of extraordinary endurance. That he emerged whole from his odyssey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit. While behind bars in his early twenties, Albert was inspired to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living. He was serving a fifty-year sentence in Angola for armed robbery when, on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and immediately put in solitary confinement. Without a shred of evidence against them, their trial was a sham of justice. Decades passed before Albert was finally released in February 2016. Sustained by the solidarity of two fellow Panthers, Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3, as they became known, resolved never to be broken by the corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. Solitary is a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the United States and around the world.

The first book in the Solitary Tales suspense series will remind you what it means to believe in what you cannot see.

Empower yourself and enrich your life with spells and rituals for the Solitary Wiccan Wicca centers around harmony, balance, wholeness, and a reverence for all living things. The Solitary Wicca Guide gives you the freedom to choose how you practice and where your magick takes you. You'll find spells to help you grow more enlightened every day and focus on bettering each moment through your magickal work. Build your Solitary Wicca practice with an overview of Wiccan deities, guidance on drawing out organic power, and ways to embrace the elements no matter where you live. Learn to set up an altar with essentials before exploring more than 100 spells to improve your magickal life and the lives of those around you, as well as celebrating the seasons and lunar cycles. You'll even find appealing celebratory recipes, like Cupid's Carrot Cake, and personalized charms and potions perfect for gifting. The Solitary Wicca Guide includes: Magickal roots—Explore the belief system and benefits of Solitary Wicca with an overview of Wicca's history, its spiritual connection to the natural world, and how to honor nature whether you're in the country, town, or city. At the altar—From cleansing to consecration, you'll find enlightening illustrations to help set up your altar for solo work, including herbs you'll be working with and common Wicca ceremonial tools. Wicca for one—Empower yourself with 100+ spells, rituals, recipes, and magickal preparations, including Self-Healing Spell, Yule Sabbat Ritual, Chocolate Mousse Happiness Spell, and a Rosebud Love Salve. Deepen your faith daily with Solitary Wicca as you cast your own path for a better life.

Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment.

“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews

Harry Mathews’s last novel is one of his most accessible—and perhaps one of his best Harry Mathews's brilliant final work, The Solitary Twin, is an engaging mystery that simultaneously considers the art of storytelling. When identical twins arrive at an unnamed fishing port, they become the focus of the residents' attention and gossip. The stories they tell about the young men uncover a dizzying web of connections, revealing passion, sex, and murder. Fates are surprisingly intertwined, and the result is a moving, often hilarious, novel that questions our assumptions about life and literature.

The Solitary Explorer responsibly and critically explores Thomas Merton's lifelong spiritual development as reflected in his religious and secular writings and delineates the meaning of his life and work for contemporary readers. It provides an interpretive chronology of Merton's writings and unravels the intertwining threads of self-realization and widening intellectual interests evidenced in the material he produced between his early autobiography and the controversial work of his later years. Elena Malits shows Merton as writer, as monk, as social critic, as seeker of wisdom in the East, as man of prayer, and as one continually on a journey into the unknown. Merton always held that the quest for God is a continuing one: The Solitary Explorer traces the progress of this quest in Merton's life and literary works to reveal a multifaceted spiritual guide who offers an approach to the divine at once reassuringly traditional and refreshingly contemporary.

In The Solitary Path of Courage, a young woman, Sam O’Brien, heads west with her father to the Idaho Territory, where he hopes to become a prospector during the gold rush. Tragedy strikes along the way, and Sam is abandoned at a mission in southern Idaho. When one of her new stepsisters runs off to avoid an arranged marriage, Sam secretly travels to rescue her in the rough-and-tumble boomtown of Lewiston, which is in the heart of gold country. Daring and resourceful, the young woman finds employment as a newspaper reporter and boldly makes her way in a man’s world. In this realistic and dangerous tale of the Old West of the 1870s, Sam unintentionally becomes embroiled in the struggles of the Nez Perce to remain on their ancestral lands. Torn between her two stepbrothers, she becomes caught in the middle of the Nez Perce War and the tribe’s final flight to Canada. Before escaping to the safety of Lewiston with the stepbrother she loves, Sam O’Brien courageously travels with the Nez Perce and reports from the frontlines of war. “M.B. Tosi continues her series of wonderful books with The Solitary Path of Courage, an exciting story of the Old West. As with all of her books, this one is alive with adventure, genuine history, difficult decisions, and faith. It is a book to enjoy.” —Jim Langford, Director Emeritus of University of Notre Dame Press

In the fall of 1996 Sydney Plum encountered a solitary Canada goose on a pond near her home in New England. Caring for the animal became a way for her to reconnect with nature. Walks to the pond were daily rituals—reflective times during which Plum thought about the relationships between humans and animals. Mixing memoir with closely observed nature writing, Plum searches for a deeper understanding of what was changed by the experience with the solitary goose she named SG. In the tradition of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Plum writes lyrical lessons on the life cycle of geese, the mystery of their great migratory patterns, and their amazing adaptability. Canada geese were not always so plentiful in the United States, she explains, nor were they always denigrated as “flying carp.” Plum shows how species-management programs reestablished the birds outside their previous range at the same time as golf courses, office parks, and suburban ponds began dotting the countryside, providing them with prime habitats where they were unwanted. Memories of breaking holes in the ice for SG to escape predators turn Plum’s thoughts toward what it means to nurture. Coming to terms with how SG thinks leads Plum to examine anthropomorphism in nature writing. In contrast to the metaphors through which we commonly view nature, Plum argues that science combined with metaphor is a better way to understand animals. Though Plum’s focus is generously outward toward nature, this book also reveals an inner journey through which, as she describes it, “the enclosures of my human life had been opened. I had become more susceptible to the kindnesses of birds.”