The Stone Sky
N. K. Jemisin
The third and final book in Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy focuses on Essun’s daughter—who has inherited her mother’s extraordinary abilities but with little of the training.
The Obelisk Gate
N. K. Jemisin
The second book in Jemisin’s Broken Earth series continues the story of Essun, now trying to survive and find her daughter during what may be the last season of the world.
The Stars are Legion
Kameron Hurley
Space opera meets body horror in a universe without men.
Little, Big
John Crowley
There are only bits and pieces of magic in this book—a talking fish, a witch who carries a cat’s bone—but somehow the entire book is magical.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
Samin Nosrat
Novice cooks will find this book does what it promises: teaches you how to cook well. But as an experienced (if amateur) cook myself, I also found a useful framework for thinking about my own cooking, not to mention a few new best practices.
Bloodchild and Other Stories
Octavia E. Butler
This collection of short stories, many written very early in Octavia Butler’s career, explore a number of themes that recur throughout her novels: societal disintegration, human/alien couplings, and the ways humans may need to evolve in order to survive as a species.
Gnomon
Nick Harkaway
This book has more twists and turns than an actual labyrinth, and short of a few more reads and some dedicated notetaking, I doubt I could speak clearly to what exactly happens between its covers.
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
Much of Butler’s fiction looks to the future. But Kindred is marked by a fascinating look back.
Thinking about power differently
On Women & Power and Ursula Franklin Speaks
Ursula Franklin Speaks
Ursula M. Franklin & Sarah Jane Freeman
This collection from the late Ursula Franklin, published just two years before her death, includes an astonishing array of speeches and interviews on technology, pacifism, feminism, education, and more.
Women & Power
Mary Beard
This brief and self-proclaimed manifesto contains two essays: the first, on the voice of women, and the second, on women and power.
You were poor then and you are poor now
On Evicted
Evicted
Matthew Desmond
For months, Matthew Desmond lived in the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee, getting to know the locals and documenting their impossible struggles to find and keep a home.
The Essex Serpent
Sarah Perry
In this Victorian novel, Cora Seagrave’s abusive husband has died, leaving her and her son the best possible gifts: freedom and wealth.
Democracy in Chains
Nancy MacLean
Nancy MacLean unravels the main source of the right’s efforts to reimagine American democracy: the writing and thinking of political economist James Buchanan.
Disempowering consequences
On Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller & Kendall Thomas
This anthology gathers core writing on the subject of critical race theory—a movement that looks at how the law is complicit in the creation and maintenance of oppression along the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class.