Babel-17
Samuel R. Delaney
Rydra Wong is a poet, a captain, an erstwhile cryptographer, and a burgeoning telepath.
Laziness Does Not Exist
Devon Price
In this well-argued polemic, Devon Price outlines three tenets of what they term the “laziness lie”: that your worth is your productivity, that you cannot trust your own feelings and limits, and that there is always more you should be doing.
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Jake Skeets
In Drift(er), Jake Skeets addresses the Richard Avedon photo that adorns the book’s cover: “to drift is to be carried by a current of air or water / but men are not the teeth / of their verbs.”
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“This is a history of the United States.”
Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
Tishani Doshi
In the opening poem in this collection, Tishani Doshi addresses her reader: “I agree to turn my skin inside out, / to reinvent every lost word, to burnish, / to steal, to do what I must / in order to singe your lungs.”
Black Sun
Rebecca Roanhorse
On the solstice, in the city of Tova, there will be a convergence—a total eclipse of the sun.
The Sentence
Louise Erdrich
Tookie works in a bookstore, and Flora—her most annoying, and most loyal, customer—has just died. This does not mean she has left the bookstore.
The Dawn of Everything
David Graeber & David Wengrow
Some books seek to simplify or clarify the past; this one seeks to complicate it.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Each essay in this collection is a a full-throated declaration of a democracy of species—with humans as the minority voice.
Echopraxia
Peter Watts
Daniel Brüks is a baseline: a human with few enhancements, no cortical inlays, no way to blink and see subtitles in his vision.
Tao Te Ching
Lao Tzu & Ursula K. Le Guin
Turning to these poems at the end of many a dark day has felt like holding the gift of a small, fierce light.
Blindsight
Peter Watts
Siri Keeton, missing half his mind, is sent out on a mission to discover the source of thousands of probes that surrounded Earth and screamed an unintelligible alien signal before burning up in the atmosphere.
The Word for World Is Forest
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Athsheans live among a forest, on a planet that “yumens” are attempting to colonize.
Lost in Work
Amelia Horgan
“Our entrance into work is unfree, and while we’re there, our time is not our own.”
The Problem with Work
Kathi Weeks
A provocative and irresistable argument that the need to “work for a living” is not a natural order but rather an invention—and one that can change.
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
An expansion of the immensely popular essay of the same title, here David Graeber takes a long hard look at why so many jobs are rank bullshit, and what can be done about it.
Breaking Things at Work
Gavin Mueller
A brisk read that locates echoes of Luddism in current practices like the free software and right-to-repair movements, and makes the case for rescuing Luddism from the dustheap.
Work Won’t Love You Back
Sarah Jaffe
From the title through every chapter, paragraph, and sentence, this book is a deeply researched polemic against the myth of the “labor of love.”
A Collective Bargain
Jane McAlevey
A brisk, fist-pumping read from veteran labor organizer Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain tells stories of unions who won big—and who won during the Trump years, perhaps the darkest time in decades of waning worker power.
Cubed
Nikil Saval
An insightful history of professional work, Nikil Saval’s Cubed interrogates how we work by digging into where we work, and the way those workplaces have changed and evolved.