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The New Press

Jan 21
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Sociologist in Davos

By | The New Press | No Comments

Arlie Hochschild is in Davos this week, attending the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. The theme of this year’s meeting is “creating a shared future in a fractured world,” and she will participate on several panels to discuss variations on this theme with a wide range of thinkers, including Atul Gawande, Yuval Noah Harari, and Yo-Yo Ma. Since the publication of Strangers in Their Own Land in September 2016 – the paperback will be published next month by The New Press – Hochschild has spoken with many groups working to heal the partisan divide in our country, as she explains in this piece she wrote last week for Time.com:

Signs of a desire to reach out extend far beyond my inbox and living room. Listed on the website of the Bridge Alliance, a non-profit non-partisan umbrella group, are over seventy-cross partisan groups based in towns scattered across the country with such names as Common Good, Better Angels, American Public Square, AllSides. Virtually all of these small groups rose from local efforts to restore a culture of respect while exploring potential points of agreement. Common ground is there to be explored.

Dec 28
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Early 2018 Projects

By | Fence Books, Johns Hopkins University Press, The New Press | No Comments

A Mouth Is Always Muzzled
by Natalie Hopkinson
(February 6 2018, The New Press | Art)
Natalie Hopkinson’s new book considers the possibility of art to serve as a catalyst for political change. She profiles six artists with ties to her native Guyana and shows the risks, yet vital importance, of creating work that challenges the establishment and individuals in power. Hopkinson, former editor of The Root, is assistant professor of communications at Howard University.

“This is a singular book, one that is not conventionally academic nor a conventional travel narrative nor a conventional work of arts criticism nor even a conventional piece of journalistic reportage, yet it draws from all of those disciplines as a deeply felt and passionately expressed manifesto…an impressively rendered story about imperialism in general and cultural imperialism in particular.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

*****

Strawberry Fields by Hilary Plum
(April 24 2018, Fence | Fiction)
Hilary Plum’s new novel follows a journalist investigating the deaths of five veterans and switches between a multitude of voices that capture the injustice, conflict, and grief since the War on Terror. Plum is associate director of Cleveland State University’s Poetry Center, co-edits with Zach Savich the Open Prose Series for Rescue Press, and is the author of Watchfires and They Dragged Them Through the Streets.

“Few American books have as truly global a perspective as Hilary Plum’s second novel, which ranges over remarkably disparate territories with exemplary economy of means, and holds together not only aesthetically but also as a vision for our times…it achieves the seemingly impossible virtue of being a political book without a hint of polemic.”  —Youssef Rakha, author of The Crocodiles

*****

The Kremlinologist
by Jenny Thompson & Sherry Thompson (March 25 2018, Johns Hopkins | History)
Llewellyn E. Thompson was stationed in Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis as Ambassador to the Soviet Union and advised President Kennedy on responding to Nikita Khrushchev. With The Kremlinologist, his daughters Jenny and Sherry Thompson have written his definitive biography, published in the Johns Hopkins Nuclear History and Contemporary Affairs Series.

“Both an intimate portrait and an insider’s account of life in Moscow during the Cold War, it reveals new and fascinating details about the many US–Soviet crises that Thompson helped to resolve during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations.”
—Martin J. Sherwin, coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Sep 19
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Congresswoman DeLauro’s Fall Tour

By | The New Press | No Comments

Rosa L. DeLauro, who has represented Connecticut’s third district as a Democrat since 1991, begins a national book tour today to discuss The Least Among Us. Tour dates are below. The book, published by The New Press earlier this year, details her legislative battles, while weaving in the personal stories and family history which have influenced her admirable career fighting for important causes that affect the lives of Americans: food stamps, early childhood education, improving healthcare, infrastructure, affordable higher education, and more. When Congresswoman DeLauro appeared on Meet the Press Daily in early June soon after The Least Among Uswas published (clip below), Chuck Todd called the book “a progressive populist manifesto.”

As she writes in the introduction, Congresswoman DeLauro was inspired by her mother Luisa, who served on New Haven’s Board of Aldermen for 35 years, in her work to help the vunerable: “Neighbors came to our house to discuss all manner of problems, while Luisa served coffee and baked cream puffs. Our kitchen table was my parents’ office and nobody gave a second thought to dropping by.” Mrs. DeLauro lived in New Haven all her life and passed away earlier this month, September 9, at the age of 103.

In his eulogy as reported in the New Haven Register, former Senator Christopher Dodd – for whom Congresswoman DeLauro served as campaign manager in 1980 and then later as his Chief of Staff – said about Mrs. DeLauro: “She never stopped championing the cause of those who were less fortunate.”

9/19 Roosevelt Institute – New York, NY.

10/3 SKDKnickerbocker – Washington D.C.

10/4 Georgetown University, Institute of Politics – Washington D.C.

10/5 R.J. Julia at Wesleyan University – Middletown, CT.

10/6 La Grua Center (co-sponorored by Bank Street Books) – Stonington, CT.

10/7 Barnes and Noble – Waterbury, CT.

10/16 University of Chicago, Institute of Politics – Chicago, IL.

10/17 Town Hall Seattle – Seattle, WA. (with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal)

10/18 University of Southern California, Unruh Institute of Politics – Los Angeles CA.

11/10 National Press Club Book Fair – Washington D.C.

11/17 Tattered Cover – Denver, CO.

11/18 Miami Book Fair – Miami, FL.

Apr 25
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FAMILY VALUES by Melinda Cooper (University of Sydney) and PORTFOLIO SOCIETY by Ivan Ascher (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), published by Zone Books in the Near Futures Series and designed by Julie Fry.

2017 Projects (Part I)

By | The New Press, West Virginia University Press, Zone Books | No Comments

This year I have been pleased to collaborate with authors and publishers releasing new books that I greatly admire. A selection of my non-fiction projects are highlighted below (another post will soon follow featuring the two novels and a memoir I am publicizing):

For The New Press (founded in 1992 by Andre Schiffrin whose The Business of Books I read a year or two ago and thought a lot about since) I have been working with Arlie Russell Hochschild on her recent book Strangers in Their Own Land, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award, continuing a publicity campaign begun by Angela Baggetta. Also for The New Press, I have been the publicist on the latest entry in their stats series – LGBTQ Stats by David Deschamps and Bennett Singer – an exhaustive almanac-style guidebook that M.V. Lee Badgett calls “the most comprehensive portrait of LGBTQ life around.”

Zone Books, a scholarly publisher in the humanities and social sciences with an office in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, recently launched the Near Future Series, edited by Wendy Brown and Michel Feher, and I am helping to promote the second and third volumes: Ivan Ascher’s Portfolio Society and Melinda Cooper’s Family Values. The series is looking at the effects of neoliberalism in the past 30 years, with Ascher analyzing the role of finance and Cooper arguing that neoliberalism aligned with social conservatism towards the end of the 20th century.

I’m also very much looking forward to the publication of Marked, Unmarked, Remembered (West Virginia University Press) this fall, what promises to be a beautiful book of photographs by Andrew Lichtenstein with an introduction and essays by leading historians edited by his brother Andrew Lichtenstein, chronicling historical sites of American social conflict. I have known Derek Krissoff, the director of the press, for many years now and glad to have an opportunity to work with him and his colleagues on their lead title this fall.

“MARKED, UNMARKED, REMEMBERED is startling and extraordinary…this book is a true gift. It both unsettles our sense of who we thought we were, and it makes us see the imperative of forging a more just future for all.” -Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History.