"Having forged a new identity as a gay man in New York, Daniel Henriquez returns to the floodlands where he went to high school, to mourn Aubrey, the self-identified "redneck" girl he loved back then. His track team buddies--Twig, a long-distance runner; Desmond, a sprinter; Des's girlfriend, Egypt; and Jess, Aubrey's best friend--help him reckon with who they are to him, and he to them. Recklessly, he confronts the good-ole-boy responsible for Aubrey's...

Spirit of a Hummingbird is an uncompromising look at family trauma, betrayal, fear, and helplessness and an inspiring testament to resilience, healing, and forgiveness. In Spirit of a Hummingbird, Felicia Thai Heath, the daughter of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants who met in the United States, gives us a disquieting, eventful memoir based on her early childhood on the run with her father—a notorious Vietnamese kingpin and escaped convict—and...

"Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems - rather than humans - control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia...

"Haunted by her sister's mysterious disappearance, Lucy Wilson arrives in Rowan County, Kentucky, in the spring of 1911 to work for Cora Wilson Stewart, superintendent of education. When Cora sends Lucy into the hills to act as scribe for the mountain people, she is repelled by the primitive conditions and intellectual poverty she encounters. Few adults can read and write. Born in those hills, Cora knows the plague of illiteracy. So does Brother Wyatt,...

"Over the last century, global poverty has largely been viewed as a technical problem that merely requires the right "expert" solutions. Yet all too often, experts recommend solutions that fix immediate problems without addressing the systemic political factors that created them in the first place. Further, they produce an accidental collusion with "benevolent autocrats," leaving dictators with yet more power to violate the rights of the poor. In...

A young donkey, named Hurry because he is always "on the trot," witnesses the sadness and suffering of the children in occupied Gaza and helps the only way he can--by letting the zookeeper paint stripes on him to make him a pretend zebra. Includes facts about the Happy Land Zoo and Gaza.

When Amandla wakes up on her fifteenth birthday, she knows it's going to be one of her mother's difficult days. Her mother has had another vision. This one involves Amandla wearing a bedsheet loosely stitched as a dress. An outfit, her mother says, is certain to bring Amandla's father back home, as if he were the prince and this was the fairytale ending their family was destined for. But in truth, Amandla's father has long been gone--since before...

In a dying country town lives a young man fighting the future, a young man fighting the past, and a long-lost animal that can teach them both the art of survival. 'The animal swerved into the bracken, its smooth long tail slipping away. Satchel listened a minute for any sign of it but it was gone ... He wondered what its name had been, who had owned it, what hard history had left it alone here, at the foot of the hanging volcano.' A shimmering, ultimately...

Global poverty, economist Collier points out, is actually falling quite rapidly for about 80% of the world. The real crisis lies in a group of about 50 failing states, the bottom billion, whose problems defy traditional approaches to alleviating poverty. Here, Collier contends that these fifty failed states pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. This group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized...