Every author launches their book into the world with a prayer. Please, powers that be, let this humble collection of words make teenaged girls laugh uncontrollably, or provoke men to schedule a prostate exam, as the case may be. Some... Read More

Jerald Walker’s essay collection concerns family, academia, and the uncomfortable realities of racism. The provocative essay “How to Make a Slave” reminisces about a Black history school project on Frederick Douglass, during which... Read More

The French word “terroir” refers to the whole environment in which something is grown, and Natasha Sajé’s essay collection Terroir: Love, Out of Place applies this term to her life, examining the context in which her identity was... Read More

By turns funny, heartbreaking, and inspiring, Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermon collection "Always a Guest" delights in the possibilities of God and faith. Made up of sermons that Taylor delivered while guest preaching during important... Read More

Some consider deserts vast expanses of barren wasteland; a politician once called them “kitty litter.” If anything can transform such opinions toward respect and appreciation, this multicultural collection of essays by desert-loving... Read More

Collection editor Dale Peterson calls his experiences with elephants in Asia and Africa “among the most transformative” of his life. The heartwarming, heartrending essays of "Thirty-Three Ways of Looking at an Elephant" reveal the... Read More

Replete with harrowing and laugh out loud accounts of misadventures at home and abroad, Suzanne Roberts’s "Bad Tourist" collects entertaining stories from around the world. Forget the glamour of collecting passport stamps and checking... Read More

The essays of Issac J. Bailey’s Why Didn’t We Riot? are incisive as they confront the realities of systemic racism in America and in the age of Donald Trump. Bailey begins his book by discussing blind spots—in particular, those of... Read More