New From Here
We Dream A World
To Free the Captives by Tracy K Smith

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

A TIME AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR – The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice – A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might–together–come to a new view of our shared past “A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils…Hopeful…Beautiful and haunting.” –Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking–personal, documentary, and spiritual–to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

In Smith’s own words, “To write a book about Black strength, Black continuance, and the powerful forms of belief and community that have long bolstered the soul of my people, I used the generations of my own patrilineal family to lean backward toward history, to gather a fuller sense of the lives my own ancestors led, the challenges they endured, and the sources of hope and bolstering they counted on. What this process has led me to believe is that all of us, in the here and now, can choose to work alongside the generations that precede us in tending to America’s oldest wounds and meeting the urgencies of our present.”
To Free the Captives touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where Smith’s father’s family comes from, and where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero’s record but difficult prospects as a Black man. Smith considers his life and the life of her father through the lens of history. Hoping to connect with their strength and continuance, she assembles a new terminology of American life.

Bearing courageous witness to the terms of Freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Weaving in an account of her growing spiritual practice, she argues that the soul is not merely a private site of respite or transcendence, but a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions: Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace. “So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry”—The New York Times In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look [...]
  • Burn Book by Kara Swisher

    Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead. Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

    Read More about "The Burn Book"...

  • The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

    In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alma Cruz inherits a plot of land in the Dominican Republic, where she decides to create a graveyard for her untold stories and the characters that haunt her. As these characters begin to assert their voices, Alma must confront the question of whose stories get told and whose remain buried, ultimately discovering that stories are never truly finished.

    Read More about "The Cemetery of Untold Stories"...

  • Once pitted as adversarial counterparts as the opinion editors of right- and left-leaning newspapers, veteran journalists Nolan Finley and Stephen Henderson join forces in this groundbreaking work to champion a novel approach to political discourse.