Past Selections

“The Great Believers soars… Makkai has full command of her multi-generational perspective, and by its end, The Great Believers offers a grand fusion of the past and the present, the public and the personal. It’s remarkably alive despite all the loss it encompasses. And it’s right on target in addressing how the things that the world throws us feel gratuitously out of step with the lives we think we’re leading.” ~The Chicago Tribune

"Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago." ~RebeccaMakkai.com

Transcendent Kingdom is a novel about faith, science, religion, and family. A deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression, addiction, and grief, it’s narrated by a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward-seeking behavior in mice.

"Yaa Gyasi is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel Homegoing and a recipient of the National Book Foundation's 2016 "5 Under 35" Award. Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, was published in September 2020. She lives in New York City."
~ Penguin Random House

"Ibram X. Kendi's new book, How to Be an Antiracist, couldn't come at a better time. . . . How to Be an Antiracist gives us a clear and compelling way to approach, as Kendi puts it in his introduction, 'the basic struggle we're all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.' " ~ NPR

"Ibram X. Kendi is one of America’s foremost historians and leading antiracist scholars. He is a National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the Founding Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Kendi is a contributor writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News Racial Justice Contributor. He is also the 2020-2021 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 2020, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world." ~ ibramxkendi.com

The Moor's Account is the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America, a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record.

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist, and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was both a nominee for the Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. For more info: lailalalami.com

Charming Billy is a New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the International Dublin IMPAC Literary Award. Alice McDermott's striking novel is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial love, of the way good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide.

Alice McDermott is the author of A Bigamist's Daughter, That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, Child of My Heart, After This, and many short stories. She is the winner of an American Book Award and National Book Award for Charming Billy and is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist as well as a Pen/Faulkner Award and International IMPAC Dublin Literary award finalist. McDermott was born in Brooklyn, New York, and is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. For more info: alice-mcdermott.com