Julie Schumacher — Patient, Female: Stories - with Michelle Brafman

Jessica M. Goldstein — Retro - with Alexandra Petri

An out-of-work actress gets a job as a tour guide for an ultra-luxury time travel company—only to discover her trips to the past could upend her present—in this sharp, speculative debut novel. When Ash spots an ad for Retro during a depressing Instagram scroll—she’s in debt and unemployed; everyone else is, evidently, thriving—she’s surprised the algorithm sent it her way. She’s heard of recreational time travel, but it’s way out of her budget. Then she sees the caption: Come away with us! We’re hiring. So begins Ash’s life as a Time Travel Agent, leading wealthy tourists on vacations to historical hotspots. She takes bachelorette parties to live out their cowboy-romance fantasies in the Old West and throws “'20s for your twenties” birthday bashes at speakeasies; she smiles politely as rich Wall Street guys give prospecting a shot in the Gold Rush. It's all thrilling, outrageous, and totally surreal. Bygone America is just a Retro Metro ride away.  Despite Ash’s tendency toward cynicism, she finds herself swept up in her dazzling new job. Sure, Ash isn’t the actress she always dreamed she’d be. But isn’t this so much better? It’s like Ash’s life is a movie, complete with an impossible love triangle. How is she supposed to choose between her mysterious office crush and the handsome private eye pursuing her in 1937?  For the first time in years, Ash’s life feels enviable—so she’d really rather not pay attention to the strange things happening to her memory and relationships outside Retro. But as her trips threaten to unravel her real life, she confronts an unsettling truth: “escaping” into the past was never really an escape at all. Jessica M. Goldstein is a journalist and humorist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vulture, Marie Claire, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and more. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she was born and raised in New Jersey and currently lives in Washington, D.C. Retro is her first novel. Goldstein is in conversation with Alexandra Petri, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Before joining The Atlantic in 2025, she wrote a humor column for the Washington Post. She won the 2025 Thurber Prize for American Humor for her book AP’s US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up) [https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9781324074762]. She is the author of two other books, Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why: Essays [https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780393867374], and A Field Guide to Awkward Silences [https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780451469618]. Her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts and Murmurs, and elsewhere. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217091362?ic_referral=gIo2q7eg6rnloeW_hfozvl2XozOstHFg0ozKRfY2G1UwM4LUDodb2fmPtPujDBfLOlUCubM0w7-os-rnApazZXf7zHZR_lsrYOconQ0vD7u0B3KulcJ9ljZkC3NTJ7iBOATiWQk

Yotam Marom — For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness - with Keya Chatterjee

The essential guide to establishing an effective opposition movement in the age of Trump, from the leading activist and organizer "I consider Marom] one of the most generous and important thinkers for the activist left, for anyone who cares about where we are and how to get to where we should be." --Rebecca Solnit There is no way to stop the descent into authoritarianism, nor win a world in which all people can thrive, without massive numbers of people organizing for social, political, and economic change. Yet experienced movement leader Yotam Marom delivers a hard truth: progressive and left movements too often get in their own way. They can be ambivalent about power, choosing insularity and purity over winning. This amounts to what Marom calls the "politics of powerlessness," which has kept movements small, weak, and defeated. In For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness [https://politics-prose.com/book/9798893850857?ic_referral=55X0vLsRdmhKbGGLG-ZfdzOcKaTA71gt2t3ol23bcAYwM3Cgii0POF5fT3JWJEIF4jnggl3cOthLOUjwDoFz_2IjmRX92qBR41Ybkp8J1QDAEJ3VyfzuUrb9_t6QrQOXTpjZnhE], Marom offers a brilliant, lyrical clarion cry for a more honest, more strategic, more loving approach to progressive activism and movement building. Grounded in decades of experience in movements, from leading at Occupy Wall Street and other movement moments to supporting some of the most important climate, racial justice, and democracy movements of our time, Marom dives deep into the challenges that hold movements back, and offers stories, tools, and paths toward real power and enduring change. Published at the most perilous time in our modern political history, For Louder Days comes not a moment too soon. It is essential reading for committed activists as well as the wider public concerned about the state of our world and hoping to change it for the better. Yotam Marom has been in movements since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has played leadership roles at Occupy Wall Street and other movements before and after, and co-founded IfNotNow and the Wildfire Project. Yotam has trained and facilitated many of the leading social justice organizations of these times, from Sunrise and the Dream Defenders to Uncommitted and Hands Off NYC, and more. He lives in Brooklyn, and this is his first book. Marom is in conversation with Keya Chatterjee, the Executive Director and cofounder of Free DC a renewed movement to protect Home Rule and win lasting dignity for the people of DC. Free DC is a five year campaign focused on seeding a culture of joyful defiance, training DC residents on noncooperation as jurors, workers, consumers, and more, and responding to dozens of attacks on DC-- from military occupation to the takeover of our public spaces and cultural centers. Keya is also a cofounder of Freedom Trainers, a loose network of trainers teaching about the powerful tools of collective noncompliance and mass noncooperation like boycotts and strikes. Keya started her career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco. She served as a Presidential Management Fellow at NASA, in the Science Mission Directorate for four years. After NASA, Keya worked at USAID and WWF as a Climate Change specialist. Keya also ran US Climate Action Network for almost a decade, a network of US Climate-focused organizations, where her tenure was bookended by the network’s efforts to secure the Paris Climate Agreement and pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Keya was elected and served two terms as a hyperlocal neighborhood commissioner, and currently serves on the boards of Sunrise Movement and Evergreen Action. She is the author of works of both fiction and nonfiction, including her October 2025 romance novel about taking down fascism, The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798893850857?ic_referral=hk7X368T1HbVgsLKhFefdTeYTDjgbMLn7oHVD8kVN0owMwpi2_Yt4mSkMpdl_PO8W_tOVxAl1e4TyTnoPxmJm_fbMNHQYMnrgb3iFMdU_c5xI7l78ZUwP5V6UTZ7QPS0ExgUREQ

Aggie Blum Thompson — The Neighbors Are Watching - with E.A. Aymar

From the "master of suburban scandal" (Samantha M. Bailey) comes a scandalous twisty thriller about obsession, betrayal, and the price of perfection Just outside Washington, DC, sits Eastbrook, Bethesda—a leafy suburb with top schools, pristine landscapes, and perfect neighbors. It’s not the kind of place where nannies are shot during robberies gone wrong. And in this picture-perfect neighborhood, someone is desperate to plaster over the cracks in that façade. A year after the unsolved neighborhood murder, Caren, nearing fifty and staring down an empty nest, has one too many drinks at a graduation party and blacks out on her way home. At least, that’s what everyone says happened. Caren suspects she was drugged by someone. But who? When Caren teams up with a new neighbor who is desperate to figure out who murdered his best friend last year, they start to uncover what Eastbrook has tried to forget. But in a place where appearances are everything, their search for the truth means not only shattering carefully curated perfection — but putting themselves squarely in the crosshairs of a killer. Before turning to fiction, Aggie Blum Thompson covered real-life crime as a newspaper reporter for a number of papers, including The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Aggie is a member of Mystery Writers of America. She lives with her husband and two children in the suburbs of Washington DC. Blum Thompson is in conversation with E.A. Aymar. Booklist wrote, of multiple Anthony Award-nominated E.A. Aymar’s most recent thriller, When She Left, “This would appeal to fans of Elmore Leonard…with high-stakes violence tempered by humor and disarmingly sympathetic antiheroes.” In 2025, When She Left was chosen by PEN/Faulkner as one of three books for their prestigious DC Reads program. His previous thriller, No Home for Killers, received praise from the New York Times, Kirkus, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and was an instant Amazon Bestseller. They’re Gone was published to rave reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus (starred), and named one of the best books of 2020. A frequent contributor to the Washington Post, Aymar is a former member of the national board of the International Thriller Writers and an active member of Crime Writers of Color and Sisters in Crime. He was born in Panama and now lives and writes in the DC/MD/VA triangle. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250412553?ic_referral=a-hSuXJB0zvjpwupoMAeZHDjTvgMVnf3OWkfIDaGlMgwM8RyLPxWeWMeRtMAFEhDW1cJOsEcjEaTcO5IZ8gJbyTyKSNk2MGAx_atGs1CFx764L8jKUXaSGaui0Q9UAmMD2ecnkA

Fergus M. Bordewich — Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America's Future - with Peter Cozzens

The grand spectacle that marked America’s first century—and a moment of reckoning for a nation in flux “Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before their eyes.” Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 attracted 10 million Americans—nearly 20 percent of the population, among them P. T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain—and visitors from around the world. On display were inventions that signaled the changing landscape of American life, from the typewriter to the telephone to Heinz Tomato Ketchup. This celebration of America’s first hundred years came at a moment when its future seemed more precarious than ever—as big money threatened to overwhelm the government, underpaid workers waged the first national labor strike, feminists demanded rights for women, Native tribes went to war to repel the advancing settlement in the West, and Black Americans struggled to exercise their hard-won freedom. Looming over the fair was the presidential race of 1876—a highly contested election that would determine the fate of Reconstruction and permanently shape the Republican party as we know it today. Fergus Bordewich animates these converging crises through the lives of four protagonists—Rutherford B. Hayes, Alexander Graham Bell, railroad magnate Tom Scott, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis—revealing a country striving to live up to the promise of its founders while bracing for the tidal wave of the twentieth century. Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of nine previous nonfiction books, including Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction; The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (winner of the 2019 D. B. Hardeman Prize in American History); America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (named best history book of 2012 by the Los Angeles Times); and Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Jean Parvin Bordewich, who advises philanthropies on democratic governance. Bordewich is in conversation with Peter Cozzens, is the international award-winning author of nineteen books on the Civil War and the American West, including the best-selling The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West (winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize in Military History). A former army officer, Cozzens retired after a thirty-year career with the U. S. Foreign Service. He lives in Kensington, Maryland, with his wife. PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593803363?ic_referral=ppYf9fKBiLEdCuWzXP2K5ia24mlQZYMLQlPf8JKMGSQwM94d-DhmANXIRlzKzGpGPEtpkex7Gkgoj74QMvl9DdLnQRP605RPdgEifeJwhGqKsYeufF1femcG9FvJtyDvCptJ8Ic

Isaac Butler — The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars -with Dan Kois

The prize-winning author of The Method reveals the forgotten origins of America's culture wars-a story of late 20th century art vs. censorship, brimming with intense drama and fierce moral urgency. It's 1988, the final year of the Reagan presidency, and the curtain is closing on the Cold War. In the absence of external adversaries, the American public is on the precipice of war with itself. The religious right, newly ascendant and emboldened, is determined to seize control of America's future. And the first battles will be fought over, of all things, contemporary art. In The Perfect Moment, [https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639733491?ic_referral=yzWpsxxSNaKoJ9ec9BHY5eTX_tL8DgNUgxOOCS_fWTowM9vM_5-RvcR9tB220FlaCd7X63gt5dFopEGE0syAdKxloJN2IOR7Agl8WUa7lV3cbn7OlUQGS9c63ycPlyvfMhcHe4A] cultural historian Isaac Butler reexamines this pivotal, misunderstood American era. Archconservatives like Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson fixed their sights on artists including Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and Karen Finley, capitalizing on the provocative politics of their work to stir a nascent evangelical coalition into moral panic. It was at this moment, Butler argues, that the far right perfected the tactics it still uses today to whip its base into frenzy-from banning books and sanitizing American history, to spreading medical misinformation. All too relevant today, The Perfect Moment is an incisive and meticulously researched account of this crucial period and a stirring ode to the power of the creative spirit. Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler's writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. Butler is in conversation with Dan Kois, author of five books, including The World Only Spins Forward, with Isaac Butler. His most recent book is the novel Hampton Heights. In 2027, he will publish a memoir, Playing Hearts, and a collection of essays, Where Is the Light Coming From. He lives in Arlington. PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639733491?ic_referral=kdzHLSDZ1nAJPOn1KJpGtfyzGpLNBGi9Ul-NaQbaDfswM6hl4LI6VR2KAwfk5LCrZXlA-t7vOIOYL6KFpbYtN7njHujr4lIIu0K3LpO2QK3L_FCfdFup-qDZ964b0II_gfwgRo0