Building on the critical acclaim of Tiffany Midge’s Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s, The Dreamcatcher in the Wry is Midge’s bitingly hilarious collection of essays written during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Standing Rock Sioux citizen, Midge offers up her unique satire about the foibles of politics, consumerism, world affairs, pandemic anxieties, and other subjects from the pandemic years of 2020 through 2023.

In All Roads Lead to Rome Thorness considers his father’s decisive moments in battle and beyond, and how he soldiered on as a disabled veteran through his life, raising a family and succumbing to an early death. Alternating between reimagined battle scenes and present-day travels, Thorness explores World War II and family history, the value and limits of memory, the attitudes of war, and our society’s inadequate understanding and support of combat veterans, who may return with physical and emotional scars that change them deeply.

Willie McCovey, known as “Stretch,” played Major League Baseball from 1959 to 1980, most notably as a member of the San Francisco Giants for nineteen seasons. In A Giant among Giants, the first biography of Willie McCovey, who passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty, Chris Haft tells the story of one of baseball’s best hitters and most-beloved players.

Boston is a city known for its sports as well as its troubled racial conflict. But generations of Black athletes, teams, sportswriters, and front-office executives have exercised historic influence in Boston over the years as they advocated for racial integration and transformed their sports into modes of racial pride, resistance, and cultural expression. Race and Resistance in Boston goes beyond the familiar topics associated with the city’s premiere professional teams to recount the long history of Black sporting culture in the city.

Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World brings to life the complicated history of Jesuit missionaries among Montana’s Native peoples—a saga of encounter, accommodation, and resistance during the transformative decades of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Sally Thompson tells the story of how Jesuit values played out in the lives of the Bitterroot Salish people.

Scott D. Seligman recounts the untold story of the largest antisemitic riot in American history: the horrific attack on Jewish mourners by factory workers and police on New York’s Lower East Side during the 1902 funeral of Chief Rabbi Jacob Joseph.

Blue Helmet: My Year as a UN Peacekeeper in South Sudan tells the story of a country, a conflict, and the institution of peacekeeping through the eyes of a senior American military officer working on the ground in one of the most dangerous countries on the planet.

In How to Change History Robin Hemley grapples with the individual’s navigation of history and the conflict between personal and public histories. In an attempt to restore, resurrect, and reclaim what might otherwise be lost, Hemley meditates and speculates on photography, scrapbooks, historical markers, travelogues, TV shows, real estate come-ons, washed-up rock stars, incontinent dachshunds, stalkers, skeletons in the closet, and literature.

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life’s fluid, ungraspable nature.

Michael Dowdy perceives the world as a poet, and one with an anxiety disorder. As a result he has rarely experienced fathering, or his relationship with his daughter, A, as a linear narrative. With measures of dark humor, the essays take seriously the literary, material, and political stakes of fathering and in doing so challenge patriarchal norms and one-dimensional accounts of fatherhood.