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The collected lore of Minnesota's favorite lumberjack hero

Paul Bunyan is a true American folk character, created in logging camp bunkhouses by men who spun exaggerated stories that combined hard work and fantasy.

Honorable Mention for the 2025 New Deal Book Award 

Leon Bibel (1913–1995) was a prolific modern American artist who painted, printed, stamped, etched, sketched, and carved. He produced pieces that ranged from social realism to dreamy expressionism and was an aesthetic experimentalist, never working for too long in any medium or style. And despite Bibel's obvious talent, his work would have languished in obscurity were it not for the New Deal programs like the Federal Art Project and Public Works of Art Project.
 
Leon Bibel, the first biography of this eclectic artist, recounts his life from his birth in Szczebrzeszyn, Poland, in 1913, to his death in New Jersey in 1995. After immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, Bibel came of age during the Great Depression, when New Deal agencies recognized his abilities and supported his artistic endeavors. Working-class artists faced challenges after these programs folded, and Bibel would later spend twenty years as a New Jersey chicken farmer before resurrecting his art career in the 1960s.
 
Historian Richard Haw shows how Bibel's life was defined by the New Deal, his visionary artwork shaped by the era's commitment to social and economic justice. With reproductions of more than 240 of Bibel's works, most in vivid color, this book reveals how he depicted everything from the trauma of unemployment to the dignity of work, from the horrors of lynching to the pleasures of everyday life.

As the best-selling author of Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII, and Trinity, Leon Uris blazed a path to celebrity with books that readers could not put down. Uris's thirteen novels sold millions of copies, spent months on the best-seller lists, appeared in fifty languages, and have been adapted into equally popular movies and TV miniseries. Few other writers equaled Uris's fame in the mid-twentieth century. His success fueled the rise of mass-market paperbacks, movie tie-ins, and celebrity author tours. Beloved by the public, Uris was, not surprisingly, dismissed by literary critics. Until now, his own life—as full of drama as his fiction—has never been the subject of a book.

In Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, Ira Nadel traces Uris from his disruptive youth to his life-changing experiences as a marine in World War II. These experiences, coupled with Uris's embrace of his Judaism and desire to write, led to his unprecedented success and the lavish excesses of a career as a best-selling author. Nadel reveals that Uris lived the adventures he described, including his war experiences in the Pacific (Battle Cry), life-threatening travels in Israel (Exodus), visit to Communist Poland (Mila 18), libel trial in Britain (QB VII), and dangerous sojourn in fractious Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic (Trinity). Nadel also demonstrates that Uris's talent for writing action-packed, yet thoroughly researched, novels meshed perfectly with the public's desire to revisit and understand the tumultuous events of recent history. This made him far more popular (and wealthy) than more literary authors, while paving the way for writers such as Irving Wallace and Tom Clancy.

The 1924 murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb shocked the nation. One hundred years later, the killing and its aftermath still reverberate through popular culture and the history of American crime.

Hal Higdon’s true crime classic offers an unprecedented examination of the case. Higdon details Leopold and Loeb’s journey from privilege and promise to the planning and execution of their monstrous vision of the perfect crime. Drawing on secret testimony, Higdon follows the police investigation through the pair’s confessions of guilt and recreates the sensational hearing where Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous attorney, saved the pair from the death penalty.

In-depth and definitive, Leopold and Loeb tells the dramatic story of a notorious crime and its long afterlife in the American imagination.

In this powerful debut collection, present-day women of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Meghana Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. At times, this disorientation skews speculative, where deceased mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars. At turns absurd and darkly humorous, the women in Mysore’s stories all experience transformation, be it small or monumental, where they find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances.

Barbara Jordan spoke for many Texas women when she told a reporter, "I get from the soil and spirit of Texas the feeling that I, as an individual, can accomplish whatever I want to, and that there are no limits, that you can just keep going, just keep soaring. I like that spirit." Indeed, the sense of limitless possibilities has inspired countless Texas women—sometimes in the face of daunting obstacles—to build lives rich in work, family, friends, faith, and community involvement.

In this collection of interviews conducted by PJ Pierce, twenty-five Texas women ranging in age from 53 to 93 share the wisdom they've acquired through living unconventional lives. Responding to the question "What have you found that really matters about life?" they offer keen insights into motherhood, career challenges, being a minority, marriage and widowhood, anger, assertiveness, managing change, persevering, power, speaking out, fashioning success from failure, writing your own job description, loving a younger man, and recognizing opportunities disguised as disaster—to name only a few of their topics. In her introduction, Pierce describes how she came to write the book and how she chose her subjects to represent a cross-section of career paths and ethnic groups and all geographic areas of Texas. A topical index makes it easy to compare several women's views on a given subject.

Winner, Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association, 2012
Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women, Texas State Historical Association, 2012

When Ann Richards delivered the keynote of the 1988 Democratic National Convention and mocked President George H. W. Bush—“Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth”—she instantly became a media celebrity and triggered a rivalry that would alter the course of American history. In 1990, Richards won the governorship of Texas, upsetting the GOP’s colorful rancher and oilman Clayton Williams. The first ardent feminist elected to high office in America, she opened up public service to women, blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, gays, and the disabled. Her progressive achievements and the force of her personality created a lasting legacy that far transcends her rise and fall as governor of Texas.

In Let the People In, Jan Reid draws on his long friendship with Richards, interviews with her family and many of her closest associates, her unpublished correspondence with longtime companion Bud Shrake, and extensive research to tell a very personal, human story of Ann Richards’s remarkable rise to power as a liberal Democrat in a conservative Republican state. Reid traces the whole arc of Richards’s life, beginning with her youth in Waco, her marriage to attorney David Richards, her frustration and boredom with being a young housewife and mother in Dallas, and her shocking encounters with Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. He follows Richards to Austin and the wild 1970s scene and describes her painful but successful struggle against alcoholism. He tells the full, inside story of Richards’s rise from county office and the state treasurer’s office to the governorship, where she championed gun control, prison reform, environmental protection, and school finance reform, and he explains why she lost her reelection bid to George W. Bush, which evened his family’s score and launched him toward the presidency. Reid describes Richards’s final years as a world traveler, lobbyist, public speaker, and mentor and inspiration to office holders, including Hillary Clinton. His nuanced portrait reveals a complex woman who battled her own frailties and a good-old-boy establishment to claim a place on the national political stage and prove “what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in.”

Reaching across miles and memory to deconstruct the American Dream in the Midwest Rust Belt

Arjan, a teen refugee from postcommunist Albania, and Jess, a Midwestern high schooler, strike up an unlikely friendship working a seasonal job on a farm in Michigan. Now in their thirties, the two have taken different paths—he chasing the American Dream with a running rotation of day-labor gigs, and she living on the road and off the grid, trying to escape the very same ideal. When Jess lands in Hamtramck, just a few miles from her suburban Detroit upbringing after years wandering, they find themselves trudging the same unplowed sidewalks, spinning loads at the same laundromat, and picking the same jukebox songs at the local dive. Both are haunted by the ghosts of childhood traumas, a chorus of the collective unconscious that takes us from the Albanian coast to the Rust Belt heartland. So near one another and yet so far apart, they must reach across miles and memories to discover that the most important voice in our heads is our own. 

A naturalist's captivating portrait of Alabama's wildlife, landscapes, and people.

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), a British naturalist, left home at age 17 and made his way to Alabama in 1838, where he had heard educated people were in demand. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold at Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen children of local landowners, but his principal interest was natural history. During the eight months he lived in th Black Belt he watched, listened, thought, took notes, and made sketches--activities that eventually led to Letters from Alabama. He lived among Alabamians, talked and listened to them, saw them at their best and their worst, and came to understand their hopes and fears. They were a part of the natural world, and he paid attention to them as any good scientist would. With the skills of a scientist and the temperament of an artist, Gosse set down an account of natural life in frontier Alabama that has no equal. Written to no one in particular, a common literary device of the period, the letters were first published in a magazine, and in 1859 appeared as a book. By that time Gosse was an established scholar and one of England’s most noted scientific illustrators.

New and improved edition of a naturalist's captivating portrait of Alabama's wildlife, landscapes, and people. 

Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), a British naturalist, left home at age seventeen and made his way to Alabama in 1838. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold and other planters near Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen of their children, but his principal interest was natural history. Letters from Alabama is a personalized record of Gosse’s perceptive observations during his eight-month residence in this small antebellum community. The work addresses a Victorian readership, including entomologists, who Gosse believed were relatively uninformed about the novelty and beauty of this “hilly region of the State of Alabama.” Written in an engaging literary style and organized as a series of epistolary discussions, the book is unparalleled in its detailed evocations of the natural history and cultural conditions of frontier Alabama. By the time Letters from Alabama appeared in 1859, Gosse’s scientific publications and fine illustrations had led to his being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton, this authoritative edition features thirty grayscale lithographs shot directly from the 1859 edition, reset type for easier reading, a new introduction and index by the two foremost scholars of Gosse in Alabama, a new appendix that provides modern scientific and common names for the plant and animal species described by Gosse, and a four-color cover featuring one of the plates from Gosse’s Entomologia Alabamensis.