Whistles from the Graveyard

December 1, 2022

In Why Fathers Cry at Night, Newbery Medalist and New York Times best-selling author Alexander (Swing) blends memoir and love poems, recalling his parent and his first years of marriage and fatherhood as he ponders learning to love (50,000-copy first printing). After abandoning her marriage as the wrong path, Biggs looked at women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Zora Neale Hurston to Elena Ferrante as she considered how to find A Life of One's Own. A celebrated New York-based carpenter (e.g., his iconic Sky House was named best apartment of the decade by Interior Design), self-described serial dropout Ellison recounts how he found his path to Building. Shot five times at age 19 by a Pittsburgh police officer (a case of mistaken identity that amounted to racial profiling), Ford awoke paralyzed from the waist down and learned he was a new father; a decade later, he recounts his path to social activism and An Unspeakable Hope for himself and his son. From the first Black American female designer to win a CFDA Award, Wildflower takes James from high school dropout to designer of a sustainable fashion line showcasing traditional African design to founder of the booming social justice nonprofit Fifteen Percent Pledge (businesses pledge to dedicate 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned brands). Minka's fans will proclaim Tell Me Everything when they pick up her hand-to-mouth-to Hollywood memoir (30,000-copy first printing). In Whistles from the Graveyard, which aims to capture the experience of confused young millennials in the U.S. Marines, Lagoze recalls serving as a combat cameraman in the Afghan War and witnessing both bonding with locals against the Taliban and brutality toward innocent people by young men too practiced in violence. To cement ties with his eldest son, star of Netflix's hit Dead to Me, veteran actor and New York Times best-selling author McCarthy found himself Walking with Sam along Spain's 500-mile Camino de Santiago. A first-generation Chinese American with a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, Pen/Faulkner Award finalist Ng (Bone) recounts being raised in San Francisco's Chinatown by the community's Orphan Bachelors, older men without wives or children owing to the infamous Exclusion Act. Thought-provoking novelist Pittard (Reunion) turns to nonfiction with We Are Too Many, an expansion of her attention-getting Sewanee Review essay about her husband's affair with her best friend (80,000-copy first printing). Delighted by all the queer stories she encountered when she moved to Brooklyn, book publicist Possanza uses Lesbian Love Story to recover the personal histories of lesbians in the 20th century and muse about replacing contemporary misogynistic society with something markedly lesbian. In Uncle of the Year, Tony, Drama Desk, and Critics Choice Award nominee Rannells wonders at age 40 what success means and whether he wants a husband and family; 19 original essays and one published in the New York Times. Describing himself as Uneducated (he was tossed out of high school and never went to college), Zara ended up as senior editor at Fast Company, among other leading journalist stints; here's how he did it (30,000 copy first printing.)

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October 1, 2023
A former Marine Combat Cameraman recounts the hell of battle. After high school, Lagoze arrived at a Marine Corps recruitment office to escape his teenage wasteland. Asked what he wanted to do, he replied, "Combat Camera." That landed him the status of POG, a person other than a grunt, "the worst thing you could be called in the Marines....similar to a desk jockey." What he filmed, officially, earned approval, but for his own purposes, he filmed forbidden things like Marines smoking hash in the field and fighting high--and, far worse, scenes of them mistreating human corpses and living animals. "You're not a Marine until you do what Marines do, which is go to war," writes the author. "Earn your strips. Get your Combat Action Ribbon." War is, of course, hell; even though a fellow videographer assured him that Afghanistan was "a really long, messed-up camping trip," it still felt like the worst place on Earth. Learning just how horrible it was--a realization built up over months in the field in a war "run by eighteen to twenty-three-year-old kids without college degrees and little on their minds besides getting some trigger time"--resulted in a surrealistic documentary, Combat Obscura, that questioned everything, including his own role: "In my head we were still good guys; not 'the' good guys, but still okay." In fact, he concludes in a book that stands up next to Anthony Swofford's Jarhead and Michael Herr's Dispatches, they weren't OK, and they would never be OK again. One sign of the mental toll, notes Lagoze, was the veteran-studded attempted coup of January 6, 2021, which he links directly to foreign interventions that led radicalized young warriors to the steps of the Capitol. Gonzo, ghoulish, and unforgettable: one of the strongest books yet to emerge from America's misadventure in Afghanistan.

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