New Books This Week

We’ve arrived at another New Books Tuesday! Check out these two titles which are now available wherever books are sold. As always you can browse everything new this month on our Hot Off the Press page or sign up for our monthly e-news to get the list of new books delivered right to your inbox every month.

Save 30% on these titles and more during our Holiday Sale with code 01UNCP30 plus get free US shipping on orders over $75.

Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America by Burgin Mathews

Magic City is the story of one of American music’s essential unsung places: Birmingham, Alabama, birthplace of a distinctive and influential jazz heritage.

“Magic City is destined to become a crucial book in jazz history, African American cultural politics, the sonic geographies of cities, and the history of the South.”—Charles L. Hughes, author of Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South

“Birmingham, Alabama may seem an unlikely cradle of jazz. And yet Sun Ra was born there, and music teacher John T. ‘Fess’ Whatley trained generations of Birmingham musicians who went on to make enormous contributions working alongside the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and more. Magic City tells an essential story of American music.”–David Menconi, author of Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music

Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana’s unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.

“Lydia Pelot-Hobbs presents a profound and compelling analysis that shows why neoliberal regimes of racialized security must be dissolved in Louisiana and everywhere, and her wonderfully rich accounts of grassroots prison abolitionist organizing point toward how these changes can come about and how we can, and must, participate in seeing them come to fruition.”—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics

“Prison Capital is an urgent, elegant, and expert account of the making of one of the carceral capitals of the world.”—Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity