New This Month: February 2024

Happy February! This month marks the start of our Spring/Summer 2024 season and we’re excited to share some of the great titles we have lined up. Scroll down to browse all of the new books publishing this month, including a bunch of new paperbacks or browse our full Spring/Summer 2024 catalog to see everything that’s coming this season.


Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination by Stephanie Clare Smith

First book in the Great Circle Books Creative nonfiction series

“This stunningly lyrical memoir is a profoundly insightful glimpse into the complex and frightening consequences of parental neglect. As Smith’s voice naturally evolves from alienated to intensely present, the impressively concise narrative alternates between ethereal observations about everything from space to spiders and gut punches of pain, shame, revelation, and redemption . . . . A masterful literary memoir about caring for those responsible for our trauma.”—Kirkus Reviews (STARRED review)

Everywhere the Undrowned offers an account of trauma and its aftermath more acute than any I have read. Reminiscent in places of Sylvia Plath at her sharpest and most bleakly funny, it deserves to become a classic.”—Emma Brockes, author of She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me

A Question of Value: Stories from the Life of an Auctioneer by Robert Brunk

“Deeply thoughtful and elegant in its forthright simplicity, A Question of Value is one of the best books on collecting in many years.”—Antiques and the Arts Weekly

“In his new memoir . . . the gavel-wielding philosopher shares wisdom gleaned from his many years on the road and in the salesroom. [Brunk’s] empathetic tales capture the comedy, pathos, joy, and ultimate mystery that is collecting.”—The Magazine Antiques

“Bob Brunk’s essays, like the auction business he chronicles, bring fresh life to old artifacts. In fact, his reminiscences made me see objects anew: as the guardians of secrets and stories. This is a book for the unconscious collector in each of us.”—Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian and The Shadow Land

Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education by Shardé M. Davis

“The perils and possibilities of life for Black scholars exist in the same academic house. Shardé Davis’s pathbreaking interventions on social media about what it means to be Black in higher education find an extended shelf life with this brilliant collection of bold voices speaking about what’s wrong and how to fix it. Being Black in the Ivory is just what the doctor ordered. This book must be read by everyone and anyone who cares about Black scholars and scholarship in the twenty-first century!”—Michael Eric Dyson, University Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University, author of Entertaining Race

Being Black in the Ivory is a collective exhale. Davis validates the experiences of Black scholars and reminds us that we are not crazy and we are not alone.”—Kellie Carter Jackson, author of Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, finalist for the MAAH Stone Book Award

Come! Come! Where? Where?: Essays by James Seay

“With the touch of a poet and the depth of an offshore fisherman (both of which he is), James Seay ranges from wrangling with hard men and heavy equipment to feeling for his butter-churning mom and a baby cowbird. The little cowbird is ignored, except by Seay, but this book shouldn’t be.”—Roy Blount Jr., author of Alphabet Juice

“From single-wides to severed digits and the naming of dogs, Come! Come! Where? Where? gently explores the beautiful, the profound, and the sad, illuminating the rich and varied human spectacle with wisdom and kindness. “—Sally Mann, photographer and author of Hold Still

Our Higher Calling, Second Edition: Rebuilding the Partnership between America and Its Colleges and Universities by Holden Thorp, Buck Goldstein

“Compelling…. Thorp and Goldstein outline a blueprint for trustees, presidents, faculty and students to follow to rebuild higher education for a new century.”—Jeffrey J. Selingo, Washington Post

“What can higher education do to reverse public and political skepticism about it–even hostility toward it? More than anything, say Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein, American higher education must work to restore the compact that has long underpinned it–a tacit agreement in which academe produces knowledge and well-educated citizens in exchange for stable public investment and the autonomy to get on with its job.”—The Chronicle of Higher Education

Now Available in Paperback

Book cover for Arise, Africa! Roar, China!: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century by  Yunxiang Gao
Book cover for Arguing Until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy Michael E. Woods
Book cover for Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West by Susan Lee Johnson
Book cover for The Birth Certificate: An American History by Susan J. Pearson
book cover for Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman by Susan M. Reverby
Book cover for Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood by Cynthia A. Kierner
Book cover for The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War by Michael S. Sherry
Book cover for Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America by Tonya Harmer
Book cover for Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11 by John Bodnar