How did a beautiful, talented college student fall in love with a man serving twenty-to-life for murder? Why did she marry him? At a time when one in four black men is caught in the web of the criminal justice system, Asha Bandele shatters the myths of prisoner's wives and tells a story of the beauty of love even in the ugliest of circumstances. Whether she is describing her restricted but romantic courtship with Rashid, when letters were like dates, or riding the bus upstate with the other wives and girlfriends, Bandele creates haunting images and reflections so powerful and unique that they beg to be reread and savoured. At the same time that she recalls the ups and downs that accompany a relationship that is constantly scutinized by guards and surveillance cameras, she confronts the secrets and sadness in her past and comes to terms with hersilf as an African-American woman and a prisoner's wife. A gifted poet, Asha Bandele has written an extraordinarily candid book that resonates with poetic language and abundant insight.

“A breezy, cautionary tale for modern sports fans” (Booklist) of the Brooklyn Nets’ inaugural season, which brought back pro sports to the borough of Brooklyn—now updated to include the 2013-2014 season.When the Brooklyn Nets played their first game at Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn in the fall of 2012, they succeeded in bringing professional sports back to Brooklyn for the first time since the Dodgers abandoned the borough in 1957. Brooklyn Bounce chronicles the Nets’ historic inaugural season in the borough, full of highs and lows—plenty of them entirely unexpected. Sports journalist Jake Appleman takes us inside the locker room and courtside, examining the team’s transition from the New Jersey swamp to gentrified Brooklyn, from an opening night delayed by Hurricane Sandy to an epic seven-game playoff showdown with the Chicago Bulls. The Nets were the game’s foremost paradox in 2013, a team that managed to be the most improved in the NBA, but also consistently disappointed. What made them interesting wasn’t their style of play or even their unique collection of personalities; it was their constant state of reinvention and their evolving relationship with their new home: as the Barclays crowds would chant it, BROOOOOOK-LYN! Here, “Appleman’s wit, enthusiasm for his subject, and familiarity with the players lifts Brooklyn Bounce above most season chronicles” (The Boston Globe).

“A darkly funny memoir about family reckonings” (O, The Oprah Magazine)—the story of a young man who, by handling the dead, makes peace with the living.Andrew Meredith’s father, a literature professor at La Salle University, was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It’s a transgression that resulted in such long-lasting familial despair that Andrew cannot forgive him. In the wake of the scandal, he frantically treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence—falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next. When Andrew is forced to move back home to his childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia and take a job alongside his father as a “remover,” the name for those unseen, unsung men whose charge it is to take away the dead from their last rooms, he begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but through that of a sympathetic, imperfect man. Called “artful” and “compelling” by Thomas Lynch in The Wall Street Journal, Meredith’s poetic voice is as unforgettable as his story, and “he tucks his bittersweet childhood memories between tales of removals as carefully as the death certificates he slips between the bodies he picks up and the stretcher-like contraption that transports each body to the waiting vehicle” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “Potent” (Publishers Weekly), and “ultimately rewarding” (The Boston Globe), The Removers is a searing, coming-of-age memoir with “lyrical language and strong sense of place” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

How did a beautiful, talented college student fall in love with a man serving twenty-to-life for murder? Why did she marry him? At a time when one in four black men is caught in the web of the criminal justice system, Asha Bandele shatters the myths of prisoner's wives and tells a story of the beauty of love even in the ugliest of circumstances. Whether she is describing her restricted but romantic courtship with Rashid, when letters were like dates, or riding the bus upstate with the other wives and girlfriends, Bandele creates haunting images and reflections so powerful and unique that they beg to be reread and savoured. At the same time that she recalls the ups and downs that accompany a relationship that is constantly scutinized by guards and surveillance cameras, she confronts the secrets and sadness in her past and comes to terms with hersilf as an African-American woman and a prisoner's wife. A gifted poet, Asha Bandele has written an extraordinarily candid book that resonates with poetic language and abundant insight.

“A breezy, cautionary tale for modern sports fans” (Booklist) of the Brooklyn Nets’ inaugural season, which brought back pro sports to the borough of Brooklyn—now updated to include the 2013-2014 season.When the Brooklyn Nets played their first game at Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn in the fall of 2012, they succeeded in bringing professional sports back to Brooklyn for the first time since the Dodgers abandoned the borough in 1957. Brooklyn Bounce chronicles the Nets’ historic inaugural season in the borough, full of highs and lows—plenty of them entirely unexpected. Sports journalist Jake Appleman takes us inside the locker room and courtside, examining the team’s transition from the New Jersey swamp to gentrified Brooklyn, from an opening night delayed by Hurricane Sandy to an epic seven-game playoff showdown with the Chicago Bulls. The Nets were the game’s foremost paradox in 2013, a team that managed to be the most improved in the NBA, but also consistently disappointed. What made them interesting wasn’t their style of play or even their unique collection of personalities; it was their constant state of reinvention and their evolving relationship with their new home: as the Barclays crowds would chant it, BROOOOOOK-LYN! Here, “Appleman’s wit, enthusiasm for his subject, and familiarity with the players lifts Brooklyn Bounce above most season chronicles” (The Boston Globe).

“A darkly funny memoir about family reckonings” (O, The Oprah Magazine)—the story of a young man who, by handling the dead, makes peace with the living.Andrew Meredith’s father, a literature professor at La Salle University, was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It’s a transgression that resulted in such long-lasting familial despair that Andrew cannot forgive him. In the wake of the scandal, he frantically treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence—falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next. When Andrew is forced to move back home to his childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia and take a job alongside his father as a “remover,” the name for those unseen, unsung men whose charge it is to take away the dead from their last rooms, he begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but through that of a sympathetic, imperfect man. Called “artful” and “compelling” by Thomas Lynch in The Wall Street Journal, Meredith’s poetic voice is as unforgettable as his story, and “he tucks his bittersweet childhood memories between tales of removals as carefully as the death certificates he slips between the bodies he picks up and the stretcher-like contraption that transports each body to the waiting vehicle” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “Potent” (Publishers Weekly), and “ultimately rewarding” (The Boston Globe), The Removers is a searing, coming-of-age memoir with “lyrical language and strong sense of place” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).