The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,”but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

In this special issue, contributors argue that addiction is at the forefront of current global conversations on biopolitics, yet its history is only beginning to be uncovered. By reassessing what counts as addiction and where we might find it, the authors present new approaches to the concept that addiction can be an expression of devotion (as its Latin etymology suggests), can provide authorial inspiration, or can be defined by legal bias and institutional structures, a phenomenon largely devised to exclude or target racialized groups (as with imperial and colonial attitudes toward drug use).

It has been fifty years since Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was first published in 1970, a year after his death. The work appeared at a historical moment when political tension on the left was at its height and the movements of pop art and postmodernism began eclipsing the modernist aesthetic values Adorno cherished. Aesthetic Theory was met with initial resistance, in part because its aesthetic criteria appeared antiquated. This issue reckons with the dialectical complexity of this often misunderstood and misinterpreted work. Essay topics include the metaphysics of landscapes, the potential of film as a medium for social critique, Adorno's conception of the spiritual in art, and a nuanced reading of his polemic against Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Bringing together philosophers, art historians, musicologists, and literary theorists, this issue shows that Aesthetic Theory still has lessons that extend beyond disciplinary bounds. Contributors. J. M. Bernstein, Hent de Vries, Peter E. Gordon, Eva Geulen, Martin Jay, Sherry Lee, Max Pensky, with two additional essays on Adorno by Mikko Immanen and Ricardo Samaniego de la Fuente

American Boarding School Fiction, 1981-2021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers - the center was filled with students: white, male, Protestant students at boys' schools. More recently, a new generation of writers-including Richard A. Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff-has transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in unprecedented ways. These new writers present characters who are rich and underprivileged, white and Black, male and female, adolescent and middle-aged, conformist and rebellious. By turning their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, they have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.

It is commonly held among scholars that there was no mass literature in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years. What should we do, then, with Lev Ovalov's Major Pronin or with the stories of Lev Sheinin, which began to appear in the mid-1930s? And what about Nikolai Shpanov's post-war best-sellers? As The Soviet Spy Thriller demonstrates, the Soviet authorities did not like to admit that they published low-quality literature aimed at the uncultured masses, but they greatly valued its propaganda value. These works represented a break with the 'Red Pinkerton' tradition of the 1920s: the genre was being reinvented along new lines, with a new seriousness, and documentary pretensions. The building of a new kind of spy thriller also required a new enemy. Between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, the Soviet spy thriller reflects the shift from an obsession with class to a new preoccupation with nationality, as the Soviet Union constructed a new identity for itself in a rapidly changing world. The same identity discourse underwent another transformation in the post-Stalin years, when the Soviet agent, underground in the enemy camp, became a metaphor for double life of the 'Soviet man'. A landmark new survey of a genre little known in the West, The Soviet Spy Thriller shines new light on cultural politics in the Soviet Union, and offers a fascinating counterpoint to the Western spy thrillers that will be so familiar to most readers.