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From writer and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton comes an eye-opening journey through American history that unearths and debunks the myths we've always told ourselves. Recent years have brought a reckoning in America. As rampant political corruption, stark inequality, and violent bigotry have come to the fore, many have faced two vital questions: How did we get here? And how do we move forward? An honest look at the past—and how it’s been covered up—is the only way to find the answers. Americans in power have abused and subjugated others since the nation’s very beginning, and myths of America’s unique goodness have both enabled that injustice and buried the truth for generations. In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton blends deep research with stunning storytelling, digging into each era of growth and change that led us here—and laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of the American imagination. Stirring, unequivocal, and impossible to put down, American Rule tells the truth about what this nation has always been—and challenges us to forge a new path.
This provocative, “critically important” memoir of working-class boyhood in rural Indiana offers a searing cultural analysis of toxic masculinity in American culture (NPR). As progressivism changes American society, and globalism shifts labor away from traditional manufacturing, the roles that have been prescribed to men since the Industrial Revolution have been rendered obsolete. Donald Trump's campaign successfully leveraged male resentment and entitlement, and now, with Trump as president and the rise of the #MeToo movement, it’s clear that our current definitions of masculinity are outdated and even dangerous. Deeply personal and thoroughly researched, the author of The People Are ...
“Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate’s presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election.” —The Washington Post The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Includes an all new afterword that details the first year of the Trump presidency. “With a novelist’s flair for the dramatic scene and evocative detail, Sexton expertly marries the quotidian tedium of the campaign trail (so many hotel room beers) and the outlandish circumstances of this particular election season with his astute observations about our polarized national condition.” —Salon “This is the post–campaign book I was waiting for. Essential reading for understanding this country now and going forward.” —Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night
In the follow-up to his critically lauded debut An End To All Things, Jared Yates Sexton presents twenty-three new stories that pick up where his first book left off. Whether they're set in a sweat-saturated sparring ring, the backroom of a gas station speakeasy, or in the kitchen of the house down the street, these are glimpses into an America that too-often goes unseen. Witness here the untold tales of the losers and the should've-beens, the dreamers and the hustlers, all of them just spoiling for their turn at glory or the inevitable one-two punch that puts them down for good.
Narcissism. Sexism. Consumerism and technological fetishism. The cult of media and the rot of war. In his third collection of stories, Jared Yates Sexton turns his eye to the ravages of the American Disease with twenty-five of his wildest and most experimental pieces. Told in raving mad prose fit for these savage times, Sexton skewers every sacred cow in an attempt to diagnose the sickness of Now.
When Jared Yates Sexton finished his MFA and returned to his hometown in Indiana, he found a population plagued by the kind of turmoil and tension usually reserved for fiction. Unemployment and uncertainty lurked everywhere he looked. In his debut story collection, this pervasive turbulence tilts into the fantastical as we observe the inspired, absurd, and even horrific moments in the lives of lost and luckless Midwesterners looking for something to believe in. Through language that’s both striking and unassuming, Sexton creates a dangerous and disturbing world in which everything and everyone teeters precariously on the edge of total chaos; a world that bears a startling resemblance to ou...
"In this analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about "the browning of America." He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness."--BOOK JACKET.
Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story... From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "You will not read a more important book about America this year."--The Economist "A riveting book."--The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."--David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The ...
An urgent look at the U.S. Border Patrol from its xenophobic founding to its assault on the Fourth Amendment in its quest to become a national police force Late one July night in 2020, armed men, identified only by the word POLICE written across their uniforms, began snatching supporters of Black Lives Matter off the street in Portland, Oregon, and placing them in unmarked vans. These mysterious actions were not carried out by local law enforcement or even right-wing terrorists, but by the U.S. Border Patrol. Why was the Border Patrol operating so far from the boundaries of the United States? What were they doing at a protest that had nothing to do with immigration or the border? Nobody Is P...
“On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist beautifully outlines . . . what it means to seek the truth. It gave me a new faith in the power of reporting.” —Oprah Winfrey The recipient of multiple Peabody and Murrow awards, Clarissa Ward is a world-renowned conflict reporter. In this strange age of crisis where there really is no front line, she has moved from one hot zone to the next. With multiple assignments in Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, Ward, who speaks seven languages, has been based in Baghdad, Beirut, Beijing, and Moscow. She has seen and documented the violent remaking of the world at close range. With her deep empathy, Ward finds a way to tell the hardest stories....