American Politics in the 21st Century

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary annual of new writing, and executive editor of the Literary Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology of new writing about inequality in the U.S. today. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he is Writer in Residence at New York University. For John Freeman―literary critic, essayist, editor, poet, “one of the preeminent book people of our time” (Dave Eggers)―it is the rare moment when words are not enough. But in the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent. Action was the only reasonable response. The result is his Dictionary of the Undoing. From A to Z, “Agitate” to “Zygote,” Freeman assembled the words that felt most essential, most potent, and began to build a case for their renewed power and authority, each word building on the last. The message that emerged was not to retreat behind books, but to emphatically engage in the public sphere, to redefine what it means to be a literary citizen. With an afterword by Valeria Luiselli, Dictionary of the Undoing is a necessary, resounding cri de coeur in defense of language, meaning, and our ability to imagine, describe, and build a better world.

Michael Tomasky is a columnist for the Daily Beast, a contributing writer for the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books, and the editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. In If We Can Keep It (Liveright) Tomansky addresses two basic but urgent questions regarding the current political situation: Why has American politics fallen into such a state of horrible dysfunction, and, can it ever be fixed? For an answer, he ranges across centuries and disciplines to show how the United States has almost always had two dominant parties that are existentially, and often violently, opposed. When he turns to our current era, his insights will challenge readers to reexamine what they thought they knew. Finally, Tomasky offers a provocative agenda for how to fix our broken political system―from ranked-choice voting and at-large congressional elections to expanding high school civics education nationwide. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews noted that Tomasky “expertly sifts through American history, citing compromises, which mostly made everyone unhappy. Refreshingly, [he] also offers 'A Fourteen-Point Agenda to Reduce Polarization,' which includes a host of reasonable ideas.... Read this excellent book; it's your civic duty.”