KtBniks
This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers
Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us. This work began when his father…
Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions
A sharp and entertaining essay collection about the importance of multiple forms of love and friendship in a world designed for couples, from a laser-precise new voice. Sometimes it seems like there are two American creeds, self-reliance and marriage, and neither of them is mine….
Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy
The origins of the next radical economy is rooted in a tradition that has empowered people for centuries and is now making a comeback. A new feudalism is on the rise. While monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich, more and more of us…
Objects of Devotion: Religion in Early America
Religion in Early America tells the story of religion in the United States through the material culture of diverse spiritual pursuits in the nation’s colonial period and the early republic. The beautiful, full-color companion volume to a Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibition, the…
The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost
In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America’s imagination. A “spirit photographer,” William Mumler, took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of lost loved ones alongside his living subjects. At a time when artists…
Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
A Wired Magazine Top Tech Book of 2017 Real democracy and the Internet are not mutually exclusive. Here, for the first time in one volume, are some of the most cogent thinkers and doers on the subject of the cooptation of the Internet, and how we can…
Uggs for Gaza: and Other Stories
Prepare yourself: this sparkling short story collection will have you thinking, cringing and laughing out loud. Gordon Haber’s nonfiction has earned him a significant following (and a few enemies). Uggs for Gaza (and Other Stories), his debut short story collection, continues that tradition of wit, scathing honesty…
One Nation Under Gods: A New American History
A groundbreaking new look at the story of America. At the heart of the nation’s spiritual history are audacious and often violent scenes. But the Puritans and the shining city on the hill give us just one way to understand the United States. Rather than…
Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck
Did you know that fatal gun mishaps have been so common in America that for centuries, newspapers carried regular columns reporting on “melancholy accidents”? It came as a surprising discovery when, while conducting research that involved reading colonial-era newspapers, acclaimed writer Peter Manseau stumbled upon…
Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, and Other Essays on American Belief
A startling and immensely pleasurable collection of American writings on belief, from the Civil War to Occupy Wall Street Beginning with Walt Whitman singing hymns at a wounded soldier’s bedside during the Civil War, this surprising and vivid anthology ranges straight through to the twenty-first…
The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Seekers, Believers, and Those In Between
Up to 30% of not one but two entire generations of Americans have chosen to live a life free from religion. The Nones Are Alright investigates how and why the exodus from organized religion is occurring, by telling the personal stories of members of the generation born…
God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet
In this tour of the history of arguments for and against the existence of God, Nathan Schneider embarks on a remarkable intellectual, historical, and theological journey through the centuries of believers and unbelievers—from ancient Greeks, to medieval Arabs, to today’s most eminent philosophers and the…
A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka
Crowded, hot, subject to violent swings in climate, with a government unable or unwilling to face the most vital challenges, the rich and poor increasingly living in worlds apart; for most of the world, this picture is of a possible future. For India, it is…
Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse
Thank You, Anarchy is an up-close, inside account of Occupy Wall Street’s first year in New York City, written by one of the first reporters to cover the phenomenon. Nathan Schneider chronicles the origins and explosive development of the Occupy movement through the eyes of the…
Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between
No one explores the borderlands of belief and skepticism quite like Jeff Sharlet. He is ingenious, farsighted, and able to excavate the worlds of others, even the flakiest and most fanatical, with uncanny sympathy. Here, he reports back from the far reaches of belief, whether…
Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church
As someone who clocked more time in mosh pits and at pro-choice rallies than kneeling in a pew, Kaya Oakes was not necessarily the kind of Catholic girl the Vatican was after. But even while she immersed herself in the punk rock scene and proudly…
C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy
The secretive Christian fundamentalist group known as “The Family” is leading a new crusade for a “God-led government.” Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from within the organization, garnering intense media coverage when it was revealed that their townhouse on Washington DC’s…
The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011
Featuring the KtB essay “A Hundred Unspoken Rules,” by KtB editor Meera Subramanian, this adventurous collection contains Meera’s South Asian bumblings and ruminations, as well as true stories about having lunch with a mobster in Japan, learning the secrets of flamenco in Spain, delivering a…