American Towns

"Simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling." ―The New Republic A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take...

No one ever said big dreams come easy For Nesto Vasquez, moving his Afro-Caribbean food truck from New York City to the wilds of Upstate New York is a huge gamble. If it works? He’ll be a big fish in a little pond. If it doesn’t? He’ll have to give up the hustle and return to the day job...

Aliquippa, Pennsylvania is famous for two things: the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill, an industrial behemoth that helped win World War II; and football, with a high school team that has produced numerous NFL stars, including Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis. But the mill, once the fourth largest producer in America, closed for good in 2000. What happens to a town when a dream dies? Does it just disappear?

In this news-breaking narrative, decades of women who brought down sexual predator Larry Nassar offer groundbreaking new insight, with the first known survivor and many others sharing their stories exclusively for the first time. We think of Larry Nassar as the despicable sexual predator of...

Nuclear power once promised to be the solution to the world's energy crisis, but that all changed in the late twentieth century after multiple high-profile accidents and meltdowns. Power plant workers, finding themselves the subject of public opposition, became leery of reporters. But one plant in Zion, Illinois, allowed unrestricted access to one journalist: the Chicago Tribune's Casey Bukro. Bukro spent two years inside the Zion nuclear plant, interviewing employees, witnessing high-risk maintenance procedures, and watching the radiation exposure counter on his own dosimeter tick up and up.

Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people.

One of the nation's most acclaimed journalists, the New York Times' Mark Leibovich, presents a blistering, penetrating, controversial--and often hysterical--look at Washington's incestuous "media industrial complex."...

American Star is a love story of two extraordinary lovers, separated by tragedy, yearning for each other, though seemingly unable to be together ever again. Nick and Lauren could never forget each other. Teenage small-town lovers—he from the wrong side of the tracks, she the prettiest girl in...

“Bold hockey romance that hits like a slap shot.” —Rachel Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Heated Rivalry Two bitter rivals go head-to-head in this age-gap, enemies-to-lovers hockey romance. Michael Sato is used to fighting. An undersized defenseman, Mike had to be tough, clawing...

Sundown Towns examines thousands of all-white American towns that were - and still are, in some instances - racially exclusive by design.

An intimate, heart wrenching portrait of one small hospital that reveals the magnitude of America’s health care crises. “With his signature gut-punching prose, Alexander breaks our hearts as he opens our eyes to America’s deep-rooted sickness and despair by immersing us in the lives of a...

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

This rodeo star's past is about to collide with his present, and the one woman he's never forgotten might be the one to tie him down for good—in this sizzling cowboy romance from the bestselling author of Wanted and the Silver Pines Ranch series. Rough, wild, and too charismatic for his own...

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he cofounded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.

The definitive and moving account of America’s only World War II Holocaust refugee shelter. Nearly eighty years ago, the residents of a small town in upstate New York welcomed a group of refugees that changed the town forever. The 982 people were the only refugees to enter the United States...

From acclaimed author Phil Stamper (The Gravity of Us and As Far as You’ll Take Me) comes a poignant coming-of-age, contemporary middle grade debut novel about finding your place, using your voice, and the true meaning of pride. Perfect for fans of Rick by Alex Gino and The Best at It by...

The story of the American mining frontier can be traced in the ghost towns - from the camps of California's forty-niners to the 20th-century ruins in the Nevada desert. They mark an epoch of high adventure, of quick wealth and quicker poverty, of gambling and gun-slinging and hell-raising. We who have seen too many Western movies sometimes think that the legends of the Wild West were invented by scriptwriters - but the ghost towns remain.

New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the seventy-five-year...

A luminous memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia - dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings - has been the great...

A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America—written by an acclaimed journalist and Army Ranger who, after returning from Iraq to a painfully divided country, rediscovered its core values in the bleachers of a minor league ballpark...