A unique perspective of the Motor City, this anthology combines stories told by both longtime residents and newcomers from activists to teachers to artists to students. While Detroit has always been rich in stories, too often those stories are told back to the city by outsiders looking in, believing they can explain Detroit back to itself. As editor, Anna Clark writes in the introduction, "These are the stories we tell each other over late nights at the pub and long afternoons on the porch. We share them in coffee shops, at church social hours, in living rooms, and while waiting for the bus. These are stories full of nodding asides and knowing laughs. These are stories addressed to the rhetorical "you"--with the ratcheted up language that comes with it--and these are stories that took real legwork to investigate . . . You will not find 'positive' stories about Detroit in this collection, or 'negative' ones. But you will find true stories." Featuring essays, photographs, art, and poetry by Grace Lee Boggs, John Carlisle, Desiree Cooper, Dream Hampton, Steve Hughes, Jamaal May, Tracie McMillan, Marsha Music, Shaka Senghor, Thomas J. Sugrue, and many others.

THE DETROITIST is an anthology of poems and stories aboutDetroit written by a daughter of Detroit.Natives of Detroit will recognize the places,faces, and history of their city. Newcomersto Detroit will learn about a Detroit thatwas and is a real locale, not a media-driveninvention. Those returning to the Detroittheir parents and grandparents fled willrealize that they are not here to save Detroit,but to be saved by their new hometown.Words of hope. Words of grief. Wordsof joy. Words of sadness. Stories abouta long-ago time. Stories about today andtomorrow. The Detroitist is a fascinatingcombination of poetry and prose that willentertain you, engage you, and educate you.The Detroitist is a book about Detroiters, forDetroiters, written by a Detroiter. If you arenot already a Detroiter, The Detroitist willprobably make you want to be a Detroiter.The Detroitist is about "Detroit Pride," past,present, and future.Marsha Battle Philpot, known in Detroit as"Marsha Music," was born in Detroit andgrew up in Highland Park, Michigan. In2012, she was awarded a prestigious KresgeLiterary Arts Fellowship, and in 2015 shereceived a Knight Arts award. She is alsorecognized as an exemplar of Detroit style.

The 14 stories of The Dogs of Detroit each focus on grief and its many strange permutations. This grief alternately devolves into violence, silence, solitude, and utter isolation. In some cases, grief drives the stories as a strong, reactionary force, and yet in other stories, that grief evolves quietly over long stretches of time. Many of the stories also use grief as a prism to explore the beguiling bonds within families. The stories span a variety of geographies, both urban and rural, often considering collisions between the two.

When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives. It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that time, twelve people had died and Flint’s children had suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun. In the first full account of this American tragedy, Anna Clark's The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

While there have been countless books written about Detroit, none have captured its incredible musical history like this one. Detroit artists have forged the paths in many music genres, producing waves of creative energy that continue to reverberate across the country and around the world. This anthology both documents and celebrates this part of Detroit's history, capturing the emotions that the music inspired in its creators and in its listeners. The range of contributors speaks to the global impact of Detroit's music scene--Grammy winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, and poet laureates all come together in this rich and varied anthology.

Detroit sports a very uneven background. The city dates from 1701, when Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac planted the flag of New France, some 75 years before America became a nation. Almost two-thirds of Detroit's history was spent as little more than a frontier military outpost--home to French farmers and fur traders who shared the quarters with the soldiers. But as the 20th century arrived, the impact of the automobile roused the city from its slumber. Within a century's time, the industry set in motion by Henry Ford produced a skyrocketing population, a diverse mosaic of ethnic groups, and levels of culture and affluence rivaled by few other places. The literature of Joyce Carol Oates, the architecture of Albert Kahn, and the music fostered by Berry Gordy enriched life and created the "Paris of the Midwest." But growing pains were inevitable: growing racial instability culminated in the insurrection of 1967, inflicting deep wounds yet creating new opportunities for harmony and justice that were capitalized on by Rev. William Cunningham. Today, efforts continue to remove the tarnish from this corner of the "Rust Belt."

In one of Curbed: Detroit’s Top 11 Books about Detroit, Aaron Foley, editor of The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook, offers the definitive inside look at one of America’s most talked-about and least understood cities. With a wry sense of humor, Foley, a native Detroiter, walks you through the most difficult questions about the Motor City, offering seven simple rules for making it there. Perfect for coastal transplants, wary suburbanites, unwitting gentrifiers, or start-up disruptors, this recently updated guidebook offers advice on everything from the glories of Vernors ginger ale to how to rehab a house to how to not sound like an uninformed racist. In twenty short chapters, Foley walks you through: How Detroiters do business The unofficial guide to enjoying Faygo How to be gay in Detroit How to raise a Detroit kid How to party in Detroit. Both hilarious and insightful, this no-frills look at Motown is written for those who live there but also, as Vanity Fair put it, “for anyone participating in contemporary global urbanization who would like to avoid behaving like a subjugating dick.”