Once the envy of the world for its quality and variety, Indian cotton today is mired in uncertainty and despair. Though India is the largest producer of cotton, its farmers are trapped in debt, and thousands choose to kill themselves than face an ignominious fate. Handloom weavers, once proud standard-bearers of the country's artisanal heritage, are barely able to scrape together a living. To make matters worse, there is the back-breaking competition with artificial fibres. Meena Menon and Uzramma take us through the fascinating history of cotton in India, examining its illustrious origins, its blood-stained colonial heritage, and the events that led to its current crisis. Amid the bleakness, the authors suggest a silver lining: reviving indigenous cotton—and the handloom industry that spun its fame. Through painstaking research, Menon and Uzramma show that with the right combination of friendly policies and championing the Indian cotton brand, it is possible to restore the fabric's past glory. This is an important book not just for lovers of cotton but anyone concerned with the struggles of Indian agriculture in a brutal, fast-changing market.

COLLECTIVE WINNER OF THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE ‘This is the book that has been wanting to be written for decades: the ragged fringe of Britain as a laboratory for the human spirit’ Adam Nicolson

She'll do anything to find her sister's killer...although she'll wish she hadn't. Because the harder Ava Hale looks into her sister's murderer, the more secrets she uncovers about Kesley, and the more she begins to think that the girl she called sister was a liar. A sneak. A stranger. And Kesley's murderer could be much closer than she thought... A debut novel from Wattpad award-winner Kara Terzis, Frayed is a psychological whodunit that will keep you guessing!

The only artifact from my family's world before the onset of World War II is a pair of "raveled, stained, scored, and torn" napkins. These frayed "white napkins with blue borders" were "given to my mother by her mother on the platform of a train station in 1939." My parents traveled from that platform in Nowy Dwor Mazowiecki, Poland, to Bialystok to Siberia to Uzbekistan, saving their lives and losing everything else. Sally and Morris Michlewitz grew up in the newly independent Poland during the interwar period. They experienced the building of a newly defined nation. They witnessed the destruction and conquest of that nation in September 1939. Sally survived the Blitz in Warsaw. Morris, as a Polish infantryman, survived the failed defense of the city. During the next decade, they saw the world falling apart in small and large ways. The narrative ends in Brooklyn, New York in 1975. Frayed Lives paints the panorama of a family record which stretches across thousands of miles. It retells family history and connects it to the stories of other people surviving those times and places. It frames these stories with the history of record presented by scholars. It carefully depicts the desperation of refugees of war.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

This poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yonatan Berg is a poet from Israel and the youngest person ever awarded the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize. This collection brings together the best poems from his three published collections in Hebrew, deftly translated by Joanna Chen. His poetry recounts his upbringing on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and service in a combat unit of the Israeli military, which left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He grapples with questions of religion and tradition, nationalism, war, and familial relationships. The book also explores his conceptual relationship with Biblical, historical, and literary characters from the history of civilization, set against a backdrop of the Mediterranean landscape. Berg shares an insider's perspective on life in Israel today.

Fred is a little frayed knot who has fears that have him a bit more frayed than your average knot. They include things that children have to do for the first time, like going to the dentist and the first day of school. With a little courage and help from family and friends, Fred takes us on his "I've got to do what I've got to do" journey. He slowly realizes something wonderful is happening...he notices his knot becomes a little less frayed with each fear he conquers.