At the end, Ella was viewed as a crack whore, when found in such tragic circumstances, by those who knew little about her. A law student, she was bright and full of life. Married and devoted to the love of her life and their adorable son, she was loved to the end . . . It was one of those unique times when the sheer brutalities of humanity, from every global angle, could be witnessed—evidence that war crimes continue in other disguises. Detroit and its people were trudging through a powerful existential crisis, questioning the very foundations of life and the acts of living. The symptoms of mass neurosis, perpetuating hopelessness deep within its roots, and disparity had been growing—a paradigm of primal survival: eat or be eaten! The once grand Motor City had now all but crumbled. Prosperity had now been replaced with cocaine, crack, heroin, prostitution, and all manner of human slavery—trading bodies, sanity, and souls for food within its many dark alleys for survival. It was an escape from the terrors of the gaping lack of hope, power, and purpose! It’s no wonder then that Ella unwittingly tripped and fell into the fate that became inevitable.

*Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism* *A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Criticism and Essays Pick for Spring 2012* The Grey Album, the first work of prose by the brilliant poet Kevin Young, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize Taking its title from Danger Mouse's pioneering mashup of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' The White Album, Kevin Young's encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical choruses to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, "jazzing." What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of art—and artfulness—to our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.

When Max Sumner and three friends play a magical card game called Round Table, they realize that it is up to them to prevent the wicked creatures of the cards from destroying their town, indeed, their world.

In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw is an exploration, and stories, of people who live in the Art Deco buildings of Springs. It is the imagined lives of those who live in a space that is not theirs historically but one that they have reclaimed. This work, in times of doom and complaint, creates a new narrative: one of revival, vigour and celebration. ‘The writing tries to capture the “grain” of a place, object or conversation, as if a swatch were cut from a larger fabric. One could trace the use of similar techniques back to the canonical modernist works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams or to a later experimenter like Burroughs … Adair uses these techniques with flair and purpose … the book’s method is to declare and contradict, to present one side and then another, keeping both present.’ Ivan Vladislavic