This book is a firsthand account of the behind-the-scenes activity of King and his lieutenants--a mixture of stress, tension, dedication, and the personal interaction at the movement's heart--told by Richie Jean Jackson, who carefully created a safe haven for the civil rights leaders and dealt with the innumerable demands of living in the eye of events that would forever change America.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a sparkling novel about misperception, second chances, and the sometimes elusive power of human connection. Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever. An intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes, Redhead by the Side of the Road is a triumph, filled with Anne Tyler's signature wit and gimlet-eyed observation.

The true crime story of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Missouri teen and her family’s journey to justice. In the early hours of March 22, 1989, two friends—career criminals with violent felony convictions—drove around the eastern Kansas City area in a stolen car committing a series of crimes. The weather was mild for late March in Kansas City; the sky was clear, and there was the pale remnant of a Full Moon that bore the dubious name of Death Moon, the last full moon of winter. A little before 7 a.m., fifteen-year-old Ann Harrison walked to the end of her driveway on Kansas City’s east side to wait for the bus to take her to Raytown South High School. Ten minutes later, she disappeared but no one saw what happened. As if waiting for her return, her belongings were still stacked carefully by the side of the road. By the Side of the Road is the true crime story of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Ann Harrison and the long journey forced upon her family who had to wait nearly three decades to see her killers brought to final justice.

Helen is a young social worker in Chicago who can’t find one of her clients, Marty Munoz. Marty was released from detention, and it is Helen’s responsibility to get him through the first six months, but he has not checked in for a week. Despite a snowstorm, she heads south to check out a house where his roommates say he may have gone. The only house she finds in the area is an abandoned, dilapidated, overgrown mess, but she decides to get as close as she can. Maybe Marty is there but can’t get back to the train due to the weather? When Helen enters, beautiful sights, sounds, and smells welcome her. Lively conversation floats from the dining room, and there she finds Marty. In the short week he’s been at the house, Marty has been transformed; he looks different and sounds different and is happier than she’s ever seen him. When Helen leaves the house that night, she wonders if she has walked out of a dream, or is what she saw something miraculous? Just as the house looks broken and crumbling on the outside, it is exquisite on the inside, just as the residents appear to have fallen to the lowest rungs of society—but is that who they are inside? Helen quickly learns appearances can be deceiving.

Someone in a peaceful Pennsylvania town has a brutal murder on his conscience... ...but who and why remain a mystery-- until Meg Kessinger moves in. The house she's inherited from an aunt is dilapidated, but she adores it-- and sets about restoring it with the help of a hunky, laid-back lawyer; a handsome, witty artist; and the secretive husband of her new girlfriend down the road. But soon Meg's rustic rhapsody is blighted by telltale traces of an unseen intruder's search for...what? Her determination to piece together rumors about the sexpot who lived there before her, and the convenient death of an old lady with a twitchy heart, will drag her into a perilous undertow of greed, cunning, and desperation that could turn her dream house into a waking nightmare...

A Space on the Side of the Road vividly evokes an "other" America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and "hollers." To Kathleen Stewart, this particular "other" exists as an excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernization, materialism, and democracy. In towns like Amigo, Red Jacket, Helen, Odd, Viper, Decoy, and Twilight, men and women "just settin'" track a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this rhythmic, dramatic, and complicated storytelling imbues everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetics. Alternating her own ruminations on language, culture, and politics with continuous accounts of "just talk," Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal "space on the side of the road." It is a space that gives us a glimpse into a breach in American society itself, where graveyards of junked cars and piles of other trashed objects endure along with the memories that haunt those who have been left behind by "progress." Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this book uses both language and photographs to help readers encounter a fragmented and betrayed community, one "occupied" by schoolteachers, doctors, social workers, and other professionals representing an "official" America. Holding at bay any attempts at definitive, social scientific analysis, Stewart has concocted a new sort of ethnographic writing that conveys the immediacy, density, texture, and materiality of the coal camps. A Space on the Side of the Road finally bridges the gap between anthropology and cultural studies and provides us with a brilliant and challenging experiment in thinking and writing about "America."