New Releases by Ilena Silverman

"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur "genius" and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection of essays and historical vignettes includes some of the most outstanding journalists, thinkers, and scholars of American history and culture--including Linda Villarosa, Jamelle Bouie, Jeneen Interlandi, Matthew Desmond, Wesley Morris, and Bryan Stevenson. Together, their work shows how the tendrils of 1619--of slavery and resistance to slavery--reach into every part of our contemporary culutre, from voting, housing and healthcare, to the way we sing and dance, the way we tell stories, and the way we worship. Interstitial works of flash fiction and poetry bring the history to life through the imaginative interpretations of some of our greatest writers. The 1619 Project ultimately sends a very strong message: We must have a clear vision of this history if we are to understand our present dilemmas. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and trying as hard as we can to undersand its powerful influence on our present, can we prepare ourselves for a more just future"--

In-laws are the inescapable consequence of marriage. Whether they’re kindly or malevolent, helpful or crazy, they’re unavoidable. The relationship can be traumatic, rewarding, maddening, and hilarious—sometimes all at once. In I Married My Mother-in-Law and Other Tales of In-Laws We Can’t Live With—and Can’t Live Without, Ilena Silverman brings together a collection of talented, successful writers who plumb their own experiences for extraordinary and unexpected wisdom about this prickly and often misunderstood relationship. We hear from some of today’s best authors, including Michael Chabon, who writes movingly about the lessons he learned from his first father-in-law; Kathryn Harrison, whose relationship with her father-in-law was far more rewarding and less complicated than the one she had with her own father; Matt Bai, who struggled across cultural barriers to learn more about the lives of his reserved Japanese-American in-laws; Martha McPhee, who explores the difficulty in fully knowing her husband without ever having known his parents; Susan Straight, who recounts her experience as the first white woman to marry into her African-American husband’s extended family; and Ayelet Waldman, who ponders the competition between wives and their mothers-in-law for the attention of their husbands/sons. By turns blunt and poignant, horrifying and touching, the essays reflect the rich complexities of these bewildering and life-changing relationships. Remarkable for both the quality of its prose and the scope of its emotional insight, I Married My Mother-in-Law is an unforgettable anthology about the struggles and rewards of life with our other families.