Ascension Press

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Nebraska

Days 244-365

Bible in a Year Companion, Vol 3

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Stephanie Duncan Smith

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway

A “special work” (J. S. Park) that honors life’s deep griefs, great joys, and unsettled in-betweens through every sacred season, assuring us that we are never alone “Oh, I love this book. . . . Honest and hopeful, masterfully written, both a balm and a bolstering.”—Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author Exquisitely told and urgently resonant, Even After Everything is a love letter to anyone who has opened their heart only to be hurt. Stephanie Duncan Smith proposes that it’s not through grit or forced resilience that you will find a way forward, but through receiving the full spectrum of our lives, just as we receive the empathy of God-with-us in every moment. Duncan Smith’s disorientation began when she lost her first pregnancy on the winter solstice, just as the world readied to celebrate its most historic birth on Christmas. Then a new yet uncertain pregnancy unfolded parallel to the pandemic, until nearly one year to the day of her loss, she gave birth to her daughter at the peak of mortality in their city. These contradictions compelled Duncan Smith into a desperate search for steadiness, which she found in the liturgical year as a grounding force and the promise that we are seen by God in every season. In Even After Everything, Duncan Smith traverses the church’s circle of time and reorients herself and us in the sacred story told through Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, and Ordinary Time. She reveals the sacred year—through its endless interplay of love, loss, risk, and resurrection—as a mirror to the human experience, an anchor for turbulent times, and a womb strong enough to encompass every human care. At its heart lives the promise of God-with-us, inviting us into the spiritual practice of taking courage in the trust that we are accompanied in everything, and love will always have the last word.

Even after Everything

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Jillian Weise

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Poems

A fierce, provocative collection of poems exploring sexuality, queerness, the body, and disability in an ableist world In this arresting collection, The Cyborg Jillian Weise navigates the intersection of disability and desire, wending her way through diners, bars, and dark living rooms lit by TV screens. Her words flit in and out of DMs, texts, and video chats, exploring the vital human thread that runs through the machines mediating our existence. Weaving personal narrative with cultural commentary and lyricism, these poems blur the line between flesh and technology, centering disabled and queer bodies and challenging our preconceptions of everything from opiate use to BDSM. In Pills and Jacksonvilles, Weise sharply claims "cyborg" as an identity of her own, embracing the space between human and technology and celebrating disabled culture and history. Bold, sexy, and formally exciting, Weise's poetry lays bare her most intimate self--pulling back the curtain on the loves, losses, and obsessions of a life.

Pills and Jacksonvilles

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Tori Sharp

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Two hilarious best friends create their very own podcast in this feel-good middle grade graphic novel about making the spotlight your own, from the author of Just Pretend. Lights, Curtains...Podcast! Best friends Clay and Kyle can't help but inject fun into everything. Whether they're goofing off backstage during a performance or making rib-tickling jokes at an open mic, these two are always ready to make people laugh! Now Clay's hoping to shift her improv skills to the stage in her middle school's production of Gals and Dolls, which means spending even more time with her crush, Dania. But Clay's boisterous humor doesn't sit well with the director, who has ZERO tolerance for fun. Clay, however, refuses to be boring! She and Kyle are eager to bring their comedic talents into the spotlight, but school musicals are too serious, open mics are too long... And that's when it hits them--they should start a podcast! But with rehearsals to attend, new episodes to record, and time running out for Clay to ask a certain someone to the eighth-grade dance, will Clay and Kyle be able to do it all?

Stand up! (a Graphic Novel)

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Survivor and the Endless Gaze

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

A Novel

A captivating debut following a cross-country road trip that will make you believe in the goodness of people, Off the Books sheds light on the power in humanity during the most troubled of times. Recent Dartmouth dropout Mei, in search of a new direction in life, drives a limo to make ends meet. Her grandfather convinces her to allow her customers to pay under the table, and before she knows it, she is working as a routine chauffeur for sex workers. Mei does her best to mind her own business, but her knack for discretion soon leads her on a life changing trip from San Francisco to Syracuse with a new client. Handsome and reserved, Henry piques Mei’s interest. Toting an enormous black suitcase with him everywhere he goes, he’s more concerned with taking frequent breaks than making good time on the road. When Mei discovers Henry's secret, she does away with her usual close-lipped demeaner and decides she has no choice but to confront him. What Henry reveals rocks her to her core and shifts this once casual, transactional road trip to one of moral stakes and dangerous consequences. An original take on the great American road trip, Off the Books is a beautifully crafted coming of age story that showcases the resilience of the human spirit and the power of doing the right thing. The spirit of Frazier’s characters will stay with readers long after they have arrived at their destination.

Off the Books

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Zen Cho

From the renowned, award-winning author Zen Cho comes a delightfully funny romance about family, class, and love in modern London. From the outside, Renee Goh’s life looks perfect. She’s thirty and beautiful, runs a glamorous—and profitable—women’s clothing company in London, and is dating a hot Taiwanese pop star. But Renee is lonely. Estranged from her family in Singapore, she practically lives at the office, and now she’s just been dumped by her supposed boyfriend. Who she never saw anyway, so why is she ruining her Instagram-ready makeup by crying? Before she can curl up on the couch with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, Renee’s father calls. He’s retiring, and, thanks to the screw-ups of her wastrel brothers, he is considering her as the next CEO of the family business: Chahaya Group, one of the largest conglomerates in Southeast Asia. That stamp of her father’s approval would mean everything to Renee, but can she cooperate with the brothers who drove her out of Singapore? But fate isn’t done with her. That same night, Renee bumps into her first love, Yap Ket Siong, who broke her heart during university. They spend a wonderful night together, but Ket Siong is pursuing a dangerous vengeance for his family. In the light of day is there any hope for the two of them?

The Friend Zone Experiment

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Joél Leon

A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

For Readers of Heavy, Punch Me Up to The Gods, and A Little Devil in America, a beautiful, painful, and soaring tribute to everything that Black men are and can be. Growing up in the Bronx, Joél Leon wasn’t taught how to feel. Shaped by a singular view of Black masculinity espoused by the media, by family and friends, and by society, he learned instead to care about the gold around his neck and the number of bills in his wallet. He absorbed the “facts” that white was always right and Black men were seen as threatening or great for comic relief but never worthy of the opening credits. It wasn’t until years later that Joél understood he didn’t have to be defined by these things. Now, in a collection of wide-ranging essays, he takes readers from his upbringing in the Bronx to his life raising two little girls of his own, unraveling those narratives to arrive at a deeper understanding of who he is as a son, friend, partner, and father. Traversing both the serious and lighthearted, from contemplating male beauty standards and his belly to his decision to seek therapy to the difficulties of making co-parenting work, Joél cracks open his heart to reveal his multitudes. “I learned that being Black is an all-encompassing everything...To be Black, to be a Black man in the era I grew up in, was easily everything and nothing at once.“ Crafted like an album, each essay is a single that stands alone yet reverberates throughout the entire collection. Pieces like “How to Make a Black Friend.“ consider challenging, delightful and absurd moments in relationships, while others like “Sensitive Thugs All Need Hugs“ and “All Gold Everything“ ponder the collective harms of society's lens. With incisive, searing prose, Everything and Nothing at Once deconstructs what it means to be a Black man in America.

Everything and Nothing at Once

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Sarah Freethy

The Porcelain Maker

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Ken Jaworowski

Ken Jaworowski's Small Town Sins is a gripping Rust Belt thriller that captures the characters of a down-and-out Pennsylvania town, revealing their troubled pasts and the crimes that could cost them their lives.

In Locksburg, Pennsylvania, a former coal and steel town whose best days seem long past, five thousand residents have toughed it out, and have reasons for both worry and hope as this neglected place teeters between decay and renewal. For some of them, their biggest troubles have just arrived.

After years of just scraping by, three restless souls have their lives upended: Nathan, a volunteer fireman who uncovers a secret stash of money in a burning building and takes it; Callie, a nurse whose tender patient may not have long to live, despite the girl's fundamentalist parents' ardent beliefs; and Andy, a recovering heroin addict who undertakes a nightmare mission to hunt down and stop a serial predator.

Before long, Nathan's stolen riches threaten to destroy everyone around him as he tries to cover his haphazard trail of lies. Callie risks her career to grant her young patient a final, and likely illegal, wish. And Andy's hunger for vigilante justice becomes a fierce obsession that may end in violence.

As their stories barrel toward unexpected ends, Nathan, Callie, and Andy struggle to endure--or escape. They each face their pasts and gamble on their futures, and confront the underside of their rough Rust Belt town. Riveting, evocative, and unforgettable, Small Town Sins is a debut novel that marks the arrival of a major new talent.

Small Town Sins

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Stuart Gibbs

Superspy middle schoolers Ben and Erica must embark on mission to rescue Erica's grandfather, who was abducted from a remote Alaskan training facility.

Spy School Goes North

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Nev March

A Mystery

The Spanish Diplomat's Secret

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Beatriz Williams

New York Times bestseller Beatriz Williams returns with a ravishing summer read, taking readers back to a mid-century New England rich with secrets and Cold War intrigue.

June 1946. As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for her incapacitated mother, Olive traveled the world, married fascinating men, and involved herself in political causes. She's also the beloved aunt of the two surviving Peabody sons, Amory and Shep, with whom Emilia has a tangled romantic history.

As the summer wears on, Emilia develops a deep rapport with Olive, who urges her to leave the island for a life of adventure, while romance blossoms with the sturdy and honorable Shep. But the heady promise of Peabody patronage is blown apart by the arrival of Sumner Fox, an FBI agent who demands Emilia's help to capture a Soviet agent who's transmitting vital intelligence on the West's atomic weapon program from somewhere inside the Summerly estate.

April 1954. Eight years later, Summerly is boarded up and Emilia has rebuilt her shattered life as a professor at Wellesley College, when shocking news arrives from Washington--the traitor she helped convict is about to be swapped for an American spy imprisoned in the Soviet Union, but with a mysterious condition only Emilia can fulfill. A reluctant Emilia is summoned to CIA headquarters, where she's forced to confront the harrowing consequences of her actions that fateful summer, and a choice that could destroy the Peabody family--and Emilia's chance for redemption--all over again.

The Beach at Summerly

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Amani Ballour

Rania Abouzeid

A Secret Underground Hospital and One Woman's Story of Survival in Syria

This searing memoir tells the story of a young doctor and activist who ran an underground hospital in Damascus, humanizing the enduring crisis in Syria. Simply put, there is no one in Syria with a story like Dr. Amani Ballour. The only woman to have ever run a wartime hospital, she saved her peers from the atrocities of war while contending with the patriarchal conservatism around her. Growing up in Assad's Syria, Ballour knew she wanted to be more than a housewife, even as her siblings were married off in their teens. As the revolution unfolded, she volunteered at a local clinic and was thrown into the deep end of emergency medicine, where she found her voice. Among the facets of this powerful tale: Becoming a hospital director. Shielding children from a horrific sarin attack. Losing colleagues. Attempting to employ more women. Abandoning the hospital. Becoming a refugee. Moving forward. Amani Ballour is a game changer who, like Malala Yousafzai, will be remembered as one of history's great heroines. Growing up in a closely confined society, she dared to dream--first of an education, then of a career--that allowed her to make her mark on the world and protect the country she loves. A passionately committed humanitarian, she is determined that others will escape the horrors she survived.

The Cave

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Shane McCrae

A Memoir of a Kidnapping

An unforgettable memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents.

When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage--all the while believing they were doing what was best for him.

For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane's grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

A revelatory account of a singularly American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. And it is also a powerful reflection on what is broken in America--but also what might heal and make it whole again.

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun

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Bakari Sellers

Thoughts on the Race Reckoning That Wasn't and How We All Can Move Forward Now

The New York Times bestselling author of My Vanishing Country examines the modern political landscape and policies that are impacting Black families and communities and offers solutions for a better tomorrow. In late May in 2020, while discussing the murder of George Floyd on CNN, Bakari Sellers spoke from the heart sharing devastating insight that touched millions around the world: "It's just so much pain. You get so tired. We have black children. I have a 15-year-old daughter. I mean, what do I tell her? I'm raising a son. I have no idea what to tell him. It's just--it's hard being black in this country when your life is not valued and people are worried about the protesters and the looters. And it's just people who are frustrated for far too long and not have their voices heard." In this powerful and persuasive book, Sellers expands on the issues he addressed in his New York Times bestseller My Vanishing Country, examining national politics and policies that deeply impact not only Black people in his home state of South Carolina but the lives of millions of African Americans in communities across the nation. Four years later, Sellers has an answer to the question he raised on CNN, offering much-needed prescriptions to help all Black American lives. Sellers explores inequities in healthcare, education, early childhood education, and policing, drawing on interviews with numerous thought leaders such as pioneering voting rights and poverty activist the Rev. William Barber, and Ben Crump, the civil rights legend who successfully uses the law to achieve justice for people of color in racially charged cases. He also shares his thoughts on conservative media and the forces and dark money behind firebrands such as Tucker Carlson. This thoughtful and practical work is a timely meditation on the state of our world today and how we can all play a part in making it better for tomorrow.

The Moment

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R. Derek Black

My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism; a Memoir

From the former heir-apparent to white nationalism, TheKlansman's Son is an astonishing memoir of a childhood built on fear, of breaking from his community, and of speaking out in the face of hate. Derek Black was raised to take over the white nationalist movement in the United States. His father, Don Black, was a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and started Stormfront, the internet's first white supremacist website--Derek built the kids' page. His godfather, David Duke, was also his mentor. Racist hatred, though often wrapped up in respectability, was all Derek knew. Then, while in college in 2013, Derek publicly renounced white nationalism and apologized for his actions and the suffering that he had caused. The majority of his family stopped speaking to him, and he disappeared into academia, convinced that he had done so much harm that there was no place for him in public life. But in 2016, as he watched the rise of Donald Trump, he immediately recognized what he was hearing--the spread and mainstreaming of the hate he had helped cultivate--and he knew that he couldn't stay silent. This is a thoughtful, insightful, and moving account of a singular life, with important lessons for our troubled times. Derek can trace a uniquely insider account of the rise of white nationalism, and how a boy indoctrinated with hate can become an anti-racist man. Few understand the ideology, motivations, or tactics of the white nationalist movement like Derek, and few have ever made so profound a change. When coded language and creeping authoritarianism spread the ideas of white nationalists, this is an essential book with a powerful voice.

The Klansman's Son

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Simon Reynolds

Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow's Music Today

A collection of writing by Simon Reynolds, centered on music that seemed, in its moment, to prefigure the Future Simon Reynolds's first book in eight years is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music's future--the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience. But it's also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other. Starting with an extraordinary chapter on Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, taking in illuminating profiles of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Boards of Canada, Burial, and Daft Punk, and arguing for Auto-Tune as the defining sound of 21st century pop, Futuromania shapes over two dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. Reynolds explores the interface between pop music and science fiction's utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software. A tapestry of the scenes and subcultures that have proliferated in that febrile, sexy, and contested space where man meets machine, Futuromania is an enthused listening guide that will propel readers towards adventures in sound. There is a lifetime of electronic listening here.

Futuromania

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Laura Taylor Namey

Teenage Flora, still reeling from the loss of her mom, leaves England for sunny Miami, where her constant self-doubt about life, including romance, leads her straight into a love triangle.

A British Girl's Guide to Hurricanes and Heartbreak

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Sarah Braunstein

A sexy, propulsive novel that confronts the limits of empathy and the perils of appropriation through the eyes of a disgraced small-town librarian.

Bad Animals

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Susan Bishop Crispell

When the perpetually single daughter of a magical matchmaker reconnects with the boy she's pretended to be in a relationship with for over a year, she may finally have met her match. Imogen Finch has never been in love... despite being the daughter of a matchmaker. Her only relationship to date was a fake one with a near stranger named August Tate that she made up to stop people from asking about her love life. To fill the void, she's channeled her obsession with love into her passion for photography, using her ability to literally see the rose-gold glow of a person in love to capture stunning portraits. But when her adviser says her photography portfolio is "one note", she's desperate to diversify. After hearing her forever crush, Ren, was recently dumped, she decides to photograph the broken-hearted, starting with him. Imogen is hopeful she'll finally find love and get the right photos. So, the last thing she expects is for the real-life version of her fake boyfriend to show up in town asking why they "broke up". Before she knows it she's juggling August and Ren and falling for the first time in her life.

The Broken Hearts Club

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Louisa Young

A poignant, modern love story about a young widow and widower and the two ghosts that bring them together because although love changes form, it never dies.

"Heart-stoppingly romantic."--The Express (UK)

Two couples. Four unfinished lives. A love that transcends space and time.

Rasmus and Jay, Róisín and Nico: two couples, strangers to each other. Two beautiful, ordinary love stories, cut short. Both in their thirties and too young to be widowed, Róisín swears she still feels Nico beside her in bed and Rasmus hears Jay as he writes songs at the piano.

Jay and Nico don't even believe in ghosts, yet here they still are. Still in love with Rasmus and Róisín. And maddeningly powerless. Until Jay has an idea that Nico wants no part of--bringing Róisín and Rasmus together. It's crazy enough that it just might work, but playing matchmaker to the living is no easy feat and one that will require all four of them to discover the meaning of love after loss, and the importance of fighting for happiness against all odds.

Moving and thought-provoking, playful and bittersweet, Twelve Months and a Day asks what is love? And what are we to do with it?

Twelve Months and a Day

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Allison Winn Scotch

Hollywood’s biggest rom-com star tries to recover from her damaged reputation by staging her own rom-com and following a lead on a lost love in the new romantic comedy from New York Times bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch. Birdie Robinson thought she’d gotten everything she wanted out of life: fame, adoration, and an A-list Hollywood career. But after an on-set feud goes viral, she leaves L.A. for the one place where no one would think to find her: her hometown. She’s startled to stumble upon a love letter from a former boyfriend asking for a second chance. And there’s just one issue: the letter was unsigned and she’s not sure which ex sent it. Still, a public reunion with an ex-boyfriend could turn the wave of public opinion back in her favor. Life imitating art. What could go wrong? Elliot O’Brien, star reporter, knows that life isn’t an actual rom-com. Case in point, he’s spent two decades repressing his long-simmering feelings for his twin sister’s best friend, Birdie. But with his journalism career cratering and Birdie back in their hometown at the same time he is, he realizes that chronicling her search for her long-ago ex may be his opportunity to right some wrongs. As they hit the road in an ancient RV, Birdie and Elliot retrace her romantic history for clues to who wrote the letter and come face to face with their own romantic missteps, all while grappling with whether happy endings are found only on the big screen—or whether their own happier ever after could be closer than they both ever imagined.

Take Two, Birdie Maxwell

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Nell Freudenberger

The most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year. From Mo’orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia’s imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen’s luxury apartment in Manhattan and meets his new, younger wife, Kate, she has been shuttled between her parents’ disparate lives—her father’s consuming work as a surgeon at an overwhelmed New York hospital, her mother’s relentless drive against a ticking ecological clock—for most of her life. Fluent in French, intellectually precocious, moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as Covid sends her and her stepmother together into near total isolation. A NYC schoolteacher, Kate struggles to connect with a teenager whose capacity for destruction seems exceeded only by her privilege. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia—and questions her own ability to become a mother—one of her sixteen-year-old students is already caring for a toddler full time. Athyna’s love for her nephew Marcus is a burden that becomes heavier as she struggles to finish her senior year online. Juggling her manifold responsibilities, Athyna finds herself more and more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave. When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. Moving from a South Pacific “paradise,” where rage still simmers against the colonial government and its devastating nuclear tests, to the extreme inequalities of 21st century New York City, The Limits is an unforgettably moving novel about nation, race, class, and family. Heart-wrenching and humane, a profound work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.

The Limits

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Robin Perkins

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