Why did the New York City school district once have the lowest ratio of minority teachers to minority students of any large urban school system in the country? Using an array of historical sources, this provocative book explores the barriers that African American and Latino candidates faced in attempting to become public school teachers in New York from the turn of the century through the end of the 1970s. Christina Collins argues that no single institution or policy was to blame for the citys low numbers of non-white educators during this period. Instead, she concludes in this deeply...

As Faulkner's voice portrayed the South and Breece D'J Pancake's represented Appalachia, Eric Shonkwiler captures the Midwest, with this collection of novellas and short stories that peels back the edges of rural existence to expose the heart of it. Through parental neglect, rebellious sons and daughters, drug-addled war veterans, backwoods zombies, injured firemen, car thieves, witch doctors, and Navajo ghosts, Shonkwiler brings you a disregarded world you can no longer ignore-one thriving with the mundane, the bruised, the unheard. Here is the voice of the rest of us, spoken only the way...

A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror-show, David Leo Rice's novel combines the mundaneness of modern life-motels, strip malls, temp jobs-with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether...