Gabino Iglesias

When journalist Eduardo Porter moved to Los Angeles in the 90s and started writing about the city, he realized race was everywhere — and that it determined "where you go to school, church, or work; how you dress and talk; whom you marry; how you fare when you run into the cops."

That realization became the seed of his latest book, American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise.

The first thing I learned about shopping after moving to Texas from the Caribbean was this: Go to Goodwill.

Andre Perry's Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now is a raw chunk of life sliced into essays packed with truths, devastating realizations, music, failed coping mechanisms, a constant search for the self, and a lot of booze.

The book is divided into three distinct sections, but they merge into a unified chronicle that follows a young black man standing at the intersection of race, art, masculinity, education, and the desire for growth and new experiences.

Investigative reporter Ian Urbina realizes that, for many people, the sea is "simply a place we fly over." That's why in The Outlaw Ocean he works so hard at sharing some of the wildest, darkest dramas taking place in seas and oceans across the world.

Timothy C. Winegard's The Mosquito is as wildly entertaining as any epic narrative out there. It's also all true.

J. Michael Straczynski's Becoming Superman is much more than a rag-to-riches story — and not only because he goes from rags to riches about half a dozen times.

The role William S. Burroughs played in shaping literature is well known. But his influence on rock and roll hasn't been as well-documented.

"No matter which way we turned the girl, she didn't have a face."

For Damon Young — writer, critic, humorist, and the co-founder and editor-in -chief of VerySmartBrothas — being black in America is to "exist in a ceaseless state of absurdity; a perpetual surreality that twists and contorts and transmutates equilibrium and homeostasis the way an extended stay in space alters human DNA."