AMERICAN WHITELASH: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress, by Wesley Lowery. (Mariner, $29.99.) Beginning with the backlash to Barack Obama’s 2008 election, Lowery examines how American society has split over the past 15 years, profiling the victims of white supremacy and the institutions that support it. .
CALIFORNIA, A SLAVE STATE, by Jean Pfaelzer. (Yale, $35.) One historian explains how California “welcomed, tightened, and legalized human slavery for 250 years,” from the legalized slavery of Native Americans to forced labor in today’s prisons.
CURVED PLOW, by Itamar Vieira Junior. Translated by Johnny Lorenz. (Verso, paperback, $19.95.) In rural Brazil, the lives of two young sisters are at the mercy of the climate, fickle men, and sharp knives in this novel that expands from a personal tale of hardship to a broader commentary on race, class and gender in Brazilian society.
RIVERMOUTH: a chronicle of language, faith and migration, by Alejandra Oliva. (Astra House, $28.) Reflecting on her family’s volatile relationship with the southern US border and her experience working with asylum seekers, Oliva meditates on the seemingly insurmountable barriers migrants face today.
ON WOMEN, by Susan Sontag. Edited by David Rieff. (Picador, paperback, $16.) This collection features seven of Sontag’s writings on gender and sexuality, including a critique of Leni Riefenstahl’s films, a remarkable conversation with Adrienne Rich about intellectualism in the feminist movement, and more.
IMELDA MARCOS FORGIVED, by Nathan Go. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A former presidential driver, now dying in a Manila nursing home, tells his son about the president’s secret meeting with her predecessor’s wife in this tender novel.
BLACK FOLK: The roots of the black working class, by Blair L. M. Kelley. (Liveright, $30.) Long associated with white America, the term “working class” is updated in this corrective account, which highlights the history of black labor beginning with the author’s ancestor, an enslaved man who became an emancipated became a blacksmith.
DEMOISELLES OF NUMIDIA, by Mohamed Lefta. Translated by Lara Vergnaud. (Other Press, paperback, $16.99.) The acclaimed Moroccan novelist’s lively debut about sex workers in a brothel in Casablanca is being published in English for the first time.