Get These Gifty Books and Other Titles with Our Holiday Sale!
December 12, 2023
You’ve heard of that elf on the shelf, but have you heard of word count at a discount? That’s really pushing it, but there are books we’re talking about. Now’s the time to hunt for gifty books for the loved ones in your life. Save 30% on everything at beacon.org through December 31 using code HOL30!
Scroll down and you’ll see some selections to give you ideas. This is just a handful of our catalog.
Remember that USPS media mail takes 7-10 business days. Also, the Penguin Random House warehouse will be closed from December 23 to December 25 and then on December 31. So, plan accordingly while placing your orders during this time.
And remember to support your local independent bookstore this holiday season!
All Is Not Lost: 20 Ways to Revolutionize Disaster
“Despair needn’t create paralysis. To the contrary, it can motivate you to risk everything, to find courage wherever you can, to trust the democratic resources available to you, and to never back down. Power can be forged among the dispossessed. Solidarity can be found in the darkest of places. Always resist and make resistance into a tradition. It will inspire you. And those who come after.”
—Alex Zamalin
Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother
“[T]here were aspects of punk culture that offered more appealing models for manhood . . . I also associated the sonic textures of punk music with freedom. I wanted to be around people and in proximity with music and art that encouraged pliability and elasticity in how masculinity was performed and understood.”
—G’Ra Asim
“The shards of heartbreak cannot simply be thrown away. They have to be reworked. This requires a careful examination, a tender holding. Of whoever is broken, whether it is you or someone you love.”
—Imani Perry
Butter: Novellas, Stories, and Fragments
“Call me pied piper woman. There I was reading the Lorca poem about the barren orange tree and the tower, and there she was with oranges painted on her leather satchel. And there I was riding on the Boston subway from Back Bay to Mass. Avenue. And so I saw this little girl, and I’m a candymaker and it was easy. I always smell like chocolate and caramel and peppermint.”
—Gayl Jones, from “Mirabeau”
Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems
Melodies heard are sweet, just as I heard them
in the rhythm of Keats, who thought unheard
melodies were sweeter. And so they are here, in
the silences of this musician’s still hands, as if
clenched in prayer, ecstasy, or forgiveness that
his fingers, solid as pillars, can’t yet release into
music, not yet strumming a guitar whispering
stars across my ears, or pounding piano keys
into my heart, not yet blowing sax smoke for
my soul, or stroking a bow across a violin like
a lover resting on his shoulder as if on mine.
—Richard Blanco, from “Music in Our Hands, after Paul Cordes’s photo The Musician”
“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”
—Viktor E. Frankl
No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating
“For me, all stories about food are stories about appetite and nostalgia—even when we’re talking about global warming, and even when we’re talking about the ways in which the state enables systemic oppression of humans, animals, and land. Talking about what we eat cannot just be rooted in the political; by its very nature, eating is personal. This is why a delicate balance must be struck when we discuss ideas of ethical consumption in an unethical global food system that interacts with other systems of oppression, from white supremacy to patriarchy to capitalism.”
—Alicia Kennedy
“It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents—the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however and by definition , a provisional self—and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits.”
—James Baldwin
One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race
“We have also seen that there is seemingly no certitude in how racial categories are established or recognized abroad. While many countries throughout the African Diaspora construct Blackness distinct from Mixedness, do all people of mixed ancestry in those countries similarly construct their own identities as mutually exclusive to Blackness? In the absence of a definitive framework through which to designate race, how do people in these countries understand their own racial identities, if at all? Furthermore, what happens when people of African descent migrate to the United States from these various global locales? Do they maintain culturally specific conceptualizations of self? Do they conform to American ideations of race and simply become Black? Or do they negotiate between the two and create melded identities?”
—Yaba Blay
If you open the door, the light
blue light is watery as girls in those
limp posters, overhead. I am listening
to your memory and it sounds like
unlimited access. I call your name,
tenderly. We live in a world
with few headboards, left.
—Alisha Dietzman, from “Love Poem by the Light of the Refrigerator”
A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories
Ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas
“Why is it that lots of white people always grin when they see a Negro child? Santa Claus grinned. Everybody else grinned, too, looking at little black Joe—who had no business in the lobby of a white theatre. Then Santa Claus stooped down and slyly picked up one of his lucky number rattles, a great big loud tin-pan rattle like they use in cabarets. And he shook it fiercely right at Joe. That was funny. The white people laughed, kids and all. But little Joe didn’t laugh. He was scared. To the shaking of the big rattle, he turned and fled out of the warm lobby of the theatre, out into the street where the snow was and the people.”
—Langston Hughes, from “One Christmas Eve”
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.