In The Great Game, Andrés Martinez reveals how billionaires, media and tech giants, Title IX–driven women athletes, gamers, and immigrants are reshaping U.S. sports culture. Rather than exporting traditional American games, they are transforming the U.S. into a surprising force in global soccer. Blending cultural shifts with evolving demographics, Martinez also traces how technology is redefining the business of sport. As the industry grows ever more powerful, its unmatched ability to unite massive audiences—and its increasing value as a form of “soft” branding—underscores sport’s expanding influence in American life.

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Olivia Newton-John was one of the most iconic global pop stars, with over 100 million records sold and starring roles in films like Grease and Xanadu. Her hit “Physical” was named Billboard’s top single of the 1980s. Beyond the spotlight, she was known for her resilience, kindness, and unwavering optimism. She publicly battled breast cancer for decades while continuing her career and championing environmental, animal, and LGBTQ+ causes. Matthew Hild offers fresh insights into her life, exploring her humanitarian work, personal struggles, and musical legacy—from her early years in Australia to her final recording, a poignant duet of “Jolene” with Dolly Parton.

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A fascinating and readable distillation of the insights developed by Dennis Krausnick and Shakespeare & Company, Shakespeare's World gives performers and directors an engaging tour of the Elizabethan worldview, unpacking such alien concepts as the four elements, the bodily humors, and “the great chain of being.” It includes detailed notes for each Shakespeare play showing how this worldview permeates the text-it will enrich the experience of anyone looking to understand and engage with Shakespeare's writing in a practical, personal, and active way.

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At the fragile intersection of myth and memory stands a girl-often eclipsed by the legend she became. The Girl Who Would Be Marilyn Monroe dares to strip away the satin, the spotlight, the studio-invented shine, to reveal the tender child beneath: a girl marked not by fame but by longing. Longing for love, for safety, for the kind of permanence the world never offered her. This is not simply another biography. It is a resurrection. A candlelit portrait drawn from decades of first-hand research and rare interviews with those who knew her-not only Marilyn the icon, but Norma Jeane the girl. Tony Castro draws on intimate conversations with famed entertainment writer James Bacon; Marilyn's close friends: Frank Sinatra; actresses Susan Strasberg and Mamie Van Doren; actor and The Misfits costar Eli Wallach; ex-husband Joe DiMaggio; and child star-turned-Hollywood raconteur Skip E. Lowe. They offer unparalleled access into Marilyn's earliest, most hidden self.

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With an apparently contradictory and characteristically makeshift term, Liberal Fascisms, Slavoj Žižek captures the paradoxical nature of political populism. From the economy and politics to ideology, these short texts work through the different faces of liberal fascisms, structured around a trio of the universal, the particular, and the singular: our global predicament; Europe and the Middle East; Trump's America. Peeling back the inadequate labels we hasten to pin on the phenomena that terrify us – like 'post-truth'– to peer at the seeping wounds beneath them, these writings reveal the uneasy mixture of hypocrisy, self-deception and what is real that have always been stacked, matryoshka like, inside of one another.

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The United States and the world have made dramatic progress against poverty in recent decades, but the second Trump administration has thrown progress into reverse. David Beckmann calls us to push back against MAGA and restore progress against poverty. At the heart of this book is hope: hope grounded in evidence, history, and the countless efforts of communities and advocates who continue to push for justice. With a foreword by travel writer Rick Steves, Poverty Abolitionists offers both a practical roadmap and a stirring moral challenge. It is a clarion call to action for activists, policy makers, and ordinary citizens who care about the future of humanity and seek to build a fairer, freer, and more just world.

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The border between the US and Mexico is the world's longest between a wealthy industrialized nation and a part of the Global South. The economy, society, culture, and politics of the two nations have become inextricably linked. As the United States continues to assert its considerable geopolitical power, this book reminds us that this trend runs deep in the country's history, starting with its closest neighbors. Buchenau explores US territorial expansion, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, disputes over agricultural and mineral wealth, and the migration of Mexican laborers. Despite that massive power imbalance, Buchenau shows us that Mexico's influence on the United States is just as significant as the inverse.

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After Ground Zero traces the lives of a diverse portrait of Americans forced to confront the pain and mystery of the terrorism that tore apart their lives beginning on that September morning. From Kelly's on-the-ground reporting at Ground Zero, following the through line of the survivors and the loved ones of those killed, to the present day, twenty-five years later, we witness the efforts of Kristen Breitweiser, Juliette Scauso, Terry Strada, Thomas Kean, Father Brian Jordon, Phil McArdle, James Yee, and numerous others as they search for answers, policy changes, reparations and accountability, faith, and healing. Kelly's up-close storytelling is a powerful reminder of just how impactful the 9/11 attacks were and the ripple effect they have had in the decades that followed.

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Most people do not see themselves as biased towards people different from themselves, yet disparities and dangerous prejudices still run rampant. Why is that? And is there anything we can do about it? Building on the transformational lessons of the bestselling Everyday Bias, Howard J. Ross and Jake Ross reveal how bias is built into our increasingly digital lives and how we must fight against the epidemic of isolation and loneliness tearing apart our sense of connection and belonging. New chapters explore structures of power that create micro-inequities and micro-advantages, the digital attention economy's promotion of isolation and destruction of trust through misinformation, and the embedded prejudices being promoted by artificial intelligence.

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Legendary creatures capture our imagination in a way quite unlike those known with certainty to exist. In Mysterious Creatures, David Alderton and Akara Heart bring readers into a shadowy, uncertain realm where myth and reality collide. Their enthralling investigation unveils the tantalizing truths behind the world's most enigmatic creatures, and how they have become etched in our minds and imaginations. With meticulous research and gripping storytelling, Alderton and Heart unravel the legends of unicorns, dragons, werewolves, and more. Each chapter weaves together historical accounts, eyewitness testimonies, and cultural lore, inviting readers to question what lurks just beyond the veil of the known.

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In Ambitious Mother, Dr. Anne Welsh--a licensed psychologist and mom of four--offers a refreshing perspective for overwhelmed moms. Welsh asks, “What are you truly ambitious for?” and invites readers to shed societal expectations, name what they really want, and pursue their own version of success. Motherhood will change your ambition. As Welsh shares, you may discover that you are more ambitious than ever before, or ambitious in new and different ways. Ambitious Mother gives you permission to be as ambitious as you want to be. Permission to set down a few balls that you no longer want to juggle--and pick up others that you do. Permission to have the career and life you truly want.

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Hot Type is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires. This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors, malign media moguls, hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport, and authors and journalists who chronicled the turmoil of their time, their every word molded into metal type by what some viewed as a thinking machine. This revolution in media technology helped to propel Mark Twain into literary celebrity, but it also cost him his fortune—as well as his sense of humor and optimism.

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What if the artists we call “geniuses” weren't born extraordinary at all-but simply refused to stop creating when life made it nearly impossible? Ryan Pozzi invites readers to step closer, past the legends and into the real lives behind the masterpieces. Pozzi argues that the creators we've mythologized didn't succeed because of destiny or innate brilliance. They were shaped by rejection, fear, persecution, illness, grief, and the relentless pressure to keep going when the world told them to stop. Caravaggio on the run, Mary Shelley writing through devastating loss, Shostakovich composing under surveillance, Yayoi Kusama surviving erasure, Tchaikovsky rebuilding after collapse—their work endures not because they were divine, but because they were human. Drawing from years spent working with writers and performers, Pozzi writes with clarity and compassion about what a creative life truly requires: not perfection, but persistence and passion.

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The Perfect Birth Myth offers a sweeping, deeply human exploration of childbirth in the United States, the country with the most highly resourced and costliest maternal healthcare in the world, yet the highest rate of maternal mortality among developed countries. Drawing on decades of experience in maternal health, midwifery, and journalism, Avital Norman Nathman and Deborah Wage weave historical analysis, policy insight, personal narratives, and data from approximately 3,000 people who've given birth to examine the forces shaping American birth culture. From the pursuit of the “perfect birth” and the commercialization of care to the racial and psychological inequities embedded in the system, they reveal how medicalization, racism, and profit-driven policies have eroded autonomy, safety, and dignity in childbirth.

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Bloomsbury Academic is a leading independent publishing house, established in 1986, with authors who have won the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Booker Prizes. Bloomsbury has offices in New York, London, New Delhi, Oxford and Sydney. Within Bloomsbury’s Academic division, it publishes under Bloomsbury, as well as under a number of prestigious and historic imprint names.

The Academic & Professional division has lifelong learning at the heart of our business, publishing works of excellence and originality to inspire, educate and inform, and believing that intellectual curiosity and educational achievement go hand-in-hand.