NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS TITLES AVAILABLE IN OVERDRIVE

publishing works of enduring scholarly and cultural value

Dead Weight chronicles the experiences of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, earned a PhD in creative writing and became the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions.

Penned by a former editor in chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, Binga is the definitive biography of the first black banker in Chicago as well as a history of race, politics, and finance in early twentieth-century Chicago.

A Death in Harlem is the first mystery novel by famed scholar Karla Holloway (Passed On). In it, she introduces Harlem’s first black policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas, who investigates a murder. Readers will recognize the setting and some characters from Nella Larsen’s best-selling 1929 novel Passing.

Once I Was Cool contrasts past aspirations with the mess and magic of the present. Maturity is demanding, but its rewards are a gift.

The poems in Blessed Are the Peacemakers ask what it means to make peace and examine the lengths and limitations of grace.

The Tunnel under the Lake tells the story of the one of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century. A two-mile tunnel dug and bricked by hand thirty-five feet below the floor of Lake Michigan, the Chicago lake tunnel was designed to bring fresh drinking water to a city in dire need. At the time of its opening in March 1867, it was hailed as the “wonder of America and of the world.”

Written as a series of rogue web posts, Instagram essays, rejected Yelp reviews, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge confession with art criticism, Art Is Everything is the story of an artist whose world implodes—just as she has a breakthrough.

The Beast includes Jóusè d’Arbaud’s 1926 masterpiece “The Beast of Vacarés”—a haunting parable about a solitary bull-herder who stumbles upon a starving creature who is half-man, half-goat—and three other tales from the Camargue delta region in southern France.

A highly praised new tragicomic novel by prolific writer Emil Draitser, Farewell, Mama Odessa follows the voyage of Soviet Jewish refugees who leave Odessa, Ukraine, to settle in the US.