Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, journalist Beth Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question--why her only son died--and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. The...

A true story of two albino African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a decades-long struggle to find them and to get justice for her family. The year was 1899, and the old people told the story: the place, a sweltering tobacco community in the Jim Crow South called Truevine, where everyone they knew was either a former slave or a child or grandchild of slaves. Though the narrative of George...

A feral child finds a family. An old bottle washes up with a note inside. A boy's stuffed elephant flies out the car window. Over two decades, Lane DeGregory's stories of ordinary people struggling with love and loss, pain and perseverance, have earned her a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and enhanced the Tampa Bay (formerly St. Petersburg) Times's reputation for publishing pioneering literary nonfiction. DeGregory has also built a worldwide fan...