Coming Soon To A Bookstore Near You (September 2, 2025)

All book descriptions provided by the publisher.

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Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds

By John Fugelsang
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Available in Hardcover, ebook, unabridged audio download

For more than two centuries, the United States Constitution has given us the right to a society where church and state exist independently. But Christianity has been hijacked by far-right groups and politicians who seek to impose their narrow views on government, often to justify oppressive and unequal policies. The extremists who weaponize the Bible for earthly power aren’t actually on the side of Jesus—and historically they never have been. How do we fight back against those acting—literally—in bad faith?

Comedian and broadcaster John Fugelsang finally offers the answers. In this informative, perspective-shifting book, Fugelsang takes readers through common fundamentalist arguments on abortion, immigration, LGBTQ rights, and more—exposing their hypocrisy and inaccuracy through scripture, common sense, and deeply inappropriate humor. It offers practical tips on how to debate your loved one, coworker, or neighbor on the issues that divide us using that Bible they claim to follow.

But Fugelsang’s message is about more than just taking down hypocrites. It’s about fighting for the love, mercy, and service that are supposed to make up the heart of Christianity. Told with Fugelsang’s trademark blend of radical honesty, comedy, and deep political and religious knowledge, Separation of Church and Hate is the book every American needs today. It’s a rallying cry for compassion and clarity for anyone of any faith who’s sick of religion being used as a cloaking device for hate.

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Living in the Present with John Prine

By Tom Piazza
W.W. Norton & Company
Available in Hardcover

In the spring of 2018, Tom Piazza climbed into a 1977 Coupe de Ville with the great singer-songwriter John Prine to write an article for the Oxford American. Their Florida road trip ignited a deep friendship, full of tall tales over epic meals, long nights playing guitar and trading songs, and visits back and forth between their homes in Nashville and New Orleans. Along the way, Prine invited Piazza to work with him on a memoir, with John telling sprawling, often hilarious stories of his youth and family in Chicago and Kentucky, his breakthrough into the national spotlight, his riotous early years in the Nashville country scene, and much more.

When Prine died suddenly of COVID in April 2020, that unfinished memoir evolved into an intimate and very personal narrative of the artist’s final years. In it, Piazza offers fans an unforgettable portrait of the beloved musician in his late glory―as a boyish cut-up, an epic raconteur, a great American poet, and, most important, a beloved friend.

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Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It

By Jane Leavy
Grand Central Publishing
Available in Hardcover, ebook, and unabridged audio download

Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium—the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best players: Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth.

But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored, yet the questions linger: how much have these efforts helped to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture?

Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to these questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, and more. What Leavy uncovers is not only what’s wrong with baseball—and how to fix it—but also what’s right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew.

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Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity

By Fergus Butler-Gallie
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Available in Hardcover, ebook, unabridged audio download

Christianity is the largest religion in the US with upwards of 200 million people, and its churches often possess an allure and beauty that fascinate even the most committed atheist. What fascinates Fergus Butler-Gallie is that each place of worship tells a story—of place, time, and most of all, people.

Beginning with the birth of Christ over 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem at the location marked by the Church of the Nativity—a confusing warren of a building—Butler-Gallie leads us to a remote stone outcrop in Mount Athos, Greece, where the monastic vow of celibacy is taken to an optimistic extreme by excluding all female animals. We learn that at Canterbury Cathedral, the stones have been soaked in blood that is both famous and infamous. On the coast of Japan, a cave-like church marks the spot where Christian martyrs were tied to crosses at low tide—and left there.

The 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, remains the site of one of the Ku Klux Klan’s most infamous bombings, and the meeting house in Salem, Massachusetts, remains a monument to the ways that a quest for purity can lead to mass murder. And in Nigeria we visit a church the size of an airplane hangar, where every Sunday it fills almost every one of its 50,000 seats.

An engaging blend of history, geography, travel, biography, spiritual reflection, and a wry sense of humor, Butler-Gallie shows us that despite its complexities and controversy, such a faith is still worth following, and that by acknowledging the past we can ultimately discover the path toward healing and hope.

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Football Sissy: A Cross-Dressing Memoir

By Jack Brennan
Arcadia Publishing
Available in Paperback

In Jack Brennan’s decades-long career as a sports journalist, he covered teams like the MLB’s Reds and the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals. As the public relations director for the Bengals, he wrangled sports stories, reporters, and players. At home, he played basketball with the neighborhood husbands and raised three kids with his wife, to whom he was devoted. At the same time, he had a passion that never left him: he liked dressing as a woman. Blonde silky hair, bright lips, and smooth legs escaping short skirts, topped off with heels as high as they go.

He kept his life as a crossdresser mostly private, so his public coming out via The Athletic in 2021—one of the first men in the NFL to come out as LGBTQ+—was a surprise to many. Football Sissy offers a no-holds-barred trip through his dual lives, from his earliest love affair with a puff-sleeve blouse at age three through to his first jaunts dressed in public to surprise visits to the hospital alongside a fulfilling family life and an exciting career.

Told with the characteristic humor and ease of Brennan’s sports columns, Football Sissy is a heartwarming tale of acceptance and love, even within the most masculine of environments.