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Bloomberg journalist Kurt Wagner takes you inside Twitter’s everchanging headquarters, charting its rise from flippant 140-character posts to one of the world’s most consequential tech companies. From Jack Dorsey’s triumphant return as CEO in 2015 to the rise and fall of @RealDonaldTrump to the contentious $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, Battle for the Bird exposes the messy reality and relentless challenges that come with building a global social network.

Luther Standing Bear was seemingly everywhere in the course of his extraordinary life. He met Chief Crazy Horse on the eve of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was enrolled in the first class at the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School, witnessed the Ghost Dance movement, toured the US and Europe with showman Buffalo Bill, and devoted his later years to Indian rights. His firsthand accounts of those experiences—and his reflections on Sioux culture, customs, and traditions—combine to make this narrative a landmark of Native American literature.

In the brutal Ice Age caused by the ancient Jemen war, many archaic human species, including Denisovans and Homo erectus, hover on the verge of extinction. There seems no way out, until the greatest Neandertal holy man, Trogon, has a vision. Legends say the truce that ended the old war left one hostage in the hands of the victorious rebels: the godlike Jemen leader known as the Old Woman of the Mountain. According to Trogon’s vision, only one person knows the location of that burial cave.

One of the most groundbreaking and highly acclaimed titles that Heyday has published, The Ohlone Way describes the culture of the Indian people who inhabited the Bay Area prior to the arrival of Europeans. Recently included in the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Top 100 Western Non-Fiction” list, The Ohlone Way has been described by critic Pat Holt as a “mini-classic”.

It was just supposed to be a birthday party, a mobile celebration with a group of college friends on a modified fire truck. But at some point, things take a dark detour. As the pulsating beats of dance music reverberate over an endless stretch of asphalt, the temperature suddenly plummets, and the reality of the situation becomes chillingly clear: the driver will not stop. After frantically attempting to contact the mysterious motorist, the passengers begin to suspect this party may never end.

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. Together, these two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, crushed George Armstrong Custer’s vaunted Seventh Cavalry. Yet their legendary victory at the Little Big Horn has overshadowed the rest of their rich and complex lives. Now, based on years of research and drawing on a wealth of previously ignored primary sources, award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner delivers the definitive chronicle, thrillingly told, of these extraordinary Indigenous leaders.

Light-years from home, it’s Ira’s second chance. Just another anonymous student at a space station university. Not the orphan whose Earther heritage was erased. Not some social experiment put on display by his adoptive father. Not the criminal recruited by the human rebels. But when Ira’s loyalties clash once again, two wars break out: one on the ground and one within himself. Which will Ira stand with? Which will take him down?

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

“Food and travel are natural companions,” writes guest editor Padma Lakshmi. From this pairing comes “the possibility of seeing anew, of examining how we make and assign meaning.” The essays in this year’s Best American Food and Travel Writing circle the world—from Dakar in Senegal, to Michoacán in south-central Mexico, to the Camino de Santiago in Spain—and deepen our understanding of our place in it.

Before that awful Saturday, Molly used to be inseparable from her brother, Hank, and his best friend, Tray. The indoor climbing accident that left Hank with a traumatic brain injury filled Molly with anger. While she knows the accident wasn’t Tray’s fault, she will never forgive him for being there and failing to stop the damage. But she can’t forgive herself for not being there either. Determined to go on the trio’s post-graduation hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, even without Hank, Molly packs her bag. But when her parents put Tray in charge of looking out for her, she is stuck.

The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent. The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded?

In the 15 years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer's in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.

Perpetually cheerful and eager to please, Gracie Cooper strives to make the best out of every situation. So when her father dies just months after a lung cancer diagnosis, she sets aside her dreams of pursuing her passion for art to take over his Midtown Manhattan champagne shop. She soon finds out that the store’s profit margins are being squeezed perilously tight, and complicating matters further, a giant corporation headed by the impossibly handsome, but irritatingly arrogant Sebastian Andrews is proposing a buyout.

After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the larger questions of its peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder’s death at the hands of four White men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird.

Thrown on a ship on a one-way voyage to uninhabitable Earth, Myra, Hannah, and Bernard believe they'll never see their home or the people they care about again. After crash landing they're attacked, sedated, and dragged away... by people? There are still people on Earth? Unbeknownst to just about everyone in the galaxy, the Old World is inhabited by Botans and many generations of their offspring. That means maybe Canter's mother and Hannah's sister might be there, too.

Melanie “Mel” Roberts and Ray Halfmoon may be from different Indigenous Nations, but the friends have become like siblings since the Robertses moved in with the Halfmoons. And they soon welcome a distinguished guest: Great-grandfather Bat, whose wing is injured, has taken refuge in their old oak tree.

Musician, composer, TV presenter, and educator Richard Mainwaring uses the concept of the Infinite Piano to reveal the extraordinary world of frequency in a multitude of arenas―from medicine to religion to the environment to the paranormal―through the universality of music and a range of memorable human (and animal) stories laced with dry humor. Whether you’re science curious, musically inclined, or just want to know what a Szechuan pepper has to do with physics, What the Ear Hears (and Doesn’t) is an immensely enjoyable book filled with “did you know?” trivia.

Fleeing the aftermath of a bizarre college prank and mourning the death of his deadbeat dad, Garrett Deaver escapes Pennsylvania for a salmon processing plant in remote Alaska, a state he has only known from his father’s stories. There he renames himself Beaver—just like a beaver, he’s “an industrious motherf*cker”—and he connives to become a supervisor at Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC, thinking it will solve his psychological and financial issues. He soon falls in with an entrepreneurial Turkish fish processor and a cynical old woman who mends nets and tells filthy jokes.

One of Canada’s most acclaimed horror writers, Gemma Files presents a mosaic of interconnected stories about interconnected families. After fleeing Scotland, five clans settled in the fictional town of Dourvale in northern Ontario. Known as the Five-Family Coven, they are the descendants of witches and witch-children, none of whom were spared persecution in their native country. Now shamans, spellcasters, singers, and thieves, the members of the Devize, Druir, Glouwer, Roke, and Rusk families survive by trading their occult powers and talents.

With heart, pathos, humor, and insight, twenty renowned writers, performers, athletes, and activists explore what it means to be Native American today. Through a series of essays and poems, these luminaries give voice to their individual experiences while shedding light on the depth and complexity of modern Native American identity, resiliency, and joy.