MSI Press Blog

  Today's Publisher's Pride is  A View through the Fog   by Bob McGee, which reached #212 in biographies of artists, architects, and photographers and #384 in coping with suicide guilt. (This book was in on the top 100 list nearly every month through January 2025 and often since.) Book description: A View through the Fog  is compelling, poignant, and packed with both moving and hilarious anecdotes. All human life (and death) is here. With his own distinct voice, McGee opens the door on the dizzying world of the Golden Gate Bridge-the beauty of both nature and the bridge itself, the camaraderie and friction with colleagues, and the devastating tragedies of suicide jumpers. He brings an entire community to the page with a thought-provoking and richly detailed memoir that will resonate with many readers. The motive for his writing this book is love of his subject. He paints this world he knows in a way that gives readers the feeling they are on the Bridge with him. From...

  Every February invites us to pause and honor the storytellers whose words have shaped not only Black history, but American history itself. Black authors have long carried the dual burden and blessing of truth-telling—documenting joy, exposing injustice, preserving memory, and imagining futures that once seemed impossible. Their work is not a sidebar to literature; it is literature. Then: The Voices Who Carved the Path From the earliest narratives of enslavement to the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, Black writers have used the written word as both refuge and resistance. Frederick Douglass showed the world that literacy is liberation. Harriet Jacobs revealed the intimate, gendered realities of bondage. Zora Neale Hurston captured the beauty and complexity of Black Southern life with unmatched ear and eye. James Baldwin insisted that America confront its own reflection. Toni Morrison gave us language for the interior lives of Black women—language that still reverberates...

The events that unfolded after I left Bahrain reached me only through messages from friends, each one carrying more fear than the last. I wasn’t involved in the politics swirling around the country then; I only felt the edges of it through the people I cared about as the ground shifted beneath their feet. A group of young men from the village I had visited and elsewhere had been taken in the middle of the night—boys pulled from their beds, accusations that didn’t match the sons their families knew. The details were always hazy, even at the time. Some said there were eleven of them, others said seventeen. What everyone agreed on was that the arrests came suddenly, based on information that later proved unreliable. The reason: public demonstrations at the Pearl Roundabout. I forgot what the political message was. I was only on the periphery and not there at the time. I only know about the turmoil through some newspaper articles I was able to access and through friends. I heard that t...

  Chris Richards, author of  Nothing So Broken , was recently interviewed by the Worcester Telegram and Gazette . Book description:  In the shadow of loss, a path to healing begins. Chris Richards grew up in a small New England mill town, where life was tough and loyalty ran deep. At just 19, his world was shaken when a close friend was left permanently disabled by a devastating accident. At the same time, Chris’s father began to show troubling symptoms linked to his service in the Vietnam War—unseen wounds that would slowly unravel the man he once knew. The weight of watching two people he loved unravel under the strain of trauma and physical decline left deep scars—ones Chris carried silently into adulthood. For years, he buried his grief and fear, never imagining that one day, facing his own crisis, he would turn to their stories for strength. This powerful and moving memoir explores the enduring impact of trauma, the quiet power of resilience, and how even the most br...