Mychal Denzel Smith - Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

Mychal Denzel Smiths Stakes Is High is the book we need. It dismantles American lies and instead offers a truth that feels like fire. Smith moves from point to point with a brilliant agility founded on a deep understanding of our history. A truly spectacular book.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black

A fresh, modern, thrilling call for humanity to come together as well as a brilliant investigation into what it means to be an American. Stakes Is High is required reading.

Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours

Stakes Is High is Mychal Denzel Smiths gift to us. With compassion and intelligence, he shows us what justice is meant to be in America.

Common

Mychal Denzel Smith has written an emotional break-up letter with hope. In his meditations on the pillars of American life, Smith challenges us to accept our complicity in the systems that link our fortunes to our oppressions. It is elegantly written and lovingly argued.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Thick: And Other Essays

From one of our countrys clearest truth-tellers comes this collection detailing why weve arrived at this current moment and how we can move beyond it. Stakes Is High confronts the inherent failures of the American dream, the dangers and delusions of American empire, and helps us imagine ourselves into a more just future.

Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

Stakes Is High is a passionate, urgent book, a personal account of a contemporary New York political education, and a call to confront the emergency with clarity and truthfulness about the history that brought us here.

Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears

Stakes Is High is that rare book written before the pandemic that predicts the American response to the pandemic and also provides a soulful, rigorous way out of the destruction. Mychal Denzel Smith is the rarest of tenacious writers who remind us that the only way into a dignified free future is backwards. And our refusal to go walk back together makes the stakes highest for the most vulnerable children of tomorrow.

Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

Nuanced, intimate, and sharp in its view of Americas history and present, Mychal Denzel Smiths Stakes Is High offers a clear-eyed view of this nations inequities, shortcomings, and self-deceptions. Its a beautifully written, timely, and illuminating book.

Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Womens Anger

With searing vision and unwavering clarity, Mychal Denzel Smith dismantles our most enduring myths and dangerous national illusions. His argument is personal, intimate. It calls on us, line by line, to do the hard work of truthful living: to hold past and present, love and criticism, up in equal measure. Stakes Is High will undoubtedly prove to be one of the most important works of the decade; as social critique, as personal essay, as a master class in language. Keep it within arms length; youll be reaching for it long after youve read the last line.

Ta Obreht, author of Inland

I want this book in the hands of everyone it would affect, which is to say, those with power and those lacking power; those of every race and ethnicity who are affected by the United States government; those who have hope, those who do not, and those who are somewhere in between. Smith writes with urgency and brilliance, honing prose to a fine glimmer as he demonstrates, again and again, life after the American Dream.

Esm Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias

[Smith] is sharply self-aware, and he would seem to expect his reader to approach his fine-honed argument with the same seriousness. Doing so is well worth the effort. An urgent and provocative work that deserves the broadest possible audience.

Kirkus, Starred Review

Smith addresses familiar topics through a fresh lens in these searing essays. Infused with righteous indignation and astute observation, this is a must-read progressive polemic.

Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

For Gil Scott-Heron and Shirley Chisholm

I dont know if you two ever met in life, but Im glad

you met here and provided the guidance I needed.

For Dr. Lloren A. Foster

I hope you got to read the first one before you left.

I hope you knew that I listened.