When We're In Charge by Amanda Litman

OUT NOW

Thrilled to announce the newest acquisition for Crooked Media Reads, Amanda Litman’s guidebook to leadership for the next generation. Acknowledging that millennials and zoomers are already stepping into power and leading differently, Litman’s book—both prescriptive and a manifesto—will teach readers how to put their values into action as they take charge both at work and outside of it. Litman is co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, a political organization that recruits and supports young, diverse progressive candidates running for local office.

Reading: it’s not just for tweets anymore.

Across the board, Crooked Media Reads explores politics, current events and activism, narratives on culture and policy, memoir, pop culture, history, and investigative journalism from a wide and diverse range of perspectives, and in more than 240 characters. Our imprint is actively acquiring both nonfiction and fiction as well as books for children and young readers and expects to announce more titles soon.

“We started Pod Save America and Crooked Media to give people an outlet for their anger, to find ways to help and find humor and joy in the fight. This book has a lot of what we’ve learned from the smartest organizers and least annoying politicians, plus jokes everyone will love without exception.”

- Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor

Woodworking by Emily St. James

OUT NOW

A tonic for the moment, Woodworking is a remarkable debut novel from an incisive new contemporary voice.

Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly bursting with other trans women. For now, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing the community theater by night.

But everything changes the day that Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl, Abigail Hawkes, enters her detention classroom. Admittedly, guiding the English teacher through her transition wasn’t on Abigail’s agenda for senior year, but she remembers the uncertainty—and loneliness—that comes with it. And besides, who else will take the job?

So begins an unlikely friendship that teaches both women, as well as the community around them, that there is nothing more radical than letting the world see who you are.

Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps

From Crooked’s founders and the hosts of Pod Save America, Democracy or Else is the New York Times bestselling useful and illustrated guide to saving American democracy, getting off the sidelines and joining the fight.

Crooked is donating its profits from Democracy or Else to support Vote Save America, its partners, and other organizations who are mobilizing for progressive outcomes in the 2024 election and beyond.

Mobility by Lydia Kiesling

Available now in paperback!

A propulsive novel about class, power, politics, and desire by the celebrated author of The Golden State.

The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan living with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s eyes, we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil and pipeline access, and hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. Both geopolitical exploration and domestic coming-of-age novel, Mobility is a propulsive and challenging story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman—her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction’s power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context.

Hated By All The Right People by Jason Zengerle

Coming Soon

From a seasoned political journalist, an eye-opening examination of Tucker Carlson’s rise through conservative media and politics, and his ideological transformation over the past thirty years, tracking the concurrent shifts in the political and media landscapes which have both influenced and succumbed to the hyperpartisan politics of today.


To many, Tucker Carlson is synonymous with modern conservative politics. Carlson has been present on our screens for almost three decades and is as infamous for his bow tie as he is for his in­creasingly extreme right-wing views. But those who knew Carlson in his earlier days in political journalism remember a very different man—a serious and gifted writer and commentator who enjoyed debating with liberal friends and calling out conservative failures in equal measure. Now after watching Carlson turn away from honest reporting, while simulta­neously gaining unparalleled power in Donald Trump’s Republican Party, most are left asking, What the hell happened to Tucker?


New York Times Magazine writer Jason Zengerle’s rich and evocative character study of Carlson tells the story of how the former Fox News talking head rose through the ranks of conservative media, from his early days as a young writer at The Weekly Standard to his current perch as one of the most powerful voices in right-wing politics. Through deep reporting and a sweeping view of the political and media landscapes over the past thirty years, Zengerle reveals how Carlson’s career of­fers a unique lens into the radical transformation of American conservatism and, just as importantly, the media that covers and ultimately shapes it. As conservative news outlets fight daily over who can report the most disreputable stories and clicks and views take precedence over facts and substance, Carlson’s evolution tells the larger story of how the right has radicalized and taken the media with it.