When We're In Charge by Amanda Litman

Coming May 13, 2025

Thrilled to announce the newest acquisition for Crooked Media Reads, Amanda Litman’s untitled 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.

Untitled by Ema O'Connor

Coming 2026

From Crooked Media Reads, Ema O’Connor’s untitled book will publish in 2026! Investigative journalist and longtime BuzzFeed News reproductive rights, gender, and politics staff writer, O’Connor’s untitled book is an urgent work of narrative nonfiction that introduces readers to the precarious landscape of American reproductive justice and privacy and the compelling people at the forefront of this new reality, in the vein of bestsellers such as EVICTED, DOPESICK, and THREE WOMEN.