W. W. Norton & Company inaugurates a new century of visionary independent publishing with Norton Shorts. Written by leading-edge scholars, these eye-opening books deliver bold thinking and fresh perspectives in fewer than 200 pages.  

A perfect fit for college courses, each Norton Shorts title features resources to help instructors enrich course material. Browse by discipline and request a digital examination copy below. 

The Trafficker Next Door

How Household Employers Exploit Domestic Workers

by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

A leading public philosopher argues that the relentless expansion of rules and mandates not only constrains us but also diminishes our intelligence, corrodes our moral integrity, undermines honesty, and weakens our capacity to govern the institutions that matter most.

A renowned sociologist examines the pernicious societal forces that lead employers to exploit vulnerable domestic workers. The phrase “human trafficking” often conjures nightmarish images of sexual exploitation, but Rhacel Salazar Parreñas reveals that the vast majority of trafficking victims are domestic workers who suffer abuse not at the hands of shadowy crime lords but rather “ordinary” people. Drawing on twenty years of groundbreaking research across three continents, Parreñas exposes the grim realities faced by migrant workers ensnared in forced labor due to poverty and debt bondage. She uncovers how entrenched social and legal norms, coupled with a pernicious “employer savior complex,” foster a troubling sense of ownership among employers over “their” domestic workers. Parreñas’s urgent narrative challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about everyday household arrangements and calls for justice and fair treatment for all workers. The Trafficker Next Door will be great for courses on social problems and social inequality as well as sociology courses on work, gender, and globalization.

KEY TOPICS ● human trafficking; forced labor; migrant workers; care work; ethnography; globalization

Sex Beyond "Yes"

Pleasure and Agency for Everyone

by Quill R Kukla

In Sex Beyond “Yes”, philosopher Quill R. Kukla challenges the idea that consent alone can define ethical sex, arguing that this binary framework oversimplifies the complex realities of sexual agency. They examine scenarios shaped by intoxication, aging, social pressure, and power imbalances—ranging from sex work and dementia to kink and everyday encounters—to show that agency often goes beyond a simple “yes” or “no.” Kukla calls for a more nuanced, human-centered approach to sexual ethics, one grounded in honest communication, mutual respect, and the often messy dynamics of intimacy and pleasure. With a mix of sharp critique and deep empathy, they offer a bold rethinking of what it means to have ethical, fulfilling sex. This Norton Short would be well suited for courses such as Philosophy of Love and Sex, Ethics of Intimacy, and Gender, Sexuality, and Philosophy.

KEY TOPICS ● Philosophy of love and sex; sexual ethics; sexual agency; Consent; pleasure, power, and social dynamics

Fear Less

Poetry in Perilous Times

by Tracy K Smith

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet reveals how poetry is a powerful tool of connection and understanding in a fractured world.

Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as “inaccessible,” “irrelevant,” or “intimidating.” She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to love, dream, question, and engage across diverse cultures and backgrounds, and she shows how reading and writing poetry can allow us to confront uncertainty and loss, build connections with strangers, and better understand ourselves. Grounding readers in the technical elements of the craft, Smith provides in-depth analysis of her own creative process as well as close readings of works by contemporary poets such as Joy Harjo, Danez Smith, and Francisco Márquez alongside classic poems by Dickinson, Keats, Millay, and others. An essential text for courses on poetry, composition, and literary criticism, Fear Less is a warm invitation to find meaning, consolation, and hope through poems.

KEY TOPICS ● poetry; literary criticism; listening; community, compassion; grief and loss

Medicine by the People

How Ordinary People Changed American Healthcare

By Jim Downs

A grassroots history of American medicine that shows how regular people were architects of medical knowledge and care.

Most histories of medicine center doctors: the standard-bearers of expertise and innovation. Yet these narratives underplay the role that ordinary people have, and always have had, on medicine and public health.

Throughout early American history, everyday people—from enslaved individuals to village midwives to cowboys—have been caring for their communities. In colonial Boston, Black people’s knowledge led to smallpox inoculations, stymieing that epidemic. Midwives, more plentiful than doctors, also delivered babies more successfully. During the Civil War, women served, taking care of the wounded, making nutritious food, and keeping hospitals clean.

Once doctors professionalized in the later 1800s, they protected their domain. Still, the Black community of the early 1900s created a public campaign to prevent tuberculosis. In the last half of the twentieth century, the Young Lords fought for better sanitation and increased medical infrastructure in their East Harlem neighborhood. In the face of HIV/AIDS, queer people pushed the federal government for research with their activism.

Grassroots community care has always been at the cutting edge of medicine, a hidden tradition of meeting need with dignity. Medicine by the People reveals that the history of American healthcare is, at its heart, a struggle over who gets to tell the story of illness.

KEY TOPICS ● public health, health justice, race and medicine, healthcare inequality, indigenous healing, social determinants of health

Gather

Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness

By Ashanté M. Reese

In Gather, anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a new vision of food justice that centers the resilience of Black communities and argues that community nourishment deserves as much consideration as individual health. Highlighting four spaces of gathering—gardens, family reunions, repasts, and protests—Reese offers rich, on-the-ground studies of the places and people who make up the food justice movement. From Black church networks and community farms to student protests, these studies illuminate ways we can challenge structures of power and nourish ourselves, body and soul. In a world of social isolation and unequal food systems, Gather offers a compelling argument for the beauty and power of togetherness.

KEY TOPICS ● food justice; Black food culture; collective action; social movements; community solidarity; anti-Black racism; self-reliance 

The Racial Wealth Gap

A Brief History

By Mehrsa Baradaran

A brief and compelling read, The Racial Wealth Gap offers a devastating analysis of one of America’s most pressing systemic issues.

Why has the racial wealth gap between the median white households and median Black households remained stagnant over the past century, never narrowing below six to one? Leading expert on race and financial equality Mehrsa Baradaran attempts to answer this question in this sweeping yet accessible history. She shows how decades of the laws rooted in white supremacy—from slavery and the broken Reconstruction-era promise of “40 acres and a mule,” to the racist policies of the Jim Crow and New Deal eras—have restricted Black access to capital, credit, homeownership, and other mechanisms of wealth creation while subsidizing the rising economic fortunes of white families.

In The Racial Wealth Gap, Baradaran outlines two tectonic forces that have driven apart the economic fortunes of white and Black families: wealth creation for white Americans, who have been systematically receiving financial subsidies in the century and a half since emancipation, and wealth destruction for Black Americans—either by vigilante violence or by official means, such as allowing Black banks to collapse or building highways through segregated Black communities. These forces, combined with the racist notion that Black communities fail to rise because of their own moral, intellectual, or economic shortcomings, have kept Black families behind their white counterparts, despite decades of civil rights activism and national economic growth. Correcting this deep injustice, the author suggests in the final pages, can only be achieved through reparations.

KEY TOPICS ● racial wealth gap; systemic racism; segregation; redlining; racial violence