Here at ITF we love to read, and our editors want to share some of their favorite books with you. Think of it as a book club in cyberspace — with a dash of identity and community, of course!

We kicked off ITF — Off the Shelf in May with Jairus Victor Grove’s Heroic ethics, a critique of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.  Though May has come and gone, we promise to keep the intriguing books coming. Each month an ITF editor will review a book concerning identity and/or community. The featured works will be a mix of old and new, fiction and nonfiction.

We’ll keep our Bookshelf at Powells.com updated so that you can purchase the books we’ll be reviewing in subsequent months a month or more in advance. And don’t worry, if you prefer to shop at Amazon, just click here or on the titles of the books listed at the bottom of this page. You’ll be taken right to the Amazon site, where you can purchase those books and start reading. (Of course, if you already have a dog-eared copy of the book sitting on your bookshelf somewhere, more power to you.)

While we’ll make our book reviews available to all ITF readers, only readers like you who are registered on our site have access to all the special features of Off the Shelf. In this space, members can access exclusive interviews with the authors of selected books and participate in online discussions with other ITF readers and editors about the books. Members can submit their own reviews of the Book of the Month for publication on our site. And you don’t have to wait for us to publish our reviews to submit yours!

So don’t just sit there — get your copy of Bernard Henri Levy’s War, Evil, and the End of History now! And at the risk of sounding like your high school English teacher, beware: There aren’t CliffsNotes for most of our recommendations. So it’s probably a good idea for you to get your hands on — and read — our featured books ahead of time.

Here’s what we’ll be taking Off the Shelf during the next few months:

May: Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth
June: Benjamin Weissman’s Headless
July: David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories
August: David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor
September: Bernard Henri Levy’s War, Evil, and the End of History
October: Rebecca Carroll’s Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois From a Collective Memoir of Souls