If you are a parent with kids in summer sports, like myself, you may recognize the feeling: the last regular season games are wrapping up, the playoffs are about to begin, and, oh-so-tantalizingly, then comes the freedom of a completed season and, hopefully, some well-earned rest and relaxation. That home stretch feeling is kind of the phase we are in here at The Society Pages with our new race volume, the latest installment in the series we are partnering on with W.W. Norton & Co.

The volume will be called Color Lines and Racial Angles, and it will feature about a baker’s dozen of the best pieces on race and diversity that have been developed on our site thus far. You may recall, for example, Jennifer Lee’s piece on “stereotype promise” or Wendy Roth’s article exploring the creation of a “Latino” race. There have been roundtables with distinguished scholars discussing the media and Trayvon Martin in the weeks immediately following his death and the history and future of American immigration, and a few weeks ago we ran a provocative little treatment of the social origins of the term “white trash” by Matt Wray. And waiting patiently in the pipeline are pieces on Native American mascots, diversity discourse, and environmental racism, as well as an interview exchange with Michelle Alexander, author of the prominent and controversial crime and punishment tome The New Jim Crow.

Along with TSP tie-ins that bring readers back to our Community Pages to further explore the topics in the volume, as well as discussion questions and group activities for reading groups and classrooms, these pieces will form the core of the new book—and they’ll remain freely available on our website. But you’ll have to be patient, of course! Over the next week or so, we’ll be doing final revisions and editing, tweaking the introduction, pulling all of the files together for delivery to our editors and designers at Norton. We hope to have the finished product ready in time for 2014 teaching (the first two volumes, The Social Side of Politics and Crime and the Punished, are expected to publish before the end of 2013). In the meantime, you can revisit our already-published pieces and look forward to some spectacular ones on the way. Here’s to summer reading!