All of American literature is a tragedy. What we're living through now isn't a tragedy, however – it's a horror novel. W****hy bother writing when the world's on fire?Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren't ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist.In captivating and cu...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which stretches beyond their literal importance. Whether the bone of a Catholic martyr, the tooth of a Buddhist lama, or the cloak of a Sufi saint, relics are material conduits to the immaterial world. Yet relics aren't just a feature of religion. The exact same sense of the tra...

Whether or not The Illuminati – an elite body claiming an ancient pedigree – does exist, it is important that growing numbers of people nonetheless do believe it exists. So does it exist? If so, is it a force for evil or a force for good - or, as some would have it, a conspiracy aimed at making us believe there is a conspiracy? Was the Bavarian Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt the true inheritor of more ancient knowledge?A force for evil or a force for good? A movement whose benevolent...

**A TIME Best Book of 2025A New Yorker Best Book of 2025A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2025"Smart, somber . . . There’s pleasure in watching a novelist wired to see all sides at once wrangle with her own dynamic subjectivity."- The New York Times Book ReviewA profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays.**In the past two decades, few writers have mastered ...

The acclaimed author examines our contemporary world—from technology to politics and pop culture—in this collection of essays written for L'Espresso.Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. In this, his last collection, the celebrated essayist and novelist observes the changing world around him with irrepressible curiosity and philosophical insight. He illuminates the contemporary upheaval in ideological values, the crises in politics, and the ...

Reveals the alt-right’s project to claim science fiction and—by extension—the futureFascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and w...

The New York Times bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization reveals how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. • “Cahill is our king of popular historians.” —The Dallas Morning NewsThis was an age in which whole continents and peoples were discovered. It was an era of sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies—and of unprecedented courag...

**Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle AwardMany worry that criticism is suffering from a crisis of authority. In a world where everyone’s a critic, what is criticism for? Since her canonical essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a leading public intellectual and a bold cartographer of the new landscape of taste itself.**Authority brings together sharp, illuminating essays on everything from...

"Splendidly articulate, informative and provoking....A book to be savored and gone back to."—Baltimore SunOn the survival and destruction of knowledge, from Alexandria to the Internet. Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, fro...

The most precious treasure of this collection is that it gives us the rich back-story and diverse range of influences on Margaret Atwood's work. From the aunts who encouraged her nascent writing career to the influence of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on The Handmaid's Tale, we trace the movement of Atwood's fertile and curious mind in action over the years. Atwood's controversial political pieces, Napoleon's Two Biggest Mistakes and Letter to America -- both not-so-veiled warnings ...

By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller.Even as he tells the stories of such individual creators as Homer, Joyce, Giotto, Picasso, Handel, Wagner, and Virginia Woolf, Boorstin assembles them into a grand mos...

Uncover the fascinating history and deep biological roots of humanity's ecstatic traditions in this thought-provoking exploration from bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich.In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic reve...