The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers the astonishing story of the rise and fall of an American man whose life is destroyed in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.I Married a Communist is the story of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt.In his ...

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.At Lonoff’s, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff’s and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his a...

Aristotle Onassis was a born orator, and Jackie Kennedy would sit and listen to him spin off tales and stories—often racy—by the hour. A speaker of seven languages, he could keep a dinner party of some of the world’s most sophisticated conversationalists spellbound. Even Jackie couldn’t help but drop her reserve and laugh with him. America’s First Lady simply never knew anyone quite as free or exotic as Aristotle Onassis, a paradoxical blend of raconteur and ruffian.Beginning with ...

A midway murder sends a terrified eyewitness running for her life—from a cop, a con, and her own secrets—in this mystery by the author of the John J. Malone series.The best carnival barker in the business couldn’t have drawn a crowd like the one now gathered around the Ferris wheel on the pier. In one of the cabs, still rocking with the ocean breeze, is a dead man—a bloody knife protruding from his back. Why the notorious gambling boss Jerry McGurn was killed is no...

At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction—pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain or assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain could have been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers grows...

The true story of the greatest mystery of Arctic exploration—and the rare mix of marine science and Inuit knowledge that led to the shipwreck's recent discovery.Ice Ghosts weaves together the epic story of the Franklin Expedition—whose two ships and crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice—with the modern tale of the scientists, divers, and local Inuit behind the incredible discovery of the flagship's wreck in 2014. Paul Watson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning jou...

Early on March 15, 1697, a band of Abenaki warriors in service to the French raided the English frontier village of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Striking swiftly, the Abenaki killed twenty-seven men, women, and children, and took thirteen captives, including thirty-nine-year-old Hannah Duston and her week-old daughter, Martha. A short distance from the village, one of the warriors murdered the squalling infant. After a forced march of nearly one hundred miles, Duston and two companions were t...

Here is Philip Roth’s masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him.For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fana...

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in...

The outbreak of the US Civil War provided an unexpected opportunity for political conservatives across continents. Mere decades after its founding, the United States had become a threat to European hegemony; instability in the United States could be exploited to lay a rival low. Meanwhile, Mexican antidemocrats needed a powerful backer to fend off the republicanism of Benito Juárez. When these two groups found each other, the Second Mexican Empire was born.Raymond Jonas argues that...

Next to the Bible itself, the English Bible was—and is—the most influential book ever published.The most famous of all English Bibles, the King James Version, was the culmination of centuries of work by various translators, from John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century catalyst of English Bible translation, to the committee of scholars who collaborated on the King James translation. Wide as the Waters examines the life and work of Wycliffe and recounts the tr...

In The Sundowner's Dance, an elderly widower relocates to a retirement community and discovers his new neighbors are worshipping a meteorite.Todd Keisling's latest novel—pitched as Cocoon meets The Color Out of Space—is crawling with grief, odd neighbors, and cosmic horrors.