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...

An illuminating new essay collection from one of the most distinctive, exciting and acclaimed writers of her generation, Zadie Smith‘Zadie Smith is a wonderful essayist. She is a natural. She writes as she thinks, and she thinks crisply and exactly’ – Tessa Hadley, GuardianIn this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have captured her attention in re...

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...

**INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERLonglisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the YearBest Books of August: Barnes & Noble, GoodreadsA New York Times New and Notable Title“Lepore is our best scholar of the culture of governance, and our most vital historian. Here she repudiates the prospect of AI as a replacement for democracy. This is the issue of our times, and Lepore is the voice of sanity.” —Jaron Lanier, author of Yo...

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...

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...

"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...

**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...

From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich comes a fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy."Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The NationIn the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins ...

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...

'A fascinating journey into our relationship with the physical book...I lost count of the times I exclaimed with delight when I read a nugget of information I hadn't encountered before' Val McDermid, The TimesMost of what we say about books is really about the words inside them: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in ou...