Fiction
- You Are One of Them, A Novel About Growing Up in Washington D.C. During the Cold War by Elliott Holt
Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s. Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war. [More...]
- The Hanging Garden, A Posthumously Discovered Novel by Patrick White
From the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Eye of the Storm comes a vivid, visceral tale of childhood friendship and sexual awakening from beyond the echoes of World War II.
Sydney, Australia, 1942. Two children, on the cusp of adolescence, have been spirited away from the war in Europe and given shelter in [More...]
- Palisades Park, A Family Saga Centering on a New Jersey Amusement Park by Alan Brennert
Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey—especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand where they sell homemade [More...]
- The Son, An Expertly Written Tale of Ancient Crimes by Philipp Meyer
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.
Spring, [More...]
- Big Brother, A Novel of Complex Relationships Among our Bodies, Minds, and Family by Lionel Shriver
Big Brother is a striking novel about siblings, marriage, and obesity from Lionel Shriver, the acclaimed author the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin.
For Pandora, cooking is a form of love. Alas, her husband, Fletcher, a self-employed high-end cabinetmaker, now spurns the “toxic” dishes that he’d savored through their courtship, [More...]
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Biographies & Memoirs
- Into the Abyss, An Extraordinary True Story of Extreme Survival by Carol Shaben
Only four men survived the plane crash. The pilot. A politician. A cop... and the criminal he was shackled to.
On an icy night in October 1984, a commuter plane carrying nine passengers crashed in the remote wilderness of northern Alberta, killing six people. Four survived: the rookie pilot, a prominent [More...]
- The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter, A Portrait of French Philosopher Rene Descartes by Steven Nadler
In the Louvre museum hangs a portrait of a middle-aged man with long dark hair, a mustache, and heavy-lidded eyes, and he is dressed in the starched white collar and black coat of the typical Dutch burgher. The painting is now the iconic image of René Descartes, the great seventeenth-century [More...]
- Stuck in the Middle with You, A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan
New York Times bestseller and acclaimed author Jennifer Finney Boylan returns with a remarkable memoir about gender and parenting, including incredible interviews discussing gender, how families are shaped, and the difficulties and wonders of being human.
A father for ten years, a mother for eight, and for a time in between, neither, [More...]
- That’s That, A Memoir of Growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland during the Troubles by Colin Broderick
Colin Broderick grew up in Northern Ireland during the period of heightened tension and violence known as the Troubles. Broderick's Catholic family lived in County Tyrone --the heart of rebel country. In That’s That, he brings us into this world and delivers a deeply personal account of what it was like to [More...]
- The Cooked Seed, A Memoir and Immigrant Story by Anchee Min
In 1994, Anchee Min made her literary debut with a memoir of growing up in China during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Red Azalea became an international bestseller and propelled her career as a successful, critically acclaimed author. Twenty years later, Min returns to the story of her own life [More...]
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Children & Young Adults
- Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, A Magic Young Adult Novel by Michelle Tea
Everyone in the broken-down town of Chelsea, Massachussetts, has a story too worn to repeat—from the girls who play the pass-out game just to feel like they're somewhere else, to the packs of aimless teenage boys, to the old women from far away who left everything behind. But there’s one [More...]
- Gorgeous, A Cinderella Story with a Difference by Paul Rudnick
A book that will make you see yourself clearly for the first time.
When Becky Randle's mother dies, she's whisked from her trailer park home to New York. There she meets Tom Kelly, the world's top designer, who presents Becky with an impossible offer: He'll design three dresses to transform the [More...]
- Nine Days: American High School Student Experience Human Rights Abuse in China, A Novel by Fred Hiatt
A fast-paced contemporary thriller in the vein of James Patterson and Anthony Horowitz set against the bustling backdrop of Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the border of China. This heart-pounding adventure takes place as two teens, an American teenage boy and his friend, a Chinese girl from his Washington, DC-area high [More...]
- The Summer Prince, A Nuanced and Original Cyberpunk Adventure by Alaya Dawn Johnson
A heart-stopping story of love, death, technology, and art set amid the tropics of a futuristic Brazil.
The lush city of Palmares Tres shimmers with tech and tradition, with screaming gossip casters and practiced politicians. In the midst of this vibrant metropolis, June Costa creates art that's sure to make her [More...]
- Courage Has No Color, The True Story of the Triple Nickles: America’s First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone
They became America’s first black paratroopers. Why was their story never told? Sibert Medalist Tanya Lee Stone reveals the history of the Triple Nickles during World War II.
World War II is raging, and thousands of American soldiers are fighting overseas against the injustices brought on by Hitler. Back on the [More...]
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Health, Mind & Body
- THE FIX, How Addiction Is Taking Over Your World by Damian Thompson
Addictions to iphones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and sex are taking over our lives.
Our most casual daily habits can quickly become obsessions that move beyond our control. Damian Thompson, who has himself struggled with a range of addictions, argues that human desire is in the process of being reshaped. Shunning the [More...]
- The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Before Their Bottom Line by Jennifer Margulis
Why, despite our state-of-the-art medical technology, does the United States have among the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the industrialized world? Why do pregnant women who are planning to breastfeed receive “free” samples of infant formula from American obstetricians? Why are American newborns given a vaccine at birth [More...]
- The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime by Adrian Raine
Why do some innocent kids grow up to become cold-blooded serial killers? Is bad biology partly to blame? For more than three decades Adrian Raine has been researching the biological roots of violence and establishing neurocriminology, a new field that applies neuroscience techniques to investigate the causes and cures of [More...]
- The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg
For more than two years, author and psychotherapist Gary Greenberg has embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the DSM—the American Psychiatric Association’s compendium of mental illnesses and what Greenberg calls “the book of woe.”
Since its debut in [More...]
- In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America by Laurie Edwards
Thirty years ago, Susan Sontag wrote, "Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick ... Sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." Now more [More...]
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Politics
- The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, An Examination of a Nation in Crisis by George Packer
A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation
American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the [More...]
- Citizenville, How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government by Former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom
A rallying cry for revolutionizing democracy in the digital age, Citizenville reveals how ordinary Americans can reshape their government for the better. Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, argues that today’s government is stuck in the last century while—in both the private sector and our personal lives—absolutely everything else has changed. [More...]
- Fighting for Common Ground: How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress by Olympia Snowe
An outspoken centrist, Senator Snowe stunned Washington in February 2012 when she announced she would not seek a fourth term and offered a sharp rebuke to the Senate, citing the dispiriting gridlock and polarization. After serving in the legislative branch at the state and federal levels for 40 years, including [More...]
- Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t by Robert G. Kaiser
An eye-opening account of how Congress today really works—and doesn’t—that follows the dramatic journey of the sweeping financial reform bill enacted in response to the Great Crash of 2008.
The founding fathers expected Congress to be the most important branch of government and gave it the most power. When Congress is [More...]
- Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East by David Rohde
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author examines the cardinal failing of Washington’s war on terror
This book distills eleven years of expert reporting for The New York Times, Reuters, and The Atlantic Monthly into a clarion call for change. An incisive look at the evolving nature of war, Rohde exposes how a dysfunctional Washington squandered billions [More...]
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Misc. Nonfiction
- Make Good Art, His Commencement Speech Turned Into a Book by Neil Gaiman
In May 2012, bestselling author Neil Gaiman stood at a podium at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts to deliver the commencement address. For the next nineteen minutes he shared his thoughts about creativity, bravery, and strength: he encouraged the students before him to break rules and think outside the box. [More...]
- College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students by Jeffrey J. Selingo
What is the value of a college degree?
The four-year college experience is as American as apple pie. So is the belief that education offers a ticket to a better life. But with student-loan debt surpassing the $1 trillion mark and unemployment on the rise, people are beginning to question that [More...]
- Tiny Confessions: The Secret Thoughts of Dogs, Cats and Everything by Christopher Rozzi
Ever wonder what your dachshund, bulldog, great dane, or tabby cat are *really* thinking? Wonder no more, because artist and comedian Christopher Rozzi has channeled the innermost thoughts of canines and felines (along with the occasional rabbit or robot) and painted their portraits with great affection and humor.
Garnering attention and [More...]
- Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin
From one of our foremost thinkers and public intellectuals, a radical new view of the nature of time and the cosmos
What is time?
This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists [More...]
- Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers
Do animals overeat? Get breast cancer? Have fainting spells?
Inspired by an eye-opening consultation at the Los Angeles Zoo, which revealed that a monkey experienced the same symptoms of heart failure as her human patients, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz embarked upon a project that would reshape how she practiced medicine. Beginning with [More...]
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Business & Investing
- Straight Flush, The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire, A Fast-Paced and Wildly Chaotic Account by Ben Mezrich
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—the sources for the films The Social Network and 21—comes the larger-than-life true tale of a group of American college buddies who brilliantly built a billion-dollar online poker colossus based out of the hedonistic paradise of Costa Rica.
One problem: the U.S. Department of [More...]
- Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City by Robin Nagle
America’s largest city generates garbage in torrents—11,000 tons from households each day on average. But New Yorkers don’t give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. And why not? On a schedule so regular you could almost [More...]
- Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet and the Spam Business by Finn Brunton
The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come [More...]
- Who Owns the Future? Arguments by the Prophet of Silicon Valley Jaron Lanier
The DazzlingNew Masterwork from the Prophet of Silicon Valley
Jaron Lanier is the bestselling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital [More...]
- The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin
When the first fissures became visible to the naked eye in August 2007, suddenly the most powerful men in the world were three men who were never elected to public office. They were the leaders of the world’s three most important central banks: Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, [More...]
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Cooking, Food & Wine
- Steal the Menu, A Culinary Memoir of Forty Years in Food by Raymond Sokolov
Four decades of memories from a gastronome who witnessed the food revolution from the (well-provisioned) trenches—a delicious tour through contemporary food history.
When Raymond Sokolov became food editor of The New York Times in 1971, he began a long, memorable career as restaurant critic, food historian, and author. Here he traces the food [More...]
- The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen, A Cookbook Full of Foraged and Forgotten Foods by Matt Lee and Ted Lee
Growing up in the heart of the historic downtown, in a warbler-yellow house on Charleston’s fabled “Rainbow Row,” brothers Matt and Ted knew how to cast for shrimp before they were in middle school, and could catch and pick crabs soon after. They learned to recognize the fruit trees that [More...]
- Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan
In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how [More...]
- Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built by Mark Russ Federman
The former owner/proprietor of the beloved appetizing store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side tells the delightful, mouthwatering story of an immigrant family’s journey from a pushcart in 1907 to “New York’s most hallowed shrine to the miracle of caviar, smoked salmon, ethereal herring, and silken chopped liver” (The New York [More...]
- The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets by Kara Newman
One morning while reading Barron's, Kara Newman took note of a casual bit of advice offered by famed commodities trader Jim Rogers. "Buy breakfast," he told investors, referring to the increasing value of pork belly and frozen orange juice futures. The statement inspired Newman to take a closer look at agricultural [More...]
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History
- Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Film and Culture Series) by Thomas Doherty
Between 1933 and 1939, representations of the Nazis and the full meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, growing more ominous and distinct only as the decade wore on. Recapturing what ordinary Americans saw on the screen during the emerging Nazi threat, Thomas Doherty reclaims forgotten films, such as Hitler's Reign [More...]
- The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter, A Portrait of French Philosopher Rene Descartes by Steven Nadler
In the Louvre museum hangs a portrait of a middle-aged man with long dark hair, a mustache, and heavy-lidded eyes, and he is dressed in the starched white collar and black coat of the typical Dutch burgher. The painting is now the iconic image of René Descartes, the great seventeenth-century [More...]
- What Soldiers Do, Sex and the American GI in World War II France by Historian Mary Louise Roberts
How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle [More...]
- The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, An Examination of a Nation in Crisis by George Packer
A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation
American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the [More...]
- The Roberts Court, The Struggle for the Constitution by Washington Correspondent Marcia Coyle
The Roberts Court, seven years old, sits at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Through four landmark decisions, Marcia Coyle, one of the most prestigious experts on the Supreme Court, reveals the fault lines in the conservative-dominated Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.
Seven minutes after President Obama put [More...]
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Science & Technology
- Robot Futures, About Our Robotic Friends and Foes by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh
With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. [More...]
- Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin
From one of our foremost thinkers and public intellectuals, a radical new view of the nature of time and the cosmos
What is time?
This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists [More...]
- A Grand Complication: The Race to Build the World’s Most Legendary Watch by Stacy Perman
Two wealthy, powerful men engage in a decades-long contest to create and possess the most remarkable watch in history.
James Ward Packard of Warren, Ohio, was an entrepreneur and a talented engineer of infinite curiosity, a self-made man who earned millions from his inventions, including the design and manufacture of America’s [More...]
- Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet and the Spam Business by Finn Brunton
The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come [More...]
- Who Owns the Future? Arguments by the Prophet of Silicon Valley Jaron Lanier
The DazzlingNew Masterwork from the Prophet of Silicon Valley
Jaron Lanier is the bestselling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital [More...]
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