Books – Detail

In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, critically acclaimed author of The Age of Wonder, discovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time

In this follow-up to Chang's Wild Swans, "Deng Xiaoping opened the door of Communist China, and Jung--twenty-six years old and unstoppably curious, despite years of brainwashing--seized the propitious moment and became one of the first Chinese to leave the tightly sealed country and come to the West. [This memoir] chronicles her journey and that of her family, along with that of China, as it rose from a decrepit and isolated state to a world power challenging American dominance

As Fussell recalls family, friends, enemies, and lovers with wry humor, affection, and a sharp-eyed confrontation with morality, all the while the coyote watches. An emblem of the wild and her metaphor for all the things one can't control, this coyote stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the day progresses. Ultimately, this exciting new work from an incomparable voice in American writing provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.

Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. ... This is a book about being different and seeing the world differently.

The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today's most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love.

One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson's newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future-an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: 'One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.' This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human--not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

National Book Award Winner

In The Philosopher in the Valley journalist Michael Steinberger explores the world of Alex Karp, Palantir, and the future that they are leading us toward. It is an urgent and illuminating work about one of Silicon Valley's most secretive and powerful companies, whose technology is at the leading edge of the surveillance state.

It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn't. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whiskey sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her.

When most of their peers were moving in with romantic partners and having children, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo chose independence--savoring solitude, quiet mornings, and the unmitigated freedom of living alone. But in their forties, something shifted, and they were met with a new, unexpected loneliness. Refusing to settle for the outdated choice between marriage or isolation, Hana and Sunwoo made a radical decision: to buy a home and live together--not as lovers, not as roommates, but as chosen family. Now a bustling household of two women and four cats, Hana and Sunwoo still value solitude, but can do so while sharing a life and its meaning with someone else.

A grounded and intimate portrait of life by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Where We Keep the Light is the story of public service and personal faith.

Michael Loughran’s Windower is a memoir of grief, an account of the years before and after losing his wife to suicide, a document of love’s impossible forms. It is a report back—tender and uncompromising—from a place we could call hell, the place where we outlive those we love.

In this radiant work of creative nonfiction, internationally beloved novelist Val McDermid delivers a dazzling ode to a lost world, ruminating on a single winter in her life as she journeys into the heart of the season's ever-evolving community-based traditions. In Winter, McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa.  A hygge-filled journey through winter nights, McDermid reminds us that it is a time of rest, retreat and creativity, for scribbling in notebooks and settling in beside the fire. A treat for the hunkering-down, post-holiday reading season, Winter is a charming and cozy celebration of the year's idle months from one of Scotland's best-loved writers.

A warm and witty memoir about the ever-changing relationships between mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters that traverses two continents and multiple generations of two disparate yet connected families.

From California Governor Gavin Newsom, an intimate and reflective memoir laying bare the defining moments of his liminal childhood splintered by his parents' divorce that shaped Newsom's visionary and relentless commitment to the state and nation.