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Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face. Ass...

In a country called Town, a doctor named Su is found dead in an abandoned car. There is only one place the police intend to look for her suspected killer: the Saha Estates. Controlled by a secretive organization of ministers, Town is the safest, richest nation in the world. But it is a society clearly divided into the haves and have-nots, and those who have the very least-who aren't even considered citizens-live on the Saha Estates. Residents...

The familiar story of civil rights goes something like this: Once, the American legal system was dominated by racist officials who shut Black people out and refused to recognize their basic human dignity. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law-and soon, everyday African Americans joined with them to launch the Civil Rights Movement. In Before the Movement, historian Dylan C. Penningroth overtu...

Everyone Erin knows feels like an acquaintance. Back in Belfast after abruptly leaving graduate school, she numbly teeters through the aftermath of losing her best friend to an accident she doesn't want to talk about. But it's easy to get into a rhythm in the Lazy City, a simple housekeeping job provides refuge, as do evenings at a cocktail lounge where her friend tends bar and she drinks for free. In quick succession, she meets an American ma...

The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you're not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as "majestic" and "noble, " yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation's founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when native peop...

Years before Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris electrified the nation, a group of daredevil pilots, most of them veterans of the World War I, brought aviation to the masses by competing in the sensational transcontinental air race of 1919. The contest awakened Americans to the practical possibilities of flight, yet despite its significance, it has until now been all but forgotten. In The Great Air Race, journalist and amateur ...

In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome. Now she shines her spotlight on the emperors who ruled the Roman empire, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE). Emperor of Rome is not your usual chronological account of Roman rulers, one after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Beard asks bigger questions: What...

In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meet-and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President Abraham Lincoln, in the most significant assassination in American history. The murder, however, did not come without warning-in fact, it had been foretold. In the Houses of Their Dea...

The heroic story of the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation's character-above all, its ambition and entrepreneurial ethos. In Rebels at Sea, best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, we...

There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost-mythic "white working class, " a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and the very existence, of everyday Black workers. In her brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. Spanning two hundred years-from Kelley's earliest known ancestor, an ensl...

Don Paterson is one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, possessed of "an infinite sensitivity to the world" (Zadie Smith). But his current standing gives few hints of his hilariously misspent youth. An indifferent student prone to obsessions (with girls at school and . . . origami), Paterson nevertheless made clear early on his immense gift for observation. In Toy Fights, he vividly re-creates the customs of the Scottish working class, f...

A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer-"the starched collar, " as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of Mann's genius. The headliner of this volume, "C...

Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen, before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense, and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith? Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith's monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals "Pat" at her most passion...

If you want to understand American history, listen to its popular music, " writes renowned NPR host Rob Kapilow. "If you want to understand America's popular music, listen to its history." Through the songs of eight legendary American composers-Kern, Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, Berlin, Rodgers, Bernstein, and Sondheim-Kapilow listens for the history not just of musical theater, but of America itself. Combining close readings of Broadway hits like...

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Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government-in despair, because all the young people were leaving-opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic...

Years ago, archaeologists excavating near Pompeii unearthed a hoard of Roman treasures, among them a bowl depicting a woman with thick, curly hair and sporting an elephant-scalp headdress. For decades, theories circulated about her identity-until, at last, she was ascertained to be Cleopatra Selene, the only surviving daughter of Roman Triumvir Marc Antony and Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII. Using this discovery as her starting point and creatin...

The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho, " so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen, in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes, and in 1923, Virginia W...

The desire for romantic love sometimes builds up behind my temples like a bad weather front." Arrangements in Blue elegantly honors the life lived completely by-and for-oneself. Inspired by Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue, celebrated British poet Amy Key sets out to examine the volatile scales of romantic feeling as she has encountered them: from the low notes of loss and unfulfilled desire-punctuated by sharp, discordant feelings of jealou...

When the New York Public Library announced in October 1968 that its Berg Collection had acquired the original manuscript of The Waste Land, one of the most puzzling mysteries of twentieth-century literature was solved. The manuscript was not lost, as had been believed, but had remained among the papers of John Quinn, Eliot's friend and adviser, to whom the poet had sent it in 1922. If the discovery of the manuscript was startling, its content ...