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Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks-posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8, 000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta-traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked...

Marisel Vera emerges as a major new voice in contemporary fiction with this "capacious" (The New Yorker) novel set in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Spanish-American War. Up in the mountainous region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their coffee farm from the creditors. When the great San Ciriaco hurricane of 1899 brings devastating upheaval, the young couple is lured along with thousands of other puertorriquenos to t...

As the "War on Crime" targeted American cities from the late 1960s onward, Black residents threw punches and Molotov cocktails at police officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Drawing on new sources, Elizabeth Hinton reveals that these so-called riots were not explosions of criminality, but collective acts of rebellion against police brutality and racism. A leading scholar of policing, Hinton documents ...

One of the greatest generals in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) has for centuries attracted great male writers, who invariably identify with him. Ruth Scurr rejects the shibboleth of the "Great Man" theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon's life through gardens, parks, and forests, not through his battlefields. Scurr, one of our most eloquent and admired historians, frames the general's life through the...

One of the most notable novels of the year, hailed by both critics and K-pop stars alike, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman's psychic deterioration in the face of rampant misogyny. In a tidy apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, millennial "everywoman" Kim Jiyoung spends her days caring for her infant daughter. But strange symptoms appear: Jiyoung begins to impersonate the voices of other women, dead and alive. As she plunges deeper into...

The Western Front evokes images of hardship and sacrifice, of young, mud-spattered men in water-logged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts by a few feet of dirt. Long considered the most futile arena of the First World War, the Western Front has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of life. In this epic narrative history, Nick Lloyd brings together the latest research from America, France, Britain, and Germany, telling the...

In 2016, American investigative journalist Matthew Gavin Frank traveled along South Africa's notorious Diamond Coast to report on the illicit trade that supplies a global market. Immediately, he became intrigued by the ingenious methods used in facilitating this trade-particularly, the illegal act of sneaking carrier pigeons onto mine property, affixing diamonds to their feet, and sending them into the air. From the pits of Alexander Bay and P...

In the summer of 1722, on the eve of a conference between the Five Nations of the Iroquois and British-American colonists, two colonial fur traders brutally attacked an Indigenous hunter in colonial Pennsylvania. The crime set the entire mid-Atlantic on edge, with many believing that war was imminent. Frantic efforts to resolve the case created a contest between Native American forms of justice, centered on community, forgiveness, and reparati...

Brian Matthew Jordan's Marching Home, a "powerful exploration" (Washington Post) of the fates of Union veterans, vaulted him into the first rank of Civil War historians. Now, in A Thousand May Fall, Jordan sends us trundling along dusty roads with the 107th Ohio, an ethnically German infantry regiment whose members battled nativism no less than Confederate rebels. The 107th was at once ordinary and exceptional: its ranks played central roles i...

John Irving writes of Allan Gurganus: "His narration becomes a Greek chorus, Sophocles in North Carolina." Since the explosive publication of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All decades back, Gurganus has dazzled readers as "the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation" (John Cheever). These ten classic tales attest to the growing depth of his genius. Offering characters antic and tragic, Gurganus charts th...

No single book about the media more thoroughly captured the imagination of readers and critics in 2019 than Audience of One. "Funny, acerbic and observant" (Gary Shteyngart, New York Times Book Review), New York Times chief television critic James Poniewozik offers a "darkly entertaining" (Carlos Lozada, Washington Post) history of mass media from the early 1980s to today, demonstrating how a "volcanic, camera-hogging antihero" merged with Ame...

No single invention epitomizes the Victorian era more than the black cast-iron range. Aware that the twenty-first-century has reduced it to a quaint relic, Ruth Goodman was determined to prove that the hot coal stove provided so much more than morning tea: it might even have kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Wielding the wit and passion seen in How to Be a Victorian, Goodman traces the tectonic shift from wood to coal in the mid-sixteent...

Captivatingly written, interwoven with tantalizing illustrations and historical vignettes ranging from Newton's alchemy to quantum mechanics to the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, Michael Strevens's wholly original investigation of science asks two fundamental questions: Why is science so powerful? And why did it take so long, two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics, for the human race to start using science to lea...

The culmination of a half-century of historical investigation, A People Betrayed is not only the definitive history of Spain from 1876 to 2016, but also an absorbing narrative that becomes a lens for understanding the challenges that all democracies have faced in the modern world. As A People Betrayed demonstrates, Spain's decrepit political system led to defeat in 1898 at the hands of the United States and cost Spain the last of its major col...

Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet-where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them-has contributed to the rampant spread of "intellectual arrogance." In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another, we are rewarded...

Why has American politics fallen into such a state of horrible dysfunction? Can it ever be fixed? These are the questions that motivate Michael Tomasky's deeply original examination into the origins of our hopelessly polarized nation. "One of America's finest political commentators" (Michael J. Sandel), Tomasky ranges across centuries and disciplines to show how America has almost always had two dominant parties that are existentially, and oft...

It is 1898, and groups of starving Puerto Ricans, los hambrientos, roam the parched countryside and dusty towns begging for food. Under the yoke of Spanish oppression, the Caribbean island is forced to prepare to wage war with the United States. Up in the mountainous coffee region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their small farm from the creditors. When the Spanish-American War and the great San Ciriaco Hurricane of...

We often assume that the Republican Party is divided between a tax-cutting old guard and a white-nationalist vanguard-and that with Donald Trump's ascendance, the upstarts are winning. Yet as New York Times best-selling authors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrate, plutocrats and populists are now effectively allies in an intensifying fight to lock in America's skyrocketing inequality. Conservative parties can always be expected to sid...

In this bewitching first novel, a sensitive teen, newly arrived in Alabama, falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. While his German parents don't know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives in the thick heat. Taken in by rowdy football players, he learns how to catch a spiraling ball, point a gun, and hide his innermost secrets. When Max meets fishnet-wearing Pan in chemistry class, they embark...

I passed away at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in 1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city." So begins Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas-at the end of the narrator's life. Published in 1881, this highly experimental novel was not at first considered Machado de Assis' definitive work-a fact his narrator anticipated, bidding "good riddance" to the critic looking for a "run-of-the-mill-novel." Yet in t...