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In 1972, after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, Oliver de la Paz's father, in a last fit of desperation to leave the Philippines, threw his papers at an immigration clerk, hoping to get them stamped. He was prepared to leave, having already quit his job and having exchanged pesos for dollars; but he couldn't anticipate the challenges of the migratory lifestyle he and his family would soon adopt in America. Their search for a sense of "home" and boundless feelings of deracination are evocatively explored by award-winning poet de la Paz in this formally inventive collection of sonnets.Broken into three parts-"The Implacable West", "Landscape with Work, Rest, and Silence" and "Dwelling Music"-The Diaspora Sonnets eloquently invokes the perseverance and bold possibilities of de la Paz's displaced family as they strove for stability and belonging. In order to establish her medical practice, de la Paz's mother had to relocate often for residencies. As they moved from state to state his father worked to support the family. Sonnets thus flit from coast to coast, across prairies and deserts, along the way musing on shadowy dreams of a faraway country.Written with the deft touch of a virtuoso and the compassion of a loving son, The Diaspora Sonnets powerfully captures the peculiar pangs of a diaspora "that has left and is forever leaving."

Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson's critically acclaimed translations of Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis introduced a new generation of readers to one of Brazil's most ground-breaking authors. Hailed as "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America" (Susan Sontag), Machado's genius is on full display in this fresh translation of the 1899 classic Dom Casmurro. In his supposed memoir, Bento Santiago, an engaging yet unreliable narrator, suspects his wife, Capitu, of having an affair with his closest friend. Withdrawn and obsessive, our antihero mines the origins of their love story: from childhood neighbours playing innocently in the backyard to his brief spell in a seminary to marriage and the birth of their child-whom, he fears, does not resemble him. A gripping domestic drama brimming with Machado's signature humour, this is another stunningly modern tale from the progenitor of twentieth-century fiction.

Over the years, R. Howard Bloch has become renowned for the insider tours of Paris that he gives to students abroad. Long sought after by travellers and history buffs for his near-encyclopaedic knowledge of French cathedrals, the eminent French literature scholar finally shares his expertise with a wider audience.In Paris and Her Cathedrals, six of the most sublime cathedrals in the penumbra of Paris-Saint-Denis, Notre-Dame, Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle, Amiens, Reims-are illumined in magnificent detail as Bloch, taking us from the High Middle Ages to the devastating fire that set Notre-Dame ablaze in 2019, traces the evolution of each in turn. Written from the premise that "seeing is enhanced by knowing", each chapter is organised along the lines of a walk around and then through the space of the cathedral, such that the actual or virtual visitor feels the rich sweep of the church, "the essence of these architectural wonders" (Antonia Felix).Animating the past with lush evocations of architectural splendour-from flying buttresses and jewel-encrusted shrines to hidden burial grounds and secret chambers-Bloch then contextualises the cathedrals within the annals of French history. Here thrilling tales of kingly intrigue-as in Saint-Chapelle, where the pious King Louis IX amassed relics, including Christ's crown of thorns-and audacious abbots are interspersed with anecdotes about the meeting of aristocratic and everyday life, culminating in "a rich, colourful narrative that clearly but expertly explains the history and symbolism of some of the world's most magnificent buildings" (Ross King).To be read in preparation for an enlightened visit or merely to open a window upon the High Middle Ages in France, Paris and Her Cathedrals is a "revelation," an "indispensable guide" (Garry Wills) to these awe-inspiring structures. Complete with the author's own photographs, this beautifully illustrated volume vitally enhances our understanding of the history of Paris and its environs.

Countless books, news reports, and opinion pieces have announced the impending arrival of artificial intelligence, with most claiming that it will upend our world, revolutionizing not just work but society overall. Yet according to political philosopher and historian David Runciman, we've actually been living with a version of AI for 300 years because states and corporations are robots, too. In The Handover, Runciman explains our current situation through the history of these "artificial agents" we created to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations-and demonstrates what this radical new view of our recent past means for our collective future.From the United States and the United Kingdom to the East India Company, Standard Oil, Facebook, and Alibaba, states and corporations have gradually, and then much more rapidly, taken over the planet. They have helped to conquer poverty and eliminate disease, but also unleashed global wars and environmental degradation. As Runciman demonstrates, states and corporations are the ultimate decision-making machines, defined by their ability to make their own choices and, crucially, to sustain the consequences of what has been chosen. And if the rapid spread of the modern state and corporation has already transformed the conditions of human existence, new AI technology promises the same.But what happens when AI interacts with other kinds of artificial agents, the inhuman kind represented by states and corporations? Runciman argues that the twenty-first century will be defined by increasingly intense battles between state and corporate power for the fruits of the AI revolution. In the end, it is not our own, human relationship with AI that will determine our future. Rather, humanity's fate will be shaped by the interactions among states, corporations, and thinking machines.With clarity and verve, The Handover presents a brilliantly original history of the last three centuries and a new understanding of the immense challenges we now face.

Back home after abruptly leaving graduate school in London, Erin numbly teeters through the shock of losing her best friend to an accident she doesn't want to talk about-especially with her mother. But it's easy to slip into the rhythms of Belfast, the lazy city; she takes an au pair job and bookends her days with early morning runs along the Lagan and hazy afters at a bar her old friend tends. In quick succession, she meets an American man who is looking to get lost, and falls back in with the local boy who both comforts and confounds her. But it is her unlikely, secretive relationship with faith that offers a different kind of sanctuary. Wandering into empty churches, gazing with mascara-smudged eyes at the stained-glass windows, Erin finally, gingerly, confronts herself.

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 peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others, whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides, twice pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction.Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves-monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world's finest parents-The Bald Eagle is a much-awaited cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird's wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.

The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America's legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn't join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these "rights of everyday use," Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself-the laws all of us live under today.Penningroth's narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story-their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life-a vision allied with, yet distinct from, "the freedom struggle."

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 Dead is the first book of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the president's fascination with Spiritualism, and to demonstrate how it linked him, uncannily, to the man who would kill him. Abraham Lincoln is usually seen as a rational, empirically-minded man, yet as acclaimed scholar and biographer Terry Alford reveals, he was also deeply superstitious and drawn to the irrational. Like millions of other Americans, including the Booths, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, suffered repeated personal tragedies, and turned for solace to Spiritualism, a new practice sweeping the nation that held that the dead were nearby and could be contacted by the living. Remarkably, the Lincolns and the Booths even used the same mediums, including Charles Colchester, a specialist in "blood writing" whom Mary first brought to her husband, and who warned the president after listening to the ravings of another of his clients, John Wilkes Booth.Alford's expansive, richly-textured chronicle follows the two families across the nineteenth century, uncovering new facts and stories about Abraham and Mary while drawing indelible portraits of the Booths-from patriarch Julius, a famous actor in his own right, to brother Edwin, the most talented member of the family and a man who feared peacock feathers, to their confidant Adam Badeau, who would become, strangely, the ghostwriter for President Ulysses S. Grant. At every turn, Alford shows that despite the progress of the age-the glass hypodermic syringe, electromagnetic induction, and much more-death remained ever-present, and thus it was only rational for millions of Americans, from the president on down, to cling to beliefs that seem anything but. A novelistic narrative of two exceptional American families set against the convulsions their times, In the Houses of Their Dead ultimately leads us to consider how ghost stories helped shape the nation.

Cabot Wright is a handsome, Yale-educated stockbroker and scion of a good family. He also happens to be the convicted rapist of nearly three hundred women. Bernie Gladhart is a naive used-car salesman from Chicago, who-spurred on by his ambitious wife-decides to travel to Brooklyn and write the Great American Novel about the recently paroled Cabot Wright. As Bernie tries to track down Wright in Brooklyn, he encounters a series of bizarre and Dickensian characters and sets in motion an extraordinary chain of events. In this merciless and outrageous satire of American culture, cult writer James Purdy is unsparing and prophetic in his portrayal of television, publishing, Wall Street, race, urban poverty, sex, and the false values of American culture in a work compared to Candide by Susan Sontag. Considered too scabrous for the stifling culture mores of the early 1960s, Purdy's comic fiction evokes "an American psychic landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation" (New York Times).

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 of Saha must squat in moldy units without plumbing or electricity and can only find work doing harsh labor. For many, the apartment complex is a bleak haven for escaping even bleaker pasts-as it was for Jin-kyung and her brother, Do-Kyung, who showed up one day sopping wet and shivering.No one is shocked when a lowlife like Do-Kyung becomes the main suspect in Su's-a citizen's-murder. But then Do-Kyung disappears. Isolated in a barren Saha unit, Jin-Kyung makes a choice: she will finally confront a system hellbent on erasing her brother's existence. To find him, she must rely on her tightlipped neighbors, from the mysterious janitor known as "Old Man," to Granny Konnim, the community gardener and reluctant midwife, to Woomi, an unwitting test subject at the local clinic. On her quest for the truth, Jin-kyung will uncover a reality far darker than she could have imagined.Written in Cho Nam-Joo's signature sharp prose, brilliantly translated by Jamie Chang, Saha is a chilling portrait of what happens when we finally unmask our oppressors.

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 change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis.A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O'Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of "deliberate unknowing," which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don't Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us.

Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd (est. 1761) to apply for a job. Allured by the smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap, Darkshire was soon unteetering stacks of first editions and placating the store's resident ghost (the late Mr. Sotheran, hit by a tram).A novice in this ancient, potentially haunted establishment, Darkshire describes Sotheran's brushes with history (Dickens, the Titanic), its joyous disorganization, and the unspoken rules of its gleefully old-fashioned staff, whose mere glance may cause the computer to burst into flames. As Darkshire gains confidence and experience, he shares trivia about ancient editions and explores the strange space that books occupy in our lives-where old books often have strong sentimental value, but rarely a commercial one.By turns unhinged and earnest, Once Upon a Tome is the colorful story of life in one of the world's oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling, where to be uncommon or strange is the best possible compliment.