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"One of our most interesting and bold writers . . . [offers] a characteristically wild effort that defies genre distinctions, flits from the profound to the mundane with fierce intelligence and searching restlessness, and at its best, delves deep into the recesses of the human heart with courageous abandon . . . An intoxicating blend of humor and pathos." -Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe "Eerie, profound, and daring, this is a book only the inimitable Hunt could write."-Adrienne Westenfeld, EsquireFrom Samantha Hunt, the award-winning author of The Dark Dark, comes The Unwritten Book, her first work of nonfiction, a genre-bending creation that explores the importance of books, the idea of haunting, and messages from beyond I carry each book I've ever read with me, just as I carry my dead-those things that aren't really there, those things that shape everything I am. A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt's The Unwritten Book explores ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting, in the broadest sense of each. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying. Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we'll never have time to read or write. Hunt, like a mad crossword puzzler, looks for patterns and clues. Through literary criticism, history, family history, and memoir, inspired by W. G. Sebald, James Joyce, Ali Smith, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and many others, Hunt explores motherhood, hoarding, legacies of addiction, grief, how we insulate ourselves from the past, how we misinterpret the world. Nestled within her inquiry is a very special ghost book, an incomplete manuscript about people who can fly without wings, written by her father and found in his desk just days after he died. What secret messages might his work reveal? What wisdom might she distill from its unfinished pages? Hunt conveys a vivid and grateful life, one that comes from living closer to the dead and shedding fear for wonder. The Unwritten Book revels in the randomness, connectivity, and magic of everyday existence. And at its heart is the immense weight of love.

Winner of the Medical Journalists' Association's Tony Thistlethwaite AwardA Finalist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science BooksRecipient of the International OCD Foundation's Illumination AwardAn intimate look at the power of intrusive thoughts, how our brains can turn against us, and living with obsessive compulsive disorderWhat might lead a schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece, or a man to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that he and his brother have compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts?David Adam-an editor at Nature and an accomplished science writer-has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn't Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. In this riveting and intimate blend of science, history, and memoir, Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind and explains how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion. Told with fierce clarity, humor, and urgent lyricism, The Man Who Couldn't Stop is a haunting story of a personal nightmare that shines a light into the darkest corners of our minds.

A bestselling literary sensation in Brazil, a powerful debut short-story collection about favela life in Rio de JaneiroIn The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins recounts the experiences of boys growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on his childhood and adolescence, Martins uses the rhythms and slang of his neighborhood dialect to capture the texture of life in the slums, where every day is shadowed by a ubiquitous drug culture, the constant threat of the police, and the confines of poverty, violence, and racial oppression. And yet these are also stories of friendship, romance, and momentary relief, as in "Rolézim," where a group of teenagers head to the beach. Other stories, all uncompromising in their realism and yet diverse in narrative form, explore the changes that occur when militarized police occupy the favelas in the lead-up to the World Cup, the cycles of violence in the narcotics trade, and the feelings of invisibility that define the realities of so many in Rio's underclass.The Sun on My Head is a work of great talent and sensitivity, a daring evocation of life in the favelas by a rising star rooted in the community he portrays.

The newest essay collection from the New York Times bestselling author John Waters, reflecting on how to overcome newfound respectability and rebel in the autumn of your years.No one knows more about everything-especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling-than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world's great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste, from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: "Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all."Studded with cameos, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from the author's personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters' most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book-another instant Waters classic.Praise for John Waters"Waters doesn't kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird . . . [Waters] has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent." -Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post"Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America's desolate freeway nodes-though they're brilliantly evoked-but of American fame itself." -Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review

And a Dog Called Fig is the story of one writer's life with dogs (including a frisky new puppy), how they are uniquely ideal companions for building a creative life, and some delightful tales about dogs and their famous writersInto my writer's isolation will come a dog, to sit beside my chair or to lie on the couch while I work, to force me outside for a walk, and suddenly, although still lonely, this writer will have a companion.An artist's solitude is a sacred space, one to be guarded from the chaos of the world, where the sparks of inspiration can be kindled into fires of creation. But within this quiet also lie loneliness, self-doubt, the danger of collapsing too far inward. An artist needs a familiar, a companion with emotional intelligence, innate curiosity, an enthusiasm for the world beyond, but also the capacity to rest contentedly for many hours. What an artist needs, Helen Humphreys would say, is a dog. And a Dog Called Fig is a memoir of the writing life told through the dogs Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime, including Fig, her new Vizsla puppy. Interspersed are stories of other writers and their own irreplaceable companions: Virginia Woolf and Grizzle, Gertrude Stein and Basket, Thomas Hardy and Wessex-who walked the dining table at dinner parties, taking whatever he liked-and many more. A love song to the dogs who come into our lives and all that they bring-sorrow, mayhem, reflection, joy-this is a book about steadfast friendship and loss, creativity and craft, and the restorative powers of nature. Every work of art is different; so too is every dog, with distinctive needs and lessons. And if we let them guide us, they will show us many worlds we would otherwise miss. Includes Black-and-White Photographs

"Pankaj Mishra transforms a visceral, intimate story of one man's humble origins into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a society bedazzled by power and wealth-what it means on a human level, and what it costs. Run and Hide is a spectacular, illuminating work of fiction." -Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan BeachGrowing up in a small railway town, Arun always dreamed of escape. His acceptance to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, enabled through great sacrifice by his low-caste parents, is seemingly his golden ticket out of a life plagued by everyday cruelties and deprivations.At the predominantly male campus, he meets two students from similar backgrounds. Unlike Arun-scarred by his childhood, and an uneasy interloper among go-getters-they possess the sheer will and confidence to break through merciless social barriers. The alumni of IIT eventually go on to become the financial wizards of their generation, working hard and playing hard from East Hampton to Tuscany-the beneficiaries of unprecedented financial and sexual freedom. But while his friends play out Gatsby-style fantasies, Arun fails to leverage his elite education for social capital. He decides to pursue the writerly life, retreating to a small village in the Himalayas with his aging mother.Arun's modest idyll is one day disrupted by the arrival of a young woman named Alia, who is writing an exposé of his former classmates. Alia, beautiful and sophisticated, draws Arun back to the prospering world where he must be someone else if he is to belong. When he is implicated in a terrible act of violence committed by his closest friend from IIT, Arun will have to reckon with the person he has become.Run and Hide is Pankaj Mishra's powerful story of achieving material progress at great moral and emotional cost. It is also the story of a changing country and global order, and the inequities of class and gender that map onto our most intimate relationships.

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SIEDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION, THE 2022 LAMBDA LITERARY PRIZE FOR TRANSGENDER FICTION, AND THE 2023 PUBLISHING TRIANGLE EDMUND WHITE AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION"These breathlessly imaginative stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about men and women." -The New York Times Book ReviewMorgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopher.Fear of Black Consciousness is an original and a bold intervention in the cultural and political conversation about systemic racism. Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and antiblackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized blackness, the problems racialization produces, and the many creative responses from black and nonblack communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom.As he skillfully navigates the difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of white narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates. He illuminates the different forms of invisibility that define black life, and he exposes the bad faith at the heart of many discussions about race and racism, not only in North America but also across the globe, including in countries where discussants regard themselves as "colorblind." Gordon reveals that these lies about race and its supposed irrelevance confer upon many white people an inherited sense of being extraordinary. More than being privileged or entitled, they act with a license to do as they please. But for many if not most blacks, living an ordinary life in a white-dominated society is an extraordinary achievement.Informed by Gordon's upbringing in Jamaica and the Bronx, and taking as touchstones the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence, Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking book that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action. It is sure to provoke, challenge, and inspire.

WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY'S NORDIC PRIZE 2023A timely and provocative novel from the internationally celebrated novelist Sjón, about a mysterious Icelandic neo-Nazi and the enduring global allure of fascism.In England in 1962, an Icelandic man is found dead on a train. In his possession, policemen find a map on which a swastika has been drawn with a red pen. Who was he, and where was he going?Based on the life of one of the ringleaders of a little-known neo-Nazi group that operated in Reykjavík in the late fifties and early sixties, Red Milk explores what shapes a young man and the enduring, disturbing allure of Nazi ideology.In Red Milk, acclaimed author Sjón tells the story of Gunnar Kampen, the founder of Iceland's antisemitic nationalist party, who has ties to a burgeoning network of neo-Nazi groups across the globe. Told in a series of scenes and letters spanning Kampen's lifetime-from his childhood in Reykjavík during the Second World War, in a household strongly opposed to Hitler, through his education, his political radicalization, and his final clandestine mission to England-this taut and potent novel urges readers to confront the international legacy of twentieth-century fascism, and the often undetectable forces that drive some people to extremism.

One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May"A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two." -Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street JournalA captivating study of Napoleon's plundering of Europe's art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from VeniceCynthia Saltzman's Plunder recounts the fate of Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of a young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563, the Renaissance picture had been immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had spread the scene across the end wall of the monastery's refectory and filled it with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the biblical banquet was taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once it was pulled from its frame, the canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder, bound for Paris; soon after, artworks commandeered in Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought to the French capital. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution, in the former palace of the French kings.As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon's looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals defining traits of his character: his desire for greatness and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the paintings and sculptures they had seized. Nevertheless, the French resisted sending The Wedding Feast at Cana back to Venice, and the painting remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly opposite the Mona Lisa.Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art-appropriation campaigns in history, shedding light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the world's great museums.

"An eye-opening and enchanting book by one of our major scientist-explorers." -Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's WifeNicknamed the "Real-Life Lorax" by National Geographic, the biologist, botanist, and conservationist Meg Lowman-aka "CanopyMeg"-takes us on an adventure into the "eighth continent" of the world's treetops, along her journey as a tree scientist, and into climate actionWelcome to the eighth continent!As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn't monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees. Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world's foremost arbornauts, known as the "real-life Lorax." She planned one of the first treetop walkways and helps create more of these bridges through the eighth continent all over the world. With a voice as infectious in its enthusiasm as it is practical in its optimism, The Arbornaut chronicles Lowman's irresistible story. From climbing solo hundreds of feet into the air in Australia's rainforests to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States, from searching the redwoods of the Pacific coast for new life to studying leaf eaters in Scotland's Highlands, from conducting a BioBlitz in Malaysia to conservation planning in India and collaborating with priests to save Ethiopia's last forests, Lowman launches us into the life and work of a field scientist, ecologist, and conservationist. She offers hope, specific plans, and recommendations for action; despite devastation across the world, through trees, we can still make an immediate and lasting impact against climate change. A blend of memoir and fieldwork account, The Arbornaut gives us the chance to live among scientists and travel the world-even in a hot-air balloon! It is the engrossing, uplifting story of a nerdy tree climber-the only girl at the science fair-who becomes a giant inspiration, a groundbreaking, ground-defying field biologist, and a hero for trees everywhere.Includes black-and-white illustrations

"This is a book for everyone who has developed an unexpected nostalgia for political 'norms' during the Trump years . . . Other books on the Trump White House expertly detail the mayhem inside; this book builds on those works to detail its consequences." -Carlos Lozada (one of twelve books to read "to understand what's going on")"Perhaps the most penetrating book to have been written about Trump in office." -Lawrence Douglas, The Times Literary SupplementThe definitive account of how Donald Trump has wielded the powers of the American presidencyThe extraordinary authority of the U.S. presidency has no parallel in the democratic world. Today that authority resides in the hands of one man, Donald J. Trump. But rarely if ever has the nature of a president clashed more profoundly with the nature of the office. Unmaking the Presidency tells the story of the confrontation between a person and the institution he almost wholly embodies.From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of the presidency. But what are those expectations, where did they come from, and how great is the damage? As editors of the "invaluable" (The New York Times) Lawfare website, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes have attracted a large audience to their hard-hitting and highly informed commentary on the controversies surrounding the Trump administration. In this book, they situate Trump-era scandals and outrages in the deeper context of the presidency itself. How should we understand the oath of office when it is taken by a man who may not know what it means to preserve, protect, and defend something other than himself? What aspects of Trump are radically different from past presidents and what aspects have historical antecedents? When has he simply built on his predecessors' misdeeds, and when has he invented categories of misrule entirely his own? By setting Trump in the light of history, Hennessey and Wittes provide a crucial and durable account of a presidency like no other.

TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITIONWINNER OF THE GREEN PRIZE FOR SUSTAINABLE LITERATUREUpdated with 100+ pages of new material and a foreword by Janette Sadik-KhanThe bestselling urban planning book of the past decade, translated into seven languages, Walkable City has changed the conversation on community design across America and beyond. It is reissued here with an extensive update, including eight new chapters covering housing equity, COVID, Uber, autonomous vehicles, urban forests, and more.Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability.Making downtown into a walkable, viable community is the essential fix for the typical American city; it is eminently achievable and its benefits are manifold. Walkable City-bursting with sharp observations and key insights into how urban change happens-lays out a practical, necessary, and inspiring vision for how to make American cities the best they can be.

Winner of the Nero Wolfe AwardIt is 1921 and Mary Russell--Sherlock Holmes's brilliant apprentice, now an Oxford graduate with a degree in theology--is on the verge of acquiring a sizable inheritance. Independent at last, with a passion for divinity and detective work, her most baffling mystery may now involve Holmes and the burgeoning of a deeper affection between herself and the retired detective. Russell's attentions turn to the New Temple of God and its leader, Margery Childe, a charismatic suffragette and a mystic, whose draw on the young theology scholar is irresistible. But when four bluestockings from the Temple turn up dead shortly after changing their wills, could sins of a capital nature be afoot? Holmes and Russell investigate, as their partnership takes a surprising turn in A Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King.

The third book in the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes series.It is 1923. Mary Russell Holmes and her husband, the retired Sherlock Holmes, are enjoying the summer together on their Sussex estate when they are visited by an old friend, Miss Dorothy Ruskin, an archaeologist just returned from Palestine. She leaves in their protection an ancient manuscript which seems to hint at the possibility that Mary Magdalene was an apostle-an artifact certain to stir up a storm of biblical proportions in the Christian establishment. When Ruskin is suddenly killed in a tragic accident, Russell and Holmes find themselves on the trail of a fiendishly clever murderer. A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King is brimming with political intrigue, theological arcana, and brilliant Holmesian deductions.

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearColette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. This is Hilary Mantel at her finest--insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read.

From a major voice in Southern literature comes award-winning author Ron Rash's Saints at the River, a novel about a town divided by the aftermath of a tragic accident--and the woman caught in the middle.When a twelve-year-old girl drowns in the Tamassee River and her body is trapped in a deep eddy, the people of the small South Carolina town that bears the river's name are thrown into the national spotlight. The girl's parents want to attempt a rescue of the body; environmentalists are convinced the rescue operation will cause permanent damage to the river and set a dangerous precedent. Torn between the two sides is Maggie Glenn, a twenty-eight-year-old newspaper photographer who grew up in the town and has been sent to document the incident. Since leaving home almost ten years ago, Maggie has done her best to avoid her father, but now, as the town's conflict opens old wounds, she finds herself revisiting the past she's fought so hard to leave behind. Meanwhile, the reporter who's accompanied her to cover the story turns out to have a painful past of his own, and one that might stand in the way of their romance.Drawing on the same lyrical prose and strong sense of place that distinguished his award-winning first novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has written a book about the deepest human themes: the love of the land, the hold of the dead on the living, and the need to dive beneath the surface to arrive at a deeper truth. Saints at the River confirms the arrival of one of today's most gifted storytellers.

From the author of Songdogs, a magnificent work of imagination and history set in the tunnels of New York City.In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Above ground, the sandhogs--black, white, Irish, Italian--keep their distance from each other until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow diggers--a bond that will bless and curse the next three generations. Years later, Treefrog, a homeless man driven below by a shameful secret, endures a punishing winter in his subway nest. In tones ranging from bleak to disturbingly funny, Treefrog recounts his strategies of survival--killing rats, scavenging for discarded soda cans, washing in the snow. Between Nathan Walker and Treefrog stretch seventy years of ill-fated loves and unintended crimes. In a triumph of plotting, the two stories fuse to form a tale of family, race, and redemption that is as bold and fabulous as New York City itself. In This Side of Brightness, Colum McCann confirms his place in the front ranks of modern writers.