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Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism#1 Book of the Year from Brain PickingsNamed a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit HubA dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring.When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her midthirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.

Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf. Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan DidionΓÇÖs first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the ΓÇ£best prose written in this country.ΓÇ¥More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan DidionΓÇÖs focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San FranciscoΓÇÖs Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: ΓÇ£[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.ΓÇ¥

Eye-opening and compelling, the overlooked world of freight shipping, revealed as the foundation of our civilization On ship-tracking Web sites, the waters are black with dots. Each dot is a ship; each ship is laden with boxes; each box is laden with goods. In postindustrial economies, we no longer produce but buy, and so we must ship. Without shipping there would be no clothes, food, paper, or fuel. Without all those dots, the world would not work. Yet freight shipping is all but invisible. Away from public scrutiny, it revels in suspect practices, dubious operators, and a shady system of "flags of convenience." And then there are the pirates.Rose George, acclaimed chronicler of what we would rather ignore, sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore on ships the length of football fields and the height of Niagara Falls; she patrols the Indian Ocean with an anti-piracy task force; she joins seafaring chaplains, and investigates the harm that ships inflict on endangered whales. Sharply informative and entertaining, Ninety Percent of Everything reveals the workings and perils of an unseen world that holds the key to our economy, our environment, and our very civilization.

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vox and AutostraddleMaking a much-anticipated return to the world of Hild, Nicola Griffith's Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change. Hild is no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking's court with her seemingly supernatural insight. She is eighteen, honed and tested, the formidable lady of Elmet, now building her personal stronghold in the valley of Menewood.But old alliances are fraying. Younger rivals are snapping at Edwin's heels. War is brewing-bitter war, winter war. Not knowing whom to trust, Edwin becomes volatile and recalls his young advisor to court. There Hild begins to understand the true extent of the chaos ahead-and realizes she must find a way to navigate the turbulence and fight to protect both the kingdom and her own people.She will face the losses and devastation of total war, and then must summon the determination to forge a radically different path for herself and her people. In the valley, her last redoubt, Hild draws strength from the fierce joy she finds in the natural world, as, slowly, her community takes root. She trains herself and her unexpected allies in new ways of thinking, learning what it means to gather and wield true power. And she prepares for one last wager: risking all on a single throw for a better future.In the last decade, Hild has become a beloved classic of epic storytelling. Menewood exceeds it in every way.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature AwardNamed a Best Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus ReviewsA new collection-about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life-by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces-death, violence, estrangement-come to light. Even before such moments, everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen. Yiyun Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and her memoir, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and other publications. Taken together, these stories, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living-exile, assimilation, loss, love-with Li's trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.

Christian Wiman braids poetry, memoir, and criticism to create an inspired, career-defining work. Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer-perhaps none-do so with his urgency and eloquence. Wiman, an award-winning poet and the author of My Bright Abyss, lays the motion of his mind on the page in this genre-defying work, an indivisible blend of poetry, criticism, theology, and searing memoir. As Marilynne Robinson wrote, "[Wiman's] poetry and his scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world . . . [It] enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader's surprise and assent are one and the same."Zero at the Bone begins with Wiman's preoccupation with despair, and through fifty brief pieces, he unravels its seductive appeal. The book is studded with the poetry and prose of writers who inhabit Wiman's thoughts, and the voices of Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and others join his own. At its heart and Wiman's, however, are his family-his young children (who ask their own invaluable questions, like "Why are you a poet? I mean why?"), his wife, and those he grew up with in West Texas. Wiman is the rare thinker who takes on the mantle of our greatest mystics and does so with an honest, profound, and contemporary sensibility. Zero at the Bone is a revelation.

"A novel following a priest and a literary critic through Chile's 1973 coup d'etat and consequent military dictatorship"--

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers."When telling one's life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself," Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details, the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling.Taking his firmly embedded memories-the "shimmering details" that give this work its title-as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings-all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. To avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too-moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light.In Shimmering Details, Volume I, Nádas probes the history of his family from the late nineteenth century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.

An Economist Best Book of 2023 | One of The New York Times' 33 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall | Named a most anticipated fall book by the Chicago Tribune and Bloomberg | Finalist for the 2024 Hayek Book Prize"Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, there's a lot to learn from this book. More than a biography of one controversial person, it's an intellectual history of twentieth-century economic thought." -Greg Rosalesky, NPR's Planet Money The first full biography of America's most renowned economist.Milton Friedman was, alongside John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His work was instrumental in the turn toward free markets that defined the 1980s, and his full-throated defenses of capitalism and freedom resonated with audiences around the world. It's no wonder the last decades of the twentieth century have been called "the Age of Friedman"-or that analysts have sought to hold him responsible for both the rising prosperity and the social ills of recent times.In Milton Friedman, the first full biography to employ archival sources, the historian Jennifer Burns tells Friedman's extraordinary story with the nuance it deserves. She provides lucid and lively context for his groundbreaking work on everything from why dentists earn less than doctors, to the vital importance of the money supply, to inflation and the limits of government planning and stimulus. She traces Friedman's long-standing collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz; his complex relationships with powerful figures such as the Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns and the Treasury secretary George Shultz; and his direct interventions in policymaking at the highest levels. Most of all, Burns explores Friedman's key role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism. The result is a revelatory biography of America's first neoliberal-and perhaps its last great conservative.

The never-thought-we'd-see-it memoir from the legendary Sly Stone.Sly Stone created some of the most memorable anthems of the 1960s and 1970s ("Everyday People," "Family Affair"). He electrified audiences at Woodstock and all over the world. His influence on modern music and culture is indisputable. But after a rapid rise to superstardom, Sly spent decades in the gripsof addiction.Having finally achieved a lasting sobriety, he is finally ready and able to relate the ups and downs and ins and outs of his amazing life. The book moves from Sly's early career as a radio DJ and record producer through the dizzying heights of the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s and into the darker, denser life (and music) of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles.Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a vivid, gripping, sometimes terrifying, and ultimately affirming tour through Sly's life and career. Like Sly, it's honest and playful, sharp and blunt, emotional and analytical, always moving and never standing still.

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The New YorkerThe Boy from Kyiv is the life story of Alexei Ratmansky, the most celebrated ballet choreographer of our time."A revelatory book about how [Ratmansky] evolved into the internationally sought-after choreographer of the moment . . . A must-read." - Martha Anne Toll, NPRAlexei Ratmansky is transforming ballet for the twenty-first century. An artist of daring imagination, the choreographer has created breathtakingly original works for the world's most revered companies. He has fashioned a singular approach to balletic storytelling that bridges the space between narrative and abstraction and heightens ambiguity and surprise on the stage. He has boldly restored great centuries-old ballets to their former glory, combining archival research with his own choreographic genius to retrieve detail and color once lost to the ages. And above all, he is renowned for fusing the Western and Eastern ballet traditions, and for drawing on the visual arts, literature, music, film, and beyond with inspired vim, to forge a style that is vibrant, eclectic, and utterly new: one that promises to leave an indelible mark on this venerable art form.But before Ratmansky was the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, the resident choreographer at American Ballet Theatre, the artist in residence at New York City Ballet, and generally, as The New Yorker has it, "the most sought-after man in ballet," he was just a boy from Kyiv, sneaking into the ballet at night, concocting his own juvenile adaptations of novels and stories, and dreaming up new possibilities for bodies in motion.In The Boy from Kyiv, the first biography of this groundbreaking artist, the celebrated dance writer Marina Harss takes us behind the curtain to reveal Ratmansky's fascinating life, from his Soviet boyhood through his globe-spanning career. Over a decade in the making, this biography arrives at a pivotal moment in Ratmansky's journey, one that has seen him painfully and publicly break ties with Russia, the country in which he made his name, in solidarity with his native Ukraine, and take on a new challenge at the storied New York City Ballet. Told with the lyricism, drama, and verve that befit its subject, The Boy from Kyiv is a riveting account of this major artist's ascent to the peaks of his field, a mesmerizing study of creativity in action, and a triumphant testament to ballet's enduring vitality.

"The only Lou Reed bio you need to read." -The Washington PostA Rolling Stone best music book of 2023 | One of Pitchfork's ten best music books of 2023 | A Variety best music book of the year | A Kirkus Reviews best nonfiction book of 2023"There have been many biographies of Lou Reed, but Will Hermes has written the definitive life . . . He has brought to the assignment a sharp eye, a clear head, a lucid prose style, and a determination to let Lou be Lou, without judgment." -Lucy Sante, author of Low LifeThe most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.Since his death in 2013, Lou Reed's living presence has only grown. The great rock poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou Reed: The King of New York, Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed's life and legacy, dramatizing his long, brilliant, and contentious dialogue with fans, critics, fellow artists, and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed's complex partnerships with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson; track the deadpan wit, street-smart edge, and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground and beyond; and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage that he took from his mentor the poet Delmore Schwartz. As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats to the eminent status he later achieved, he also tells the story of New York City as a cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library's much-publicized Reed archive, Hermes employs the library collections, the release of previously unheard recordings, and a wealth of recent interviews with Reed's contemporaries to give us a new Lou Reed-a pioneer in writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures.

A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle AwardWinner of the Women's Prize for NonfictionNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | National Indie BestsellerA New York Times notable book of 2023 | Vulture's #1 book of 2023One of Slate's ten best books of 2023 | A Guardian best ideas book of 2023 | One of Time's ten best books of 2023 | Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award"I've been raving about Naomi Klein's Doppelganger . . . I can't think of another text that better captures the berserk period we're living through." -Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times"If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one." -Katie Roiphe, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self-a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against?Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience-she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us-and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now-and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

"Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar-winning film of the same name and the eight-part Disney+ miniseries.Reissued for today's reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast and an introduction by the New York Times bestselling author Robin Sloan.What does it take to be an astronaut?First published in 1979, Tom Wolfe's astounding book The Right Stuff answers this question and more, exploring both the mental and the physical sacrifices that must be made by individuals entering space. Wolfe tells the stories of the pilots, engineers, and astronauts involved in Project Mercury (1958-1963), the United States' first human spaceflight program.A breathtaking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the heroism and courage of the first American astronauts to conquer space, The Right Stuff is a true American classic.

A startlingly beautiful novel about marriage by "one of our most scouringly vivid writers" (The New York Times Book Review).In See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid's brilliant and evocative novel, a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters-a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England-as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, "the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then." Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear.See Now Then is Kincaid's attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.Over the past forty years of her career, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling-creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers.In Shimmering Details, Volume II, Péter Nádas delves deeper into his and his parents' lives during the tumultuous years spanning the rise of Hungarian communism in 1948 to the brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising. Zeroing in on this critical period-which overlapped with the formative years of his childhood-Nádas concludes his monumental history of a family whose own experiences and fortunes are deeply intertwined with two centuries of Hungarian history.This second volume is a composite portrait of life lived at the nexus of world-historical forces-a jewel-like study that holds up different facets of the human experience to the light of Nádas's singular prose style. What emerges is a memoir of unusual insight and exceptional power. Hailed by Deborah Eisenberg as an "extraordinary writer," Nádas has confirmed his place among Europe's greatest living authors.

The boldly original, dramatic intertwined story of Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scots-three queens exercising power in a world dominated by men.Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de' Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to the French king, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the French throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later, Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary Queen of Scots, who would later become her daughter-in-law.Together, Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary lived through the sea changes that transformed sixteenth-century Europe, a time of expanding empires, religious discord, and populist revolt, as concepts of nationhood began to emerge and ideas of sovereignty inched closer to absolutism. They would learn that to rule as a queen was to wage a constant war against the deeply entrenched misogyny of their time.Following the intertwined stories of the three women from girlhood through young adulthood, Leah Redmond Chang's Young Queens paints a picture of a world in which a woman could wield power at the highest level yet remain at the mercy of the state, her body serving as the currency of empire and dynasty, sacrificed to the will of husband, family, kingdom.

The history of NOW-its organization, trials, and revolutionary mission-told through the work of three members.In the summer of 1966, crammed into a D.C. hotel suite, twenty-eight women devised a revolutionary plan. Betty Friedan, the well-known author of The Feminine Mystique, and Pauli Murray, a lawyer at the front lines of the civil rights movement, had called this renegade meeting from attendees at the annual conference of state women's commissions. Fed up with waiting for government action and trying to work with a broken system, they laid out a vision for an organization to unite all women and fight for their rights. Alternately skeptical and energized, they debated the idea late into the night. In less than twenty-four hours, the National Organization for Women was born.In The Women of NOW, the historian Katherine Turk chronicles the growth and enduring influence of this foundational group through three lesser-known members who became leaders: Aileen Hernandez, a federal official of Jamaican American heritage; Mary Jean Collins, a working-class union organizer and Chicago Catholic; and Patricia Hill Burnett, a Michigan Republican, artist, and former beauty queen. From its bold inception through the tumultuous training ground of the 1970s, NOW's feminism flooded the nation, permanently shifted American culture and politics, and clashed with conservative forces, presaging our fractured national landscape. These women built an organization that was radical in its time but flexible and expansive enough to become a mainstream fixture. This is the story of how they built it-and built it to last.Includes 16 pages of black-and-white images

An enthralling and original first novel about exile, diaspora, and the impossibility of Black refuge in America and beyond.In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn't recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone recognizes him, a man who calls him brother-setting him on a quest to find his real brother, who is dying.In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of that search, and of the phantoms, guides, tricksters, bureaucrats, debtors, taxi drivers, relatives, and riddles that will lead to the truth.This is an uncommonly assured debut: an existential journey; a tragic farce; a slapstick tragedy; and a strange, and strangely honest, story of one man's stubborn quest to find refuge-in this world and in the world that lies beyond it.

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.In Our Migrant Souls, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now."Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States, and also one of the most rapidly growing. Composed as a direct address to the young people who identify or have been classified as "Latino," Our Migrant Souls is the first account of the historical and social forces that define Latino identity.Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, and pop culture, Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and gives voice to the anger and the hopes of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes and who have faced insult and division-a story as old as this country itself.Tobar translates his experience as not only a journalist and novelist but also a mentor, a leader, and an educator. He interweaves his own story, and that of his parents' migration to the United States from Guatemala, into his account of his journey across the country to uncover something expansive, inspiring, true, and alive about the meaning of "Latino" in the twenty-first century.

"This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other." -NewsweekTom Wolfe raised the banner for his high-octane brand of New Journalism with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, his first book of essays, which collects stories from corners of 1960s America that few had described before. With a thrilling flair for detail, Wolfe creates an indelible portrait of the era-from the burgeoning ersatz glamor of Las Vegas, to the hot-rodding world of car customizers, to a close-up look at the working lives of New York City doormen.These essays are a testament to Wolfe's unparalleled ability to capture the zeitgeist on the page, bringing it to life with colorful and unusual characters and an inimitable ear for a new kind of American idiom. The force and depth of his writing endures even sixty years after his debut, reaffirming, yet again, his role as a foundational figure in the development of a truly American school of language and journalism.