Many Americans today are frustrated, unsettled, or just plain perplexed about the rules governing our democracy and who gets make them. Concern about rigged systems, confusion about the Electoral College, and uncertainty about who's in charge of it all...

Book by Weiss, Theodore

Ch. 6 (pp. 214-245), "Nationalism and National Identity, " contains a short survey (pp. 231-233) of the image of the Jews, among other minorities, in popular Russian literature. The Jews are mostly depicted as negative characters. Their image is often...

Every day in the United States, an average of three people are killed by police officers. Black and Indigenous victims are disproportionately represented, and their stories are too often distorted by courts and media to justify their deaths and exonerate...

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry "During the halcyon days of the Abstract Expressionist and Imaginative Realism movements, Frank O'Hara was the laureate of the New York art scene."--New York Times The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara,...

Our ideas about Confucius come from the stories told about him. He often appears as the great sage of ancient China, handing down timeless moral precepts to his disciples and to posterity. Yet over the course of twenty-five centuries, Confucius has meant...

Jürgen Habermas is Germany’s most important postwar philosopher, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School in this period. He is best known for the concept of the public sphere, which forms the basis of his communicative understanding of democratic...

"Most American music grew out of the Great Migration, the movement of millions of African Americans from the South to the North between the world wars. This physical movement and the subsequent cultural developments resulted in the emergence of the...

The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. Exiled, she is unable to write there and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair, but then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a...

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together, they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation into a prewar market rife with other first-generation American Jewish toymakers: the Hassenfield...

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social-justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate-concerned. Ever since wage labor in cities replaced...

A fresh, deeply biblical account of God's expanding grace and mercy, tracing how the Bible's narrative points to the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in Christian communities "A radical new vision . . . and [an] argument that God's plan was always to...

Alice, the German writer Judith Hermann’s 2009 short-story collection, was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.When someone very close to you dies, your whole life changes. Everything is different. Alice is the central figure in these...

"Diana, Justin, Vivian, and Errol have been friends for as long as they can remember. They worked hard and went to good schools, but rather than finding post-grad dream jobs, they've reunited while moving back into their childhood bedrooms. A year out of...

A look at the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the plant specimens the great explorers gathered on their way—and of their amazing afterlife. Elizabeth Adelman's Chasing the Missing Monkeyflower is the two hundred-year saga of finding, losing, and finding...

Mollusks’ innermost selves are absolute secrets because, not only do they hide in shells or distant habitats, but also that’s just how it is with innermost selves.Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s reminiscences, dreams,...

A masterful short story collection in which Martin Amis wields his sharp wit and dark humor to unravel the complexities of desire, loneliness, and mankind’s place in the universe.Heavy Water is a masterful and haunting collection from Martin Amis, where...

Braiding together biography and criticism, Adam Plunkett challenges our understanding of Robert Frost’s life and poetic legacy in a pathbreaking new work.By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our...