An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.Over the course of the 18th century, Christianity began to loosen its grip on the story of...

A celebration of the beguiling power of literature, from one of the world's greatest storytellers At the Pigeon Book Club, a circle of readers joins in exhilarating meetings to discuss literature. The only requirements for entry are an...

From the author of Mercury and Shiner comes a novel about the bond between two female folk singers, the love stories that haunt them, and the music that brings them together to burn bright. Young folk singer Elle Harlow reaches the height of her prowess...

Playwright August Wilson is best known for his American Century Cycle, a sequence of ten plays--including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson--that chronicle the lives of Black Americans in each decade of the twentieth century. But...

A publication that examines medieval art and European modernism together. Modernism is often described as a fundamental break with tradition. Yet precisely as art was being redefined around 1900, a deliberate backward glance at the late Middle Ages...

In We're Having Much More Fun Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnaney celebrate the ways punks have built and documented their own misfit collectives since the mid-1970s, assembling alternative worlds of riotous music, art, fashion, and writing. This book...

Although Spain was never a formal ally of the United States during the American Revolution, its entry into the war definitively tipped the balance against Britain. Led by Bernardo de Gálvez, supreme commander of the Spanish forces in North America, their...

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...

In this major new history of the Continental Army's Grand Forage of 1778, award-winning military historian Ricardo A. Herrera uncovers what daily life was like for soldiers during the darkest and coldest days of the American Revolution: the Valley Forge...

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,...

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a bloody escalation of a conflict that had begun eight years earlier. What drove Vladimir Putin to launch Europe's largest land war since World War II? Lucian Kim--an on-the-ground reporter in the region for...

"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...

The true story of Daniel Defoe and the dirty tricks which helped bring Scotland into union with England In 1706, Edinburgh was on the brink of a popular uprising. Men and women took to the streets to protest the planned union with England, fearing the...

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 revelatory account of sexual nonconformity and radical religious dissent in Renaissance Italy, drawing on never-before-studied Inquisition trials. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a series of highly controversial Inquisition trials took...

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...

From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life. In Traversal, her startling and moving new book, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry...