A lively compendium of musical practices and compositions that upend notions of creativity and expressivity while diversifying our sense of the musical canon. An artist draws two octaves of pitches randomly from a hat, just enough to set each syllable...

The often-forgotten global story of how the Confederacy lost its bid for sovereign nationhood In 1861, proslavery secessionists severed ties with the United States, launched the Confederacy, and readied their new government to join the international...

A new history of slavery and the French RevolutionThe First Emancipation is a dramatic account of how slavery and race profoundly influenced the course of the French Revolution and had a central impact on the lives of key leaders, including Mirabeau,...

A monumental cartographic history of the African slave trade, updated and expanded in a new edition In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave...

For thirty years Anne Enright--one of our greatest living novelists (Times)--has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and drawing us into her precise insights. These essays,...

Life isn't easy for a Parisian rat. But Gouri is getting by: with his best friend Rakä, he's got a small business selling worms to pigeons, a cozy bachelor nest at the local florist, an--as spring blooms in the City of Lights--a budding love interest...

Tour every major campaign of the American War of Independence with the first travel guide to survey every theater: New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, Canada, and the western frontier. Itineraries lay out how best to visit the 476 battlefields,...

Hello, and welcome to Planet Money! Millions of listeners trust the world's leading economics podcast to explain the mysterious inner workings of the global economy and the forces that affect nearly every decision we make. Through expert research and...

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman's Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only...

One spring day in 1683, a notary's clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled on one of the wonders of the seventeenth-century world: twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. How had this one Dutchwoman come to...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Goodreads Choice Award Winner in History & Biography One of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 "A spirited defense of this important, odd and odds-defying American retail category." —The New York Times "It is a delight to...

From award-winning author Nora Lange comes a ransacking of the house of motherhood and matrimony.Nora Lange’s debut novel, Us Fools, was praised as the “Great American Novel” by Molly Young in The New York Times, and “a razor-sharp critique of American...

Fresh out of college in New England, a young woman returns home to New Orleans and is quickly pulled back into the city’s “wastrel-youth contingent” in this cult-classic novel of love and decadence, now with a new introduction.Nancy Lemann’s voice is one...

From the bestselling, prize-winning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the...

From the author of the cult classic Lives of the Saints, a diaristic novel of middle-aged reckoning that roves from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, from court records to Don Giovanni, all of it riotously narrated by one of American fiction’s most...

The best in short fiction from around the world, from celebrated anthologist and author John Freeman and award-winning novelist Rabih AlameddineIn The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages, and...

“The Witch is Marie NDiaye at her most dazzling.In this simple, startlingly powerful novel, NDiaye lays outher central themes: familial secrets, power, shame, andliberation. NDiaye is one of the greats—her novels aremesmerizing, wholly singular,...

A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must...

REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK"This story left me thinking about the ways we overcome setbacks and redefine what truly matters." - Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club December '24 Pick)A once-famous ballerina faces a final choice—to return to the world of...

An Instant New York Times Bestseller! A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating memoir of a woman making her way through the food world, navigating addiction, a cultural reckoning, and an unexpected tragedy In this moving, hilarious, and insightful...