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The Great Global Transformation

"In The Great Global Transformation, acclaimed economist Branko Milanovic draws on original research to chart how these seismic shifts will shape the next century of the global economy. As both the US and China retreat into protectionism, Milanovic shows how a new and multipolar world order will follow--and how rising nationalism will have dramatically different effects on the two countries. And he shows us the fight ahead: as plutocracy returns, global war threatens, and a new system silently shapes our nations, driving populist discontent to the breaking point. A worthy successor to Capitalism, Alone and his other landmark works, Milanovic's new book announces the arrival of a new era he terms "national market liberalism," in which liberalism survives in domestic economies, but not necessarily in the social arena. The Great Global Transformation is Milanovic's indispensable account of the new twenty-first century now underway. "-- From De Gruyter Brill

One Bad Mother

"We all have an idea what it means to be a good mom: little screen time, kids hitting their milestones, endless patience and understanding, and self-sacrifice on behalf of one's children. But what does it mean to be a "bad mom" in modern society? Women as wide-ranging as Meghan Markle, Hannah Neelman (of Ballerina Farm), and anyone giving birth over forty, have been labeled "bad moms." In a world where the rules are constantly changing, it feels like women simply cannot win. With this in mind, in her first book, Ej Dickson takes a sharp, provocative look at one of society's most polarizing labels: the "bad mom." What makes a mother "bad," and why? Through the lens of pop culture and American history, Ej Dickson explores how this trope has evolved--from Victorian "angels in the house" to the infamous Mommie Dearest, from Instagram influencers like EmRata and Mormon momfluencers to fictional icons like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Each chapter dives into a different archetype of so-called bad motherhood--like the Stage Mom, the Tiger Mom, the MILF, the MLM hun--challenging us to rethink our assumptions about femininity, parenting, and societal expectations. Drawing on insightful analysis and interviews, Dickson unpacks why our culture is obsessed with vilifying moms and how issues of race and class shape these narratives. Are bad moms truly "bad," or do they simply defy norms we don't fully understand--or fear?"-- Provided by publisher

Volga Blues

In this work of reported nonfiction, an Italian journalist travels undercover along the Volga River to document contemporary Russian society following the invasion of Ukraine and restrictions on foreign media. Framed as a historical and cultural journey, the narrative combines travel reporting, interviews, and analysis informed by Russian history and literature. Through conversations with a wide range of individuals, the author examines public attitudes toward war, nationalism, religion, and relations with the West, as well as perceptions of Russia's past and future. The book situates present-day Russia within longer historical, ideological, and cultural contexts and includes a map and black-and-white photographs.

Superfan

"Freshman Minnie is adrift at college in Austin, Texas, when she discovers a boy band called HOURglass and the online forums that worship them. She especially loves Halo, whose sharp edges feel somehow familiar. After a brief romance goes painfully awry, Minnie pours everything into her new fandom, clinging to each livestream and bonding with other fans online. But when a scandal threatens to expose Halo to harm, Minnie decides that she is the only one who can save him. Except Halo's secret is darker than anything the tabloids could imagine. Before he was a superstar heartthrob, he was Eason: a high school dropout haunted by a tragic accident. When he is recruited for HOURglass, it feels like a chance to become someone else. And when he is onstage in front of his fans, he can almost forget the horrors of his past--until one of those very fans threatens to destroy everything. Dazzling, entrancing, and deeply heartfelt, Superfan is about fandom in all its magic and its terror, and the extreme lengths to which we go to rid ourselves of loneliness."-- Provided by publisher

The School of Night

"Kristian Hadeland, young and ambitious, has moved to London to study photography; he knows that he and his art are destined for more. His family never understood him, and his fellow photography students bore him. But when he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist, the future he yearns for becomes possible—as long as he is willing to sacrifice everything and stop at nothing. Twenty-four years later, Kristian sees his dreams come to fruition when a major retrospective of his work is held in New York City. As his past catches up to him, Kristian’s world begins to crumble. Success comes at a price, but is he prepared to pay it? In a thrilling twist on Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Karl Ove Knausgaard masterfully spins a cautionary tale about the lengths that we will go to achieve success—and how far we are willing to fall. His most daring and macabre novel yet, The School of Night is an indelible tale about dark temptations and moral depravity, and what we forget when we bargain with the devil." -- Amazon

The Reckoning

"California, Southern Humboldt County, 1985. Renata Drake steps off a Greyhound bus and into small-town Garberville, hoping to disappear. She checks the papers. She's not headline news. Not yet. But she's made a mistake. The FBI have the cannabis-producing "Emerald Triangle" town-- and its corrupt residents--in their sights. Even worse, a teenage girl is missing, and when she turns up dead, the third in three years, it's clear a serial killer is living among them. Renata knows about murdered girls and the burning desire for justice--and for revenge. Her younger sister Josie is gone, and now, so is the man who killed her. Renata didn't stay in Washington, D.C. to be arrested for executing a murderer, and she shouldn't stay here either. But Renata decides to investigate, and what she uncovers will trigger a final reckoning: For herself, for a killer, and for all of Southern Humboldt." -- Page 2 of cover

The Mixed Marriage Project

Dorothy Roberts grew up in a deeply segregated Chicago of the 1960s where relationships barely crossed the "color line." Yet inside her own home, where her father was white and her mother a Black Jamaican immigrant, interracial marriage wasn't just a part of her upbringing, it was a shared mission. Her father, an anthropologist, spent her entire childhood working on a book about Black-white marriages--a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life. As a 21-year-old graduate student, Dorothy's father dedicated himself to the study of interracial marriage and her mother soon became his full-time partner in that work. Together over the years they interviewed over 500 couples and assembled stunning stories about interracial marriages that took place as early as the 1880s--studying, but also living, championing, and believing in their power to advance social equality. Decades later, while sorting through her father's papers, Roberts uncovers a truth that upends everything she thought she knew about her family: her father's research didn't begin with her parents' love story--it came long before it. This discovery forces her to wrestle with her father's intentions, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story. Rather than finish the book her father never published, Roberts immerses herself in their archive of interviews to trace the story of her parents and to better understand her own. Though grounded in her parents' research, it's Roberts' captivating storytelling that drives this memoir. In following the arc of her parents' interviews and marriage, The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today's most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love.

Life after Ambition

"Channeling the subversive and sharp-eyed voice showcased in her popular column for The Cut, this memoir stylishly interrogates the aspirations of young adulthood, early middle age, motherhood and life after ambition-- for readers of Ada Calhoun, Jia Tolentino, Jessi Klein, and Maggie Smith. Building off her wildly popular viral essays "Losing My Ambition" and "The Mindfuck of Mid-Life," rising star Amil Niazi explores what life looks like "post-ambition." With sly humor and a deep literary sensibility, she interrogates her own evolving ambitions, and how they intersect with adulthood, motherhood, age, identity, class, and race, and how it has shaped her and a generation of Millennials. And, most importantly, now that she is "done with ambition"--what happens next? Life After Ambition is an achingly relatable, intensely funny punch to the gut which reveals that, though we hide them from one another, we all have the same painful bruises. Niazi has written a book that is, at its core, about optimism, about the joy of choosing something different, and about the thrill of finding ourselves when we thought all was lost. A whip-smart reimagination of how to live our lives, Life After Ambition will set the stage for rising star Amil Niazi for many years (and books) to come." -- Provided by publisher

Just Watch Me

Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister--a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption. Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She's behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she's being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy. Dell is her stream's dungeon master, banishing those who don't abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform's ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something--but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means. Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell's livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this charismatic misfit with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg's debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.

Jean

"Set over one hot summer, a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole. Seventeen-year-old Jean, a troubled Jewish boy caught in the countercultural swirl of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, a rural alternative boarding school for boys with "problems." Dyslexic, antisocial, and prone to violent outbursts, Jean has never made friends easily and school has never been a place of safety or enjoyment. Compton Manor is his last chance, but even here, despite the unconventional teaching methods, Jean is marked by difference. The other boys are fee-paying, while Jean is on a grant; they have good, English families, while Jean's mother, Rosa, is a German-Jewish refugee and his father is an absent memory. Having broken the rules several times, Jean is on thin ice. But there is only one summer to get through and then Jean will pass his exams and get out. All of a sudden, he is befriended by Tom--confident, charming, buoyed by years of good breeding and privilege--and it seems as if Jean's world might change. When things turn romantic, Jean is tipped into a heady, overwhelming infatuation. Now Jean skips class to venture into the woods, or sneaks across moonlit fields to see Tom, wondering whether the relationship might offer a way out of a life marked by alienation. But what if the only true path to freedom is to disappear altogether. Spellbinding and evocative, Jean is a meditative narrative of loss and escape distilled into the heartrending story of an intense and dangerous adolescent love." --Dust jacket

Island at the Edge of the World

"A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archeological scholar Mike Pitts--a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island's collapse."-- Amazon.com

Girls Play Dead

This work combines memoir, reportage, and cultural analysis to examine how fear and trauma influence responses to sexual violence. Drawing on personal experience, family history, and interviews with survivors, Jen Percy explores behavioral and psychological reactions to assault, as well as societal misconceptions surrounding these responses. The book analyzes how trauma affects memory and narrative, the ways institutions interpret survivors' accounts, and the broader cultural frameworks that shape understandings of violence, self-preservation, and healing.

Dizzy

"Rachel Weaver's DIZZY is a braided memoir of her time working in the backcountry of Alaska and her time in the medical world as a chronically ill patient with a mysterious illness. As a young woman, the stunning loss of Rachel's father sent her seeking the edges of adventure working on boats and in the wildness of Alaska; a stress test of sorts to be ready for the next catastrophe by keeping catastrophe close. But it wasn't the bear who stuck his head into her tent, or the shipwreck in cold Canadian waters, or the waterspout four hundred miles out in the South Sargasso Sea that brought Rachel to her knees. It was clinicians in clean white coats and an undefinable, debilitating illness. Over the course of eighteen years, Rachel would see over forty medical practitioners, face hostility and indifference, be accused of making it all up, go broke, wonder if she really was making it all up, and be subjected to endless drugs and invasive procedures in her search to learn the truth about her body. A medical mystery and a cautionary tale about our broken-down system, DIZZY is a story about perseverance in pursuit of answers, of learning to live with life's uncertainty, and the struggle to find joy in an imperfect but beautiful world." -- Provided by publisher

Crux

"In this story of intense friendship and grit, two down-and-out teens escape the hopelessness of their lives and chase a different future through rock climbing."-- Provided by publisher

The Copywriter

A portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.

Wildwood

"Deputy Sheriff Eli North has spent the last year getting his life back together. He hasn't touched a drop of alcohol, he's working through his PTSD from his military deployment, and he's repairing hismost important relationships. When an undercover informant disappears and all signs point to murder, Eli must expose the dark underbelly of his idyllic Wisconsin small town while safeguarding his newfound stability. Then, with the unexpected arrival of FBI Agent Alyssa Mason, Eli and his mother, the sheriff, are pulled deeper into a violent criminal network built on the backs of the lost and forgotten. As the case deepens, loyalties fracture and the line between justice and survival begins to blur. In a town where everyone has something to hide, exposing the truth may cost them everything." -- Provided by publisher

The Spy in the Archive

"How do you steal a library? Not just any library but the most secret, heavily guarded archive in the world. The answer is to be a librarian. To be so quiet, that no-one knows what you are up to as you toil undercover and deep amongst the files. The work goes on for decades but remains so low key, that even after your escape, aided by MI6, no-one even notices you are gone. 'The Spy in the Archive' tells the remarkable story of how Vasili Mitrokhin - an introverted archivist who loved nothing more than dusty files - ended up changing the world. As the in-house archivist for the KGB, the secrets he was exposed to inside its walls turned him first into a dissident and then a spy, a traitor to his country but a man determined to expose the truth about the dark forces that had subverted Russia, forces still at work in the country today." -- jacket flap

Hated by All the Right People

"From a seasoned political journalist, an eye-opening examination of Tucker Carlson's rise through conservative media and politics, and his ideological transformation over the past thirty years, tracking the concurrent shifts in the political and media landscapes which have both influenced and succumbed to the hyperpartisan politics of today. To many, Tucker Carlson is synonymous with modern conservative politics. Carlson has been present on our screens for almost three decades and is as infamous for his bow tie as he is for his increasingly extreme right-wing views. But those who knew Carlson in his earlier days in political journalism remember a very different man--a serious and gifted writer and commentator who enjoyed debating with liberal friends and calling out conservative failures in equal measure. Now after watching Carlson turn away from measured reporting, while simultaneously gaining unparalleled power in Donald Trump's Republican Party, most are left asking, What the hell happened to Tucker? New Yorker staff writer Jason Zengerle's rich and evocative character study of Carlson tells the story of how the former Fox News talking head rose through the ranks of conservative media, from his early days as a young writer at The Weekly Standard to his current perch as one of the most powerful voices in right-wing politics. Through deep reporting and a sweeping view of the political and media landscapes over the past thirty years, Zengerle reveals how Carlson's career offers a unique lens into the radical transformation of American conservatism and, just as importantly, the media that covers and ultimately shapes it. As conservative news outlets fight daily over who can report the most disreputable stories, and clicks and views take precedence over facts and substance, Carlson's evolution tells the larger story of how the right has radicalized and taken the media with it."-- Amazon

Gems and the New Science

"The first book-length history of gems in early modern science offers a thought-provoking new take on the Scientific Revolution. In Gems and the New Science, Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connected to major developments in the "new science" between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he explains, precious and semi-precious stones were at the center of dramatic shifts in natural knowledge in early modern Europe. They were used to investigate luminescence, electricity, combustion, chemical composition, and more. They were collected by naturalists, measured by mathematicians, and rubbed, burned, and dissolved by experimental philosophers. This led to the demise of the traditional way of classifying gems--which grouped them by transparency, color, and locality--and a turn to density, refraction, chemistry, and crystallography as more reliable guides for sorting these substances. The science of gems shows that material evaluation was as important as material production in the history of science. It also shows the value of seeing science as the product of the interaction between different material worlds. The book begins by bringing these insights to bear on five themes of the Scientific Revolution. Each of the subsequent chapters deals with a major episode in early modern science, from the expansion of natural history in the sixteenth century to the emergence of applied science early in the nineteenth century. This important work is not only the first book-length history of the science of gems but also a fresh interpretation of the Scientific Revolution and an argument for a new form of materialism about science." -- Provided by publisher

Eating Ashes

"An arrestingly beautiful, award-winning novel about separation, migration, and love left behind."-- Page 2 of cover

Catapult

"Catapult is the magical but true story of two men, a microscopic arts grant, and the siege weapon this volatile combination somehow produced. Jim Paul's charming narration and deadpan wit light up every page, which is why critics were rapturous when Catapult was first published in 199l. It remains a shrewd and timely riff on the nature of men and masculinity." -- back cover

Call Me Ishmaelle

"1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. Nearly twenty years later, as the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody male violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the white whale who claimed Seneca's leg. Built on the bones of Melville's classic, Call Me Ishmaelle is a dynamic new tale, imbued with a diverse, swashbuckling crew--from a Polynesian harpooner to a Taoist Monk-and a powerful exploration of human nature, gender, and the nature of home." -- Provided by publisher

Bonfire of the Murdochs

A narrative nonfiction account of the succession struggle within the Murdoch family and the leadership of their global media enterprises. Drawing on numerous interviews and source material, the book examines decisions by Rupert Murdoch regarding the disposition of his media holdings and the ensuing disputes among his children over control of the family's business interests. Coverage includes developments in media ownership, family dynamics, legal contests, and corporate governance within major news organizations.

Why We Drink Too Much

Explores why humans drink, how alcohol affects the brain and body, and why individuals differ in their responses to it. Drawing on neuroscience, genetics, environmental factors, and personal experience, the book explains both the pleasurable effects and health risks of alcohol, encouraging readers to better understand and reflect on their relationship with drinking.