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The Wreck of the Mentor

"The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026" An astonishing true story--one of the most gripping maritime sagas of the nineteenth century--told by our era's "expert literary steersman." (Washington Post)

Unvaccinated under God

"Vaccine hesitancy in America didn't begin with the uproar over the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw resistance to a wide variety of vaccines. In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer shows that debates over vaccine safety and mandatory vaccination were about more than diseases or injections. They have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality. Kieffer argues that vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression--not as the product of scientific misinformation." -- Publisher, inside front flap of dust jacket

The Man Who Read Everything

"A selection of the lively letters between one of the world's greatest literary critics and the poets, novelists, and scholars he most admired. Bringing together a collection of Harold Bloom's letters to and from eight of his favorite contemporary writers, Heather Cass White provides an intimate view of one of the most famous literary critics of the last century. In correspondence with Alvin Feinman, Northrop Frye, A. R. Ammons, John Hollander, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Henri Cole, and Ursula K. Le Guin, we see Bloom developing his groundbreaking theory of poetic influence, transforming himself into a public intellectual, and reckoning with the meaning of his own legacy. While Bloom's public persona was oracular, sure, and often combative, his letters are inquiring and provisional, revealing his overarching obsession with good writing. The presence of love, as the letters show, was always vital to how Bloom worked as a reader. Filled with delightful anecdotes and poignant observations, these letters -- many of them published here for the first time -- offer a new window onto twentieth-century letters and Bloom's long and illustrious career."-- Publisher's website

Lord of the Flies

The well-known plot: A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they explore the dazzling beaches, gorging fruit, seeking shelter, and ripping off their uniforms to swim in the lagoon. At night, in the darkness of the jungle, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, they must forge their own; but it isn't long before their innocent games devolve into a murderous hunt. William Golding's Lord of the Flies was originally published in 1954 and has been a canonical text on school syllabi and a familiar literary reference within the public's consciousness. For the first time this unforgettable classic has been given new life with Aimee de Jongh's graphic style and gorgeous color adaptation.

From Life Itself

"A political, social, and intellectual history of modern Turkey and the broader region, as told through the deeply textured story of one neighborhood in Istanbul." -- Provided by publisher

An Enigma by the Sea

"In an exclusive resort in a dark, threatening pine forest on the coast of Tuscany, the rich and famous are gathering at their second homes for Christmas. On the morning that a husband and wife from one of the heavily-guarded villas go missing, a certain Count Delaude is washed up, battered to death, on the seashore. The cast list promises intrigue from the beginning. The count, a sponger and a sham had arrived under cover of dark with a beautiful young woman scheming to be a top model. Two comedians seclude themselves as they try to overcome a writing block. The depressive Signor Monforte, a retired academic, tries to woo a beautiful divorcee, while another, a woman this time, prepares to leave her husband. Two elderly spinsters and their Filipina maid are aghast at the awful predictions of their Tarot pack. The local police is inept, so Monforte finds himself in the role of detective, and is triumphant"-- Provided by publisher

The End of the Sahara

"The story is set in 1988 Algeria. It takes place in just forty days, ending as mass protests erupt in the country. In a small town on the edge of the desert, plagued by a locust infestation and a food shortage, teetering on the brink of uprising, the body of Zakia Zaghouani--the singer at the Sahara Hotel--is discovered. Suspicion immediately falls on her lover, who is thrown into prison. The incompetent and greedy Inspector Hamid begins an investigation. So does the defense lawyer of the main suspect. Family, friends, and close ones give their testimonies, finding themselves confronted with their past. Secrets, betrayals, grudges, but also dreams and hopes shed light on their connection to the victim: each person harbors, for one reason or another, the desire to take revenge on her."-- Provided by publisher

The Children

"Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods. In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of her family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother's world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother's readers imagine: She and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they've made their playland. As Edith Sharpe's books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame -- until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith's series unfinished and her children the sole survivors. Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere's childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the past twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother's fantasy world?" -- Book jacket flap

Transcendence for Beginners

"A lyrical work of philosophy that draws from the work of Spinoza, George Eliot, biographers, memoirists, and more to examine how wisdom and goodness are transmitted by individual human lives. Transcendence for Beginners is an innovative book about philosophy and life writing, exploring how each practice might complement the other and so contribute to a greater understanding of human existence. In six short chapters, guided by a pantheon of exemplars drawn from European and Indian traditions as well as her own experience as a biographer and philosopher, Clare Carlisle examines how deep, genuine wisdom and goodness are transmitted by individual lives. Animated by the spirit of enquiry and the desire to share its rewards, Transcendence for Beginners is a generous, enlivening work by one of the UK's most original thinkers." -- Provided by publisher

The Sleepless Ape

"Despite sleep's critical role in maintaining health and cognitive function, humans sleep less than any other primate. The Sleepless Ape reveals the reasons for this evolutionary paradox, showing how our unique sleep patterns evolved when our ancestors left the safety of the forest canopy for more dangerous ground, which led them to form more secure, social sleeping arrangements. As a result, early humans developed shorter, deeper, and more flexible sleep patterns that provided survival advantages and freed more time for crucial activities such as toolmaking, social interaction, and migration. In this groundbreaking book, David Samson draws on his extensive fieldwork to explain how these sleep patterns contributed to our cognitive and social evolution. He delves into how the human brain adapted to achieve deeper, more restorative sleep, enabling advanced memory consolidation, fostering creativity, and contributing to our success as a species. Samson also addresses modern sleep challenges, demonstrating how an understanding of our evolutionary sleep heritage can help us to address sleep disorders and improve overall health and well-being. He tackles contentious issues such as co-sleeping, whether we should embrace paleo sleep or optimal sleep, and whether we are in fact suffering from an epidemic of too little sleep. Blending the latest science with engaging storytelling by a leading expert, The Sleepless Ape shares compelling insights into how a fundamental yet overlooked aspect of human biology has shaped our evolutionary trajectory and continues to profoundly influence our daily lives."--Jacket

Screen People

"From the popular and award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic, an eye-opening look at how the current media landscape has incentivized us to see our fellow citizens as characters in an ongoing entertainment-and how we can fight back against this phenomenon."-- Provided by publisher

Glorious Country

"From the author of American Eden--finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and more--comes a sweeping, richly researched biography of Frederic Church, the great 19th-century American artist whose stunning paintings of remote lands and seas thrilled American audiences and put the young republic on the map of world culture--published on Church's bicentennial." -- Amazon

The Young Will Remember

"It's the coldest Korean winter in decades, and twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American journalist Ellie Chang has hitched a ride on a military flight to cover a battle in the mountains of North Korea when her plane is shot down in enemy territory. The pilot is killed, but Ellie is saved from communist soldiers by a woman who insists Ellie is her missing daughter. Hwa-Ja, "Emma," knows deep in her bones that her daughter, who has been missing since WWII, lives, just as she knows that Ellie is not her. But Ellie is someone's daughter, and she won't watch her die. So she convinces her household to hide the girl. Imo, the matriarch of their home, has no patience for this American girl whose presence could mean the death of them all, but she's seen the rise and fall of power before and knows Ellie could be useful to them. Together--as the Chinese, American, and Korean troops clash, and bombs explode overhead--the women chase the constantly moving frontline south. Emma always searching, Imo haunted by the past, and Ellie keeping her identity hidden at all costs . . . even as her life becomes entangled with theirs. Moving and triumphant, The Young Will Remember sheds light on the Forgotten War and emphasizes the resilience of love within some of our darkest histories, the courage of women and girls, and the indefatigable determination of mothers in war."-- Provided by publisher

Wild People Quiet

"A taut, exquisitely rendered story exploring the repercussions of a woman's decision to hide her Métis identity while living in a small, predominantly white prairie town in the 1940s, for readers of The Berry Pickers, Tommy Orange, and The Vanishing Half. Torduvalle, Saskatchewan, 1946. Florence has created a beautiful life for herself. Her home is immaculate; she is a model employee at Pratt's Insurance, where she works as a secretary. Her hair is the perfect shade of movie-star blonde -- never once does she allow her brown roots to show. She dyes them every other Saturday night, without fail. But one morning, everything changes. Florence notices a new group of men at the local diner, Métis workers from out of town, hired on for the season at a nearby farm. And one of them has a connection to the past that Florence has spent her entire life outrunning. He has one simple request for her. Suddenly, Florence is thrown back into memories of her life before. Suddenly, the line between who she once was and who she has chosen to be feels very thin. And when Florence learns of the government's plans for the Métis community on the fringes of town, she will be faced with a choice -- one that will shatter her carefully constructed life forever. This extraordinary novel asks us what we will do for our community, for our families, for our friends, even at our own expense. It examines the harrowing effects of choosing to live as someone else -- and the radiant peace that comes from finally living one's truth. Gripping, wrenching, and utterly immersive, Wild People Quiet is a stunning achievement by a remarkable literary talent." -- Provided by publisher

Whistler

"When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn't seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again. Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It's a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything."-- Provided by publisher

Walter Lippmann

"Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was among the most influential and wide-ranging political writers in modern America. As both a journalist and political theorist, he shaped ideas about liberalism and democracy, the nature of public opinion, US power and empire, and the roles of journalists, experts, and citizens. Tom Arnold-Forster provides a bold historical reassessment of Lippmann's intellectual life, offering fresh perspectives on a career at the intersection of daily news and democratic theory. This incisive book shows how Lippmann helped define the public debates of American liberalism from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. By exploring his ideas in their historical context, Arnold-Forster challenges the claim that Lippmann was primarily a theorist of expertise and technocracy. Instead, Lippmann emerges as a strikingly political thinker, public-facing and multifarious, who focused on what politics meant and how it worked in modern democracies. Covering subjects from press freedom to urban reform to economic and foreign policy, while tracing the evolution from his early liberal socialism to later conservative liberalism, this book explores Lippmann's thought as reflecting the protean character of liberal politics and the crises and paradoxes of democracy. Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography is a richly historical account of a complex political thinker. Lippmann's ideas played a formative role in the twentieth century and resonate powerfully with our fraught present." -- Provided by publisher

The Violence

"A powerful chronicle of Colombia's descent into decades of civil war through the lens of an intimate, multi-generational tale of upheaval and betrayal."--Amazon

Underlake

"Thirteen years ago, Otta escaped the small town of Steels, intent upon becoming a marine biologist. Now she's returned, having failed to achieve her dream, and carrying the guilt of a friend's death during a deep-sea dive. She thinks she may never dive again, but then a stranger appears at her door. This stranger, May, says that her daughter has run away, and insists that she's under a nearby lake--alive. Because it turns out the small-town legend of 'the underlake' is three decades ago, an entire valley and the town in it was flooded to make way for a dam, but the people in that town refused to leave. Now, they're still living beneath the lake, self-proclaimed 'refugees of a world obsessed with change,' connected--and held apart--by an intricate, airtight system of tubes and sealed buildings. To find May's missing daughter, Otta and May must travel deeper and deeper under the water. Along the way, they'll discover communities that have lived in isolation for decades, fomenting extremes of delusion and nostalgia. As the two women bond in the thrall of their search, they are each forced to confront the layers of fear, control, and uncertainty that drive their quest. Together and alone, they must challenge the laws of love and society--and push their bodies to the mortal limit."-- Provided by publisher

The Things We Never Say

"Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He goes about his days teaching American history to high schoolers, correcting their casual ignorance, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He spends his free time sailing the beautiful Massachusetts Bay, or with his adult son and his wife of more than three decades--and as Artie does these things, he plans the event that will forever change the world he inhabits. But when a startling accident awakens a new perspective in Artie, and he realizes that life has its own secret it's been keeping from him--along with a lot more to say on the weighty matters of fate and freedom in his home and his country--he charts another course full of grief, hilarity, and heart, to a place where the end marks the beginning. Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a profound exploration of the human condition--one that brims with deep compassion for each and every one of her characters. With exquisite prose and gentle intimacy, Artie Dam takes one man's fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the mysterious love that sustains and holds us through it all."-- Provided by publisher

A Terrible Intimacy

"From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of 'master-slave' dynamics. A white man hosts a wedding party for his enslaved servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer turns up dead after getting drunk with a slave; two men, one poor and white and the other enslaved, team up to plot a murder. Through six criminal cases in antebellum Virginia, A Terrible Intimacy describes a startling variety of encounters between white and Black Virginians. Contrary to our common assumption, fully half of the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, yet in households of five, ten, or fifteen people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and domestic dynamics. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861 most white men in Virginia were ready to fight for the right to own other humans. Revealing a society in which white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that exploited and abused them, A Terrible Intimacy offers striking new insights into the complexity of life in the old South." -- Dust jacket

Small Town Girls

"Appalachia--a distinctly American landscape, dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings-has been the great setting for Jayne Anne Phillips's work. She grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia and has always kept it close, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled. In these essays, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She recreates the place she calls home, both its history and its foundational truths. She traces her journey across the country in search of love and work and belonging, and offers insights into the fellow writers and cultural touchstones that helped shape her path. From the local beauty salon to the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud, from Jean Shrimpton and Barbara Stanwyck to Stephen Crane and Breece D'J Pancake, Jayne Anne ponders her relationship with inspiration, religion, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries. Tender, inviting, sparkling with wisdom and open-heartedness, Small Town Girls is a portrait of an inimitable artist as well as a love letter to the place and the people who have made her who she is." -- Provided by publisher

The Shock of the Light

"Twins Tessa and Theo are roots of the same tree, in tune with one another's every thought and desire. As World War II takes hold across Europe, both are eager to do their part. Theo is recruited by the RAF and disappears into the skies, while Tessa jumps at the chance to join the Special Operations Executive, devoted to spying and sabotage behind enemy lines. It will be dangerous, highly classified work, but Tessa, despite all she shares with Theo, is no stranger to secret-keeping. Two years later, Theo comes home. Tessa does not. Theo, wounded, broken by the loss of his fellows and his sister, is indefatigable, angry, driven, a clandestinely gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal--and he will pay a price for pursuing answers about Tessa's fate. Decades later, PhD candidate Edie is deep into her research on the Special Operations Executive during the war. When she finds Theo in London, they form an unlikely partnership, and together they finally uncover the truth about Theo's beloved sister--a truth that stretches back to the summer Tessa spent in France before the war had even begun."-- Provided by publisher

Ruby Falls

"In 1928, a Chattanooga man disappears down a hole in the ground and discovers a 150-foot waterfall in the middle of a mountain that he names after his wife: Ruby Falls. Within months, visitors can buy tickets to see the falls for themselves. Ada Smith has been sneaking into the caves at night, entranced by the natural wonders around her and the freedom granted by this new underground world. But it's tough timing for a natural wonder. As the country flounders in the Great Depression, a shrewd public relations ploy seems like the only way to save Ruby Falls. A famous mind reader agrees to launch himself into the caverns where he will attempt to locate a hidden hatpin using only his psychic abilities. He'll be joined by five others: his manager, his wife, a guide, a Chattanooga businessman, and a reporter from the Chicago Times. But they're not alone in the caverns. Ada and another guide, Quinton, have been asked to follow the mind reader's party at a distance, staying out of sight. They are a safety net, in case of a broken leg or busted flashlights. One of them will be dead before the end of the day. Faced with a corpse and the stark reality that one of the people in her midst is a killer, Ada needs to get everyone--the murderer and the innocents--back aboveground before their light runs out."-- Provided by publisher

Revenge for the Sixties

Politico editor Peter Canellos presents a biography of conservative Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. The book begins with Alito's upbringing in an Italian-American New Jersey suburb and the culture shock he experienced as a middle-class student at Princeton University. These experiences shaped Alito's opinions on liberalism and progressive social change, driving him toward organizations like the Federalist Society. Canellos documents how Alito's professed dedication to originalism is flexible rather than fixed.