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The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
By Null Sophia Rosenfeld. 2025
A sweeping history of the rise of personal choice in the modern world and how it became equated with freedomChoice…
touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best to select. There are social costs too. How did all this happen? The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.Taking readers from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one&’s convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change. She concludes with an exploration of how reproductive rights have become a symbolic flashpoint in our contemporary struggles over the association of liberty with choice.Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from novels and restaurant menus to the latest scientific findings about choice in psychology and economics, The Age of Choice urges us to rethink the meaning of choice and its promise and limitations in modern life.
Victorian Psycho: A Novel
By Null Virginia Feito. 2025
SOON TO BE A FEATURE FILM FROM A24 STARRING MARGARET QUALLEY AND THOMASIN MCKENZIE "This book will be the bloody…
belle of the 2025 literary ball." (Oprah Daily) Most Anticipated Books of 2025: Vulture, Oprah Daily, Polygon, Reader's Digest, Lit Hub, CrimeReads, The Stacks, LibraryReads, Paste Best Books of the Month: Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Goodreads, Gizmodo, Book Riot, The A.V. Club, Apple Books, Amazon The American Booksellers Association's #1 Indie Next Great Read! (Feb 2025) A Matty Maggiacomo Book Club Selection “Simmering with rage, propulsive and laugh out loud funny, Victorian Psycho speaks profoundly of horror both within and without us.” —Catriona Ward From the acclaimed author of Mrs. March comes the riveting tale of a bloodthirsty governess who learns the true meaning of vengeance. Virginia Feito’s Mrs. March was hailed as “a brilliant debut . . . [by] a writer who keeps pace with the grandees she invokes” (Sarah Ditum, Guardian)—from Daphne Du Maurier and Shirley Jackson to Patricia Highsmith. Now, Feito returns with her “silver-polish sentences and her eerie psychological acumen” (Constance Grady, Vox) to unleash an entirely new antihero on us all. Grim Wolds, England: Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess—she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family—Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze. Compounded with her disdain for the entitled Pounds children, Winifred finds herself struggling at every turn to stifle the violent compulsions of her past. French tutoring and needlework are one way to pass the time, as is admiring the ugly portraits in the gallery . . . and creeping across the moonlit lawns. . . . Patience. Winifred must have patience, for Christmas is coming, and she has very special gifts planned for the dear souls of Ensor House. Brimming with sardonic wit and culminating in a shocking conclusion, Victorian Psycho plunges readers into the chilling mind of an iconic new literary psychopath.
Memorial Days
By Geraldine Brooks. 2025
A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey to peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of …
Horse.Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz - just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy - collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert's Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.
Silver Elite
By Dani Francis. 2025
In the first book of a sizzling dystopian romance series, psychic gifts are a death sentence and there are rules…
to survival: Trust no one. Lie to everyone. And whatever you do, don&’t fall for your greatest enemy.TRUST NO ONE.Wren Darlington has spent her whole life in hiding, honing her psychic abilities and aiding the rebel Uprising in small ways. On the Continent, being Modified means certain death—and Wren is one of the most powerful Mods in existence. When one careless mistake places her in the hands of the enemy and she&’s forced to join their most elite training program, she&’s finally handed the perfect opportunity to strike a devastating blow from inside their ranks.LIE TO EVERYONE.But training for Silver Block can be deadly, especially when you&’re harboring dangerous secrets and living in close quarters with everyone who wants you dead.AND WHATEVER YOU DO, DON&’T FALL FOR YOUR GREATEST ENEMY.As the stakes grow ever higher, Wren must prove herself to Silver Block. But that&’s easier said than done when your commanding officer is the ruthless and infuriatingly irresistible Cross Redden, who doesn&’t miss anything when it comes to her. And as war rages between Mods like her and those who aim to destroy them, Wren must decide just how far she&’s willing to go to protect herself . . . and how much of the Continent is worth saving.
The Sisters: 'One of this summer’s most buzzed-about novels' - Financial Times
By Jonas Hassen Khemiri. 2025
'One of the best novels I've ever read about the complexities of mixed heritage'New Yorker'I really loved this book .…
. . a novel to sink into'New York Times'Superb . . . one of those books you live inside and miss when it's over'Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost'A moving appraisal of family, language, and the spiritual developments that accrue over a life'Raven Leilani, author of Luster'A thoroughly fascinating story about sibling rivalry, loyalty, and love'Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove'If you welcome this novel into your mind, it will warm and transform you'Tess Gunty, author of the Rabbit Hutch'Astonishing . . . every character - every sentence - is startlingly, indubitably alive'Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies'His masterpiece . . . life overflows its pages'Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have NothingMEET THE MIKKOLA SISTERS: INA, EVELYN, AND ANASTASIA.Their mother is a Tunisian saleswoman, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, quick to anger.Ina meets her future husband when she's dragged to a New Year's party by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life.Following them from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. His life intersects with the sisters across decades and continents, from Stockholm to Tunis and New York. When Evelyn disappears, it's Jonas who tracks her down - and helps her to break a curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for years. But in the process, a shocking revelation changes everything.Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, The Sisters is a vivid, epic family saga of the highest order - an addictively entertaining tour de force.Perfect for fans of Coco Mellors and Jonathan Franzen
A Gentleman's Gentleman: A Novel
By Null Tj Alexander. 2025
From the acclaimed author of Chef's Kiss, a groundbreaking trans Regency romance that's both delightfully witty and refreshingly iconoclastic.&“A Gentleman&’s…
Gentleman is a thoroughly charming confection of a romance. If you&’re looking for a tender, gentle slow burn, this is the book for you.&” —Cat Sebastian, author of We Could Be So GoodThe notoriously eccentric Lord Christopher Eden is a &“man of unusual make&” and even more unusual habits: he prefers to live far from the prying eyes and ears of the ton, and would rather have the comfortable company of his childhood cook and his aged butler than the swarm of servants and hangers-on befitting a man of his station. But Christopher&’s pleasant, if occasionally lonely life is upended when he receives word from his lawyers that, according to his late father&’s will, he must find a wife by the end of the Season if he intends to keep his family&’s fortune and the Eden estate. Christopher cannot imagine a worse fate: as he isn&’t attracted to women, his chances of making a wife happy are slim. Furthermore, if his quest to marry has any hope of succeeding, he must move to London posthaste and acquire some more suitable staff.Enter James Harding, Christopher&’s new, distractingly handsome—if rigidly traditional—valet. After a rocky start, the two strike up a fragile friendship amid the throes of the London Season . . . a friendship that threatens to shatter under the looming shadow of Christopher&’s impending nuptials—and the secrets both men are keeping. With its heady combination of dry wit, slow-burn romance, and a nuanced portrait of trans identity, A Gentleman&’s Gentleman stands to transform the historical romance genre as we know it.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
By Stephen Graham Jones. 2025
In 1912 a strange confession is given, over several nights, to a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a…
vampire who haunted the fields of the Blackfeet reservation, looking for justice.A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran Pastor is discovered within a wall and what it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to two hundred and seventeen Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed confessions by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shared the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits, this is a bloody history of the American West that has remained untold until now.
Abundance
By Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson. 2025
From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a…
politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough. Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished. Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel. New York Times Bestseller
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
By Sophie Gilbert. 2025
From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and…
girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequences. An urgent read that addresses questions around the current regression of feminism.When did feminism lose its way? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement&’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and &“riot grrrl&” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the unattainable aesthetic of Victoria&’s Secret ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren&’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period&’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture&’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amidst a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng: A Darkly Funny, Gory, and Ghostly Horror Novel
By Kylie Lee Baker. 2025
"A compelling, gory, ghostly romp."—Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie"This is what it felt like to live…
in New York City during lockdown: haunted, absurd, terrifying, ridiculous, and full of hungry ghosts."—Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted HouseIn this explosive horror novel, a woman is haunted by inner trauma, hungry ghosts, and a serial killer as she confronts the brutal violence experienced by East Asians during the pandemic.Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. But none of that seems so terrible when she&’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister, Delilah, being pushed in front of a train.Before fleeing the scene, the murderer shouted two words: bat eater.So the bloody messes don&’t really bother Cora—she&’s more bothered by the germs on the subway railing, the bare hands of a stranger, the hidden viruses in every corner, and the bite marks on her coffee table. Of course, ever since Delilah was killed in front of her, Cora can&’t be sure what's real and what&’s in her head.She pushes away all feelings and ignores the advice of her aunt to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open. But she can't ignore the dread in her stomach as she keeps finding bat carcasses at crime scenes, or the scary fact that all her recent cleanups have been the bodies of East Asian women.As Cora will soon learn, you can&’t just ignore hungry ghosts.For fans of Stephen Graham Jones and Gretchen Felker-Martin, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng is a wildly original, darkly humorous, and subversive contemporary novel from a striking new voice in horror.
What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a Revolution
By John Birdsall. 2025
A celebrated culinary writer’s expansive, audacious excavation of the roots of modern queer identity and food culture. The food on…
our plates has long been designed, twisted, and elevated by queer hands. Piecing together a dazzling mosaic of queer lives, spaces, and meals, beloved food writer John Birdsall unfolds the complex story of how, through times of fear and persecution, queer people used food to express joy and build community—and ended up changing the shape of the table for everyone. Tracing the evolution of queer food from the early decades of the twentieth century through the LGBTQ civil rights movement of post-Stonewall liberation and the devastation of AIDS, Birdsall fills the gaps between past and present. He channels the twin forces of criticism and cultural history to propel readers into the kitchens, restaurants, swirling party houses, and buzzing interior lives of James Baldwin, Alice B. Toklas, Truman Capote, Esther Eng, and others who left an indelible mark on the culinary world from the margins. Queer food, as Birdsall brilliantly reveals, is quiche and Champagne eleganza at Sunday brunch and joyous lesbian potlucks in the bunker world of Cold War homophobic purges. It’s paper chicken for the gender-rebel divas of Chinese opera in San Francisco, Richard Olney’s ecstatic salade composée, and Rainbow Ice-Box Cake from Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking. It’s the intention surrounding a meal, the circumstances behind it, the people gathered around the table. With cinematic verve and delicious prose, What Is Queer Food? is a monumental work: a testament to food’s essential link to modern queerness that reveals how, like fashion or pop music, cooking and eating have become a crucial language of LGBTQ+ identity. By reframing our understanding of both food and queerness, it opens the door for courageous reckoning and boundless conversation.
The Doorman: A Novel
By Chris Pavone. 2025
A pulse-pounding novel of class, privilege, sex, and murder, from the New York Times bestselling author of Two Nights in…
Lisbon and The Expats.Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York’s cultural elite.Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she’d quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave him. Yet.And downstairs in 2a, Julian Sonnenberg—who has carved himself a successful niche in the art world, and led a good half-century of a full and satisfying, cosmopolitan life—has just received a devastating phone call that does nothing at all to alleviate his sense that, probably for better and worse, he has aged out and he’s just not that useful to anyone any more.Meanwhile, gathered in the Bohemia’s bowels, the building’s almost entirely Black and Hispanic, working-class staff is taking in the news that that just a few miles uptown, a Black man has been killed by the police, leading to a demonstration, a counterdemonstration, and a long night of violence across the tinderbox city.As Chicky changes into his uniform for tonight’s shift, he finds himself breaking a cardinal rule of the job: tonight, he’ll be carrying a gun, bought only hours earlier, but before he knew of the pandemonium taking over the city. Chicky knows that there’s more going on in his patch of sidewalk in front of the Bohemia than anyone’s aware of. Tonight in the city, enemies will clash, loyalties will be tested, secrets will be revealed—and lives will be lost.
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
By Sam Tanenhaus. 2025
&“A magnificent achievement—a long, gripping, and enthralling account of the life of America&’s premier conservative polemicist of the twentieth century.&”—Max…
Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend&“A rich, immersive biography exposes the roots of the modern conservative movement through the life of the firebrand writer and commentator who shaped it.&”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors&’ Choice)In 1951, with the publication of God and Man at Yale, a scathing attack on his alma mater, twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., seized the public stage—and commanded it for the next half century as he led a new generation of conservative activists and ideologues to the peak of political power and cultural influence.Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biographer Sam Tanenhaus to tell the full, uncensored story of his life and times, granting him extensive interviews and exclusive access to his most private papers. Thus began a deep investigation into the vast and often hidden universe of Bill Buckley and the modern conservative revolution.Buckley vividly captures its subject in all his facets and phases: founding editor of National Review, the twentieth century&’s most influential political journal; syndicated columnist, Emmy-winning TV debater, and bestselling spy novelist; ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater; mentor to Ronald Reagan; game-changing candidate for mayor of New York.Tanenhaus also has uncovered the darker trail of Bill Buckley&’s secret exploits, including CIA missions in Latin America, dark collusions with Watergate felon Howard Hunt, and Buckley&’s struggle in his last years to hold together a movement coming apart over the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, and the invasion of Iraq—even as his own media empire was unraveling.At a crucial moment in American history, Buckley offers a gripping and powerfully relevant story about the birth of modern politics and those who shaped it.
The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place
By Kate Summerscale. 2024
*Named a Best Book of 2024 by FT * Nominated for the Women's prize for nonfiction*From the Edgar Award–winning author…
of The Haunting of Alma Fielding, the tale of two journalists competing to solve the notorious Christie murders in postwar LondonIn March 1953, London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy rowhouse in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they found another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor apartment, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. But they had already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?The story was an instant sensation. The star reporter Harry Procter chased after the scoop on Christie. The eminent crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begged her editor to let her cover the case. To Harry and Fryn, Christie seemed a new kind of murderer: he was vacant, impersonal, a creature of a brutish postwar world. Christie liked to watch women, they discovered, and he liked to kill them. They realized that he might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice.In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie&’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.
The Director: A Novel
By Daniel Kehlmann. 2023
&“Nothing short of brilliant.&”—The Wall Street Journal &“A surpassingly gifted storyteller.&” —The New York Times From &“one of the brightest,…
most pleasure-giving writers at work today&” (Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize–winning author), a visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich.An artist&’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema&’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels&’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Kehlmann&’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.
The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
By Null Michelle Adams. 2025
"Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J.…
Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground." —Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times Book ReviewThe epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs—and the defeat of desegregation in the North.In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today. Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country's promise.
Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free
By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. 2024
The riveting hidden history of Claire McCardell, the most influential fashion designer you&’ve never heard of. Claire McCardell forever changed…
fashion—and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women&’s clothes, and today much of what we wear traces back to her ingenious, rebellious mind. McCardell invented ballet flats and mix-and-match separates, and she introduced wrap dresses, hoodies, leggings, denim, and more into womenswear. She tossed out corsets in favor of a comfortably elegant look and insisted on pockets, even as male designers didn&’t see a need for them. She made zippers easy to reach because a woman &“may live alone and like it,&” McCardell once wrote, &“but you may regret it if you wrench your arm trying to zip a back zipper into place.&” After World War II, McCardell fought the severe, hyper-feminized silhouette championed by male designers, like Christian Dior. Dior claimed that he wanted to &“save women from nature.&” McCardell, by contrast, wanted to set women free. Claire McCardell became, as the young journalist Betty Friedan called her in 1955, &“The Gal Who Defied Dior.&” Filled with personal drama and industry secrets, this story reveals how Claire McCardell built an empire at a time when women rarely made the upper echelons of business. At its core, hers is a story about our right to choose how we dress—and our right to choose how we live.
We Do Not Part: A Novel
By Null Han Kang. 2025
THE NEW NOVEL FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE &“[Han Kang&’s] intense poetic prose .…
. . confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.&”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize &“Unforgettable.&”—Hernan Diaz Han Kang&’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon&’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn&’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend&’s house.Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
By Peter Beinart. 2025
A bold, urgent appeal from the acclaimed columnist and political commentator, addressing one of the most important issues of our…
time. In Peter Beinart’s view, one story dominates Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of Jewish religious tradition and warps our understanding of Israel and Palestine. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history, and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, Beinart argues, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations, they must do nothing less than offer a new answer to the question: What does it mean to be a Jew? Beinart imagines an alternate narrative, which would draw on other nations’ efforts at moral reconstruction and a different reading of Jewish tradition. A story in which Israeli Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, and in which Jewish and Palestinian safety are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. One that recognizes the danger of venerating states at the expense of human life. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is a provocative argument that will expand and inform one of the defining conversations of our time. It is a book that only Peter Beinart could write: a passionate yet measured work that brings together his personal experience, his commanding grasp of history, his keen understanding of political and moral dilemmas, and a clear vision for the future. new York Times Bestseller
Playworld: A Novel
By Null Adam Ross. 2025
"Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post"A…
gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review"Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Line for line the book is a revelation." —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles TimesA big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut&“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn&’t seem strange at the time.&” Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin&’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi&’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm. Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age&’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.