In This Is Your Mind on Plants (Penguin Books), Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs – opium, caffeine, and mescaline – and our thinking about them. Treating them as drugs, whether licit or illicit, is one of the least interesting things you can say about them, he argues, for when we take them […]
Register to join livestream. Richly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman’s work, Hillary Chute’s Maus Now: Selected Writings gathers responses to the work from many of contemporary culture’s leading critics, authors, and academics, including Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, and Ruth Franklin. More than 40 years after its first publication, they and others examine the work’s […]
In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity, leading theoretical physicist and cosmologist Antonio Padilla offers an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works – and how mathematical truths have led to new understandings […]
The protagonist of Percival Everett’s Dr. No: A Novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by “Wala Kitu.” Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, as does Kitu, in Swahili – he is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and […]
On November 4, 2019, a caravan of women and children was ambushed on a desolate road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Nine people died; five were gravely injured. They were fundamentalist Mormons, members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities. And in The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land, […]
Calling all lovers of indie bookstores for a Miami Book Fair two-part event: A screening of a new literary documentary and a panel of the nation’s foremost independent booksellers! In 2019, Mason Engel took a road trip around the country to 50 independent bookstores in 50 days. His goal: to promote his self-published novel, 2084. […]
When Rhea Ewing neared college graduation in 2012, they became consumed by the question: “What is gender?” The obsession sparked a quest in which they eagerly approached friends and strangers in their quiet Midwest town for interviews to turn into comics. A decade later, Fine: A Comic About Gender now presents a sweeping portrait of […]
"At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror," writes Sharon Olds in Balladz, a self-scouring, exhilarating volume which opens with a section of quarantine poems, and at its center boasts what she calls Amherst Balladz (whose syntax honors Emily Dickinson: “she was our Girl – our Woman – / Man enough […]
Bestselling author Rick Riordan presents Daniel José Older’s Ballad & Dagger, a music-and-magic-filled YA urban fantasy about two teens who discover each other and their powers during a political battle within a unique diaspora community. While the rest of his tight-knit Brooklyn community dreams of someday finding a way back home to the lost island […]
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Rainbow Rowell comes Scattered Showers: Stories. Rowell has won fans all over the world by writing about love and life in a way that feels true. In her first short story collection, she gives us nine beautifully crafted love stories. Girl meets boy camping outside a movie theater. […]
B. B. Alston returns to his Supernatural Investigations trilogy with Amari and the Great Game. Between the fearsome new Head Minister’s strict anti-magician agenda, fierce Junior Agent rivalries, and her brother Quinton’s curse steadily worsening, Amari’s plate is full. So when the secretive League of Magicians offers her a chance to become its new leader, […]
Husband-and-wife creative team Yarrow and Carrie Cheney join forces to present Superworld: Save Noah, a new series that breaks the mold with gorgeous black-and-white art on every page, and a cinematic, blockbuster feel. Every 12-year-old kid feels like they don’t fit in sometimes – but Noah takes it to a whole new level. When a meteor […]