Enlightenment Lite

A Blue Hand: The Beats in India By Deborah Baker

The Work of Death

How the Civil War changed forever Americans’ relationship with mortality

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War By Drew Gilpin Faust

Subjectivity Is All

Using a lifetime of colorful examples to define the undefinable

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond By Peter Gay

The Casserole Inquisition

Chronicles from America’s culinary transformation

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food By Judith Jones

Wry Eye on the Bard

Sorting through the little we know about the best we’ve got

Shakespeare: The World as Stage By Bill Bryson

Latin’s Eminent Career

Is the language of empire, the church, scholarship, and Europe nearing retirement?

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin By Nicholas Ostler

A Long Walk in the New World

Of 300 Spaniards sent to settle Florida, only four survived

A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca By Andrés Reséndez

The Genius and Her Sanctuary

Pivotal moments in the pairing of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice By Janet Malcolm

Atonality and Beyond

The century when composers and audiences parted company

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Early End of Consensus

Bitter partisanship began soon after George Washington left the scene

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign By Edward J. Larson

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night

Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Ageby James Chappel

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine

Ideology as Anatomy

How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives

Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Partsby Helen King

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

The Creator’s Code

Are humans alone in their ability to make art?

The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines From Automata to AIby David Hajdu

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apartby Nicholas Carr

Barbarity at the Bataclan

A chilling account of darkness in the City of Light

V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the Frenchby John Lambert

Heart of Semi-Darkness

A writer’s delectable quest for rare flavors

Masters of Horror and Magic

The German folklorists who helped build a nation

For Want of Touch

The astonishing breadth of our passions

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