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

Imperiled Planet

The ecological havoc we’ve wrought

The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith

Ground Truth

A story of dirt, dollars, and death

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson

Insisting on the Positive

A popular historian’s philosophical musings

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder

A Stranger in the Seven Hills

A refugee’s experience in the Eternal City

Roman Year: A Memoir by André Aciman

Mortal Coils

We aren’t alone in facing the inevitable

Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó

Silent Partner

The union that may have made possible a writer’s late flourishing

A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri

Schmaltz of Significance

How the first talkie treated the myth of the melting pot

Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer by Richard Bernstein

Drought and Famine

What the past teaches us to fear most about global climate change

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations By Brian Fagan

Sleepless Nights

Getting cranky about the things that keep us awake

Insomniac By Gayle Greene

The Case of the Defective Detective

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective By Kate Summerscale

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

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