Politics and Prose Presents

Compulsive, shattering, if not fundamentally disruptive,  Returning  emerges as one of the most important and searingly honest family sagas of our time. Nicholas Lemann, a veteran  New Yorker  correspondent, grew up in New Orleans, the son of German Jews in a world of gilded privilege. Yet in contrast to his parents’ generation, which always sought to downplay their religious background, Lemann wa...

This revelatory biography persuasively addresses the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer—why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean? One spring day in 1683, a notary’s clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled on one of the wonders of the seventeenth–century world: twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. How had this one Dutchwoman come...

Good Food Institute founder and president Bruce Friedrich offers a hopeful and rigorously researched exploration of how science, policy, and industry can work together to satisfy the world’s soaring demand for meat, while building a healthier and more sustainable world.  The human love of meat appears to be hard-wired. The world consumes more than 550 million metric tons of meat and seafood each y...

An incisive examination of free speech's global decline and a framework for preserving expression in democratic societies. The Future of Free Speech  confronts a stark truth: the right to speak freely is under siege. Once celebrated as a cornerstone of democratic societies, free expression is now met with growing suspicion and retaliation across the globe. Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff pres...

From the author of the international bestseller  Life of Pi , a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar. The Psoad  is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner’s story was lost to time—until Harlow Donn...

An immigration journalist and her wife trace their family’s intertwined past to unearth a history of how hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived Hitler’s Holocaust at the brutal hands of Stalin — a story that sheds light on the enduring power of hope and love. Daniela Gerson and her wife, Talia Inlender, met at a picnic in Los Angeles, not knowing that 75 years earlier, their grandparents ha...

An unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US—and why even affluent Black women are imperiled by substandard care.  From a leading expert on race, class, maternal health, and reproductive rights. Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the US,  Expecting Inequity...

In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life story: how it was born, nearly died, was born again under Steve Jobs, and became, under CEO Tim Cook, the most valuable company in the world. The book features full-color photos, new facts that correct the record and illuminate its subversive culture, and fresh interviews with...

The surprising story of how iconic works of music sparked debate and action in the halls of Congress. From "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to  Rhapsody in Blue  and  Hamilton , the story of America is written not only in its laws and speeches but also in its music. In  On the Record: Music That Changed America , award-winning scholar and storyteller A...

Life Lines  is an ethnographic exploration of elder care as a creative and relational process, centred on the author's journey caring for his aging father. Over five years, these shared moments opened up new understandings of his father's inner world, revealing the social and personal forces that shaped his life, dreams, and disappointments. Blending personal narrative with ethnographic in...

A former public defender takes us behind the closed doors of America's criminal courts, revealing how the institutions that claim to protect us are doing the exact opposite—and offering a blueprint for finally fixing it. As Americans, we are told a rose-tinted story about our criminal courts—that these are the hallowed halls of justice, that the purpose of our legal process is to find the trut...

Based on extensive inside sources, a revealing account of how the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations transformed both health care and politics in America   For nearly a century, every Democratic president—and many Republicans—entered office promising to restructure America’s health care system. Barack Obama finally broke through but, in the process, opened a tumultuous decade in which battles...

The dramatic story of the secretive decade–long Pentagon campaign to bring AI–powered targeting systems onto the battlefield. In 2017, a small crew gathered in a windowless Pentagon room to put AI at the heart of how America makes war. Led by a Marine Corps colonel haunted by the deaths of US troops and prospect of AI–enhanced rivals, the Project Maven team raced to send AI into combat, igniting c...

Something darker than the devil stalks the North Carolina woods in  Wolf Worm , a new gothic masterpiece from  New York Times  bestselling author T. Kingfisher “I saw the devil in these woods.” Sonia Wilson is a talented scientific illustrator—but she is only able to follow her dream because of her father’s reputation as a renowned scientist. Such is the lot in life for a woman in science in 1899....

Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. As if Hilary Mantel’s  The Giant, O’Brien  met  Robinson Crusoe,  here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction. Told in the vernacular of the day, this novel-as-notebook features a 19th-century ornithologist on a remote Irish island—from the author of indie favorite  The Gospel of Orla ....

Some cities feed on secrets. Naples is ravenous. A peaceful evening mass at the historic Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo is shattered when a young au pair is killed in one of the cathedral’s quiet chapels. The daughter of the US Ambassador sees it happen—but she'll speak only to one person: Nikki Serafino. Shaken by betrayal in her last high-profile case, Nikki has retreated from the relentless vigilanc...

How the Internet lost its way--and how to fix it Recovering the Internet  is an indictment of how Big Tech cloaks ruthless commercial exploitation in the language of free speech. Olivier Sylvain, a leading legal scholar and former senior advisor at the Federal Trade Commission, exposes the incentives behind social media design, revealing how they trap users in cycles of addiction, misinformation,...

From the creator of AdviceWithErin, the definitive book on how to use the right words at work—so you can build the career you deserve We’ve all been there: you’re sweating, sitting in front of your laptop, and the interviewer on the screen says, “Tell me about yourself.” You freeze. Is that even a question? What are they expecting from you?  What do you say? If that paragraph made your heart beat...

From Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist Anand Gopal, a mesmerizing and powerful account of six Syrians fighting for a better world, in the tradition of classic works by Philip Gourevitch and Katherine Boo. In 2011, in a northern Syrian city, a small group of men and women began a movement that overthrew one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships. For the next eighteen months, citizens of...

The Drama of War and Postwar Italy Through the Life of One of Its Most Celebrated Icons When people think of fashion designer Emilio Pucci, it is of his bright, swirling colors and easy, freeing fabrics, and everyone from Sophia Loren to Jackie Kennedy donning the eye-catching dresses that personify  La Dolce Vita . What few know about Pucci, however, is that before creating his world-famous fashi...

A movie censor murdered, a leading lady vanished—the glamour, romance, and intrigue of the beginnings of Bollywood come to vivid life in the thrilling new installment of the Perveen Mistry historical mystery series. India, 1922: Perveen Mistry, the only female lawyer in Bombay, has secured her biggest client yet: Champa Films, a movie studio run by director Subhas Ghoshal and his wife, Rochana, th...

A new collection of evocative personal essays from one of America’s most beloved nonfiction writers, Anne Fadiman.  In  Frog , Anne Fadiman returns to her favorite genre, the essay, of which she is one of our most celebrated practitioners. Ranging in subject matter from her deceased frog, to archaic printer technology, to the fraught relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son Hartley...

A warm and witty memoir about the ever-changing relationships between mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters that traverses two continents and multiple generations of two disparate yet connected families. Janice Page hails from Braintree, Massachusetts and a large Catholic brood. Her parents had a complicated marriage. Her five siblings each have their own sagas, and there is a destructive genetic...

Why fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress--and what that reveals about American democracy. Congress, the central democratic institution in the United States, is hanging on by a thread. On January 6, 2021, a violent attack on the Capitol Building left five people dead, and threats and attacks against politicians are on the rise. In  Stuck , Maya Kornberg chronicles the e...

Let the Great World Spin meets The White Lotus when three passengers from wildly different backgrounds board a cruise ship bound for Bermuda shortly after 9/11 and learn en route that they can’t outrun their regrets about the risks not taken. It’s Sunday, September 16, 2001. Franny and her husband have traded in their elegant Park Avenue co-op for a suite on board the Sonata, a once-glittering cru...