Matthew Specktor uses his childhood in a Hollywood household and his later work as a studio executive and screenwriter to trace how the American film industry changed over the past seventy‑five years. Mixing memoir and cultural history, he interweaves family stories with episodes involving agents, studio heads, artists, unions, and corporations to show how Hollywood shifted from a cultural center to a global business and how that shift intensified tensions between art, labor, and capital.

The Mission traces the CIA’s evolution from post–Cold War decline through the shock of 9/11 and the agency’s shift toward paramilitary operations, detention, and drone strikes. It describes the consequences of that shift—operational losses, cyber and counterintelligence setbacks—and the subsequent effort to rebuild traditional espionage capabilities to confront rivals such as Russia, China, and Iran while operating under intense political pressure.

After a mysterious illness leaves him isolated and unable to read or write, Brian Buckbee rescues an injured pigeon he names Two‑Step. Tending injured birds transforms his life and forms an unexpected bond that helps him confront grief, chronic illness, and the end of his former adventures. Dictated to editor Carol Ann Fitzgerald, the memoir is a quiet, hopeful meditation on connection, care, and the small wonders of the natural world.

A collection of nine short stories set in Minnesota, New Mexico, and California that follows people who have left their places of origin and wrestle with desire, identity, family obligations, and the pressure to make others happy. The stories are character-focused and spare in tone, exploring intimate forms of loss and violence as individuals try—and sometimes fail—to reconcile their pasts with their present lives.

Make Your Way Home is a collection of eleven short stories set across the American South that follows Black men and women as they navigate family legacies, longing, and the meaning of home. From Florida marshes to North Carolina mountains and Southern cities, the stories explore love, belonging, and how past histories shape present choices, told with careful attention to place and intimate detail.

Nova Scotia House follows Johnny Grant as he reflects on his decades-long relationship with Jerry Field, who was nearly thirty years his senior. Living together in Jerry’s house in Nova Scotia, they explored experimental ways of loving, sex, and community in the years before the AIDS crisis. Now, facing grief and difficult choices, Johnny revisits those memories and tries to preserve the relationships and practices that shaped their lives.

Set in Chernihiv, Ukraine, the novel follows twelve-year-old Artem as he helps on his grandfather’s sunflower farm, sketches in a treasured notebook, and quietly navigates emerging romantic feelings for his best friend Viktor. When war suddenly erupts and shatters his ordinary life, Artem and his younger brother Yuri flee their home and travel across Ukraine hoping to reunite with their father. The story is a coming-of-age exploration of identity, brotherhood, and survival amid upheaval.

On a Chicago university campus, a toddler begins to emit a mysterious light called the nimbus. The unexplained phenomenon, visible to some but not others, upends the lives of his parents—Adrian, a divinity school professor, and Renata—and draws in Adrian’s graduate student Paul Harkin and a former alumnus, Warren Kayita. As attention on the child grows, the characters are forced to confront questions of faith, family, ambition, and the search for meaning.

Margaret, a newly divorced mother, returns to the big house where she was raised and brings her young daughters back into the landscape of her childhood. As she juggles co-parenting and a new relationship, old memories and hidden family secrets begin to surface, forcing her to confront how the past shapes the present. The novel quietly explores motherhood, family dynamics, and the lasting effects of childhood.

Rebecca Romney explores the women writers who influenced Jane Austen—figures like Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and others—tracing their impact on Austen’s work and asking why their books fell out of favor. Through personal reading, searches for rare editions, and close connections between these authors’ novels and Austen’s, she reconstructs the bookshelf that shaped Austen and invites readers to rediscover overlooked women writers and reconsider how the literary canon is formed.

Cécé follows a young woman in a Haitian cité who documents daily life and violence through striking photographs she posts online. Working as a sex worker and living under the control of local gangs, she uses images, friendships, and small acts of defiance to claim agency and survive. The novel is an intimate, unflinching portrait of resilience amid poverty and unrest.

A compact, authoritative collegiate dictionary providing clear definitions, pronunciations, etymologies, usage notes, variant spellings, and illustrative examples; updated to include contemporary vocabulary and new entries, it serves as a practical reference for students, writers, and general readers seeking concise, reliable guidance on modern American English usage.

A concise essay collection in which cultural critic Tre Johnson explores how Black creativity and everyday innovation have shaped American life. Mixing personal memoir, pop culture, and historical observation, Johnson highlights examples—from 1990s airbrush tees to family trips and comedians like Dick Gregory—to argue that ordinary practices reveal extraordinary resourcefulness and cultural influence.

Leo Schofield has spent decades behind bars for the 1987 murder of his wife, a crime he insists he did not commit. Years later, fingerprints from the scene were linked to another local man who has confessed to multiple killings, leaving both men claiming the truth while authorities remain unconvinced. The book examines the competing accounts, physical evidence, and the workings of the criminal-justice system in Polk County, Florida, without revealing the case’s final outcome.

Fear No Pharaoh examines how American Jews confronted slavery and the Civil War through the lives of six figures—Judah P. Benjamin, Morris Raphall, Isaac Mayer Wise, David Einhorn, August Bondi, and Ernestine Rose. Drawing on contemporary sources, Richard Kreitner explores competing Jewish responses—biblical defenses of slavery, calls for caution to protect communities, and fierce abolitionism—and shows how those debates shaped Jewish identity and political choices in nineteenth‑century America.

Molly Jong‑Fast recounts growing up as the daughter of author Erica Jong, navigating a childhood shaped by public fame, emotional distance, and a complicated mother–daughter bond. Blending sharp humor and candid reflection, the memoir explores how that relationship influenced her identity and how she comes to terms with love, loss, and family.

Emily Feng investigates how the Chinese state defines and enforces national identity. Through portraits of Uyghurs, an Inner Mongolian teacher, a mainland human-rights lawyer and others, the book shows how language, ethnicity, religion and political dissent are policed and how people resist and survive under state pressure.

Libraries of the Mind argues that our minds function like libraries: collections of texts, memories, and references that shape how we read and understand literature. William Marx examines how these invisible libraries are formed, considers the “dark matter” of lost or fragmentary works, and urges us to broaden our mental shelves by recovering missing texts and cultivating an attitude that respects diversity and otherness in reading.

Make It Ours traces the life and influence of Virgil Abloh, following his unconventional path from streetwear and design to becoming menswear artistic director at Louis Vuitton. Robin Givhan examines how Abloh and his peers reshaped ideas about fashion, race, luxury, and taste, and how a new generation blurred the boundaries between high fashion and street culture.

A concise, chronological history tracing five centuries of Mexico’s cultural, political, and economic change. It follows first contacts and conquest, the demographic collapse and cultural recombination that followed, the global impact of silver, struggles for independence and 19th‑century conflict, and the revolutions, social reforms, and contemporary challenges—such as organized violence and migration—that have shaped modern Mexican institutions and identity.

A Ukrainian reporter and novelist who becomes a soldier after the 2022 invasion examines how war upends personal beliefs, family life, and everyday routines. In three parts, he reflects on the first days of the conflict, the experiences of ordinary civilians, and the moral questions around who fights and why. The book is a spare, personal account of how war reshapes identity, duty, and relationships without revealing operational details or outcomes.

In Nazi-occupied Paris, two unlikely women run a secret escape line that helps Allied servicemen slip past checkpoints and out of danger. After their arrest by the Gestapo, the book pieces together their actions and the complex personal and moral consequences that followed, drawing on archival records and wartime letters to tell a tense, character-driven story of courage and secrecy.

When journalist Amanda Hess becomes pregnant, a routine ultrasound and her online searches pull her into the fraught landscape of digital parenting. She examines how apps, prenatal tests, social media groups, and algorithmic attention amplify fear, judgment, and choices, and connects those experiences to longer histories like eugenics and surveillance. The book is a personal, clear-eyed look at how the internet reshapes pregnancy and early parenthood.

They Poisoned the World investigates how “forever chemicals” (PFAS) came to contaminate drinking water across the United States. Starting with a 2014 discovery of toxic levels in Hoosick Falls, New York, Mariah Blake traces the chemicals’ history—from wartime research to decades of industry knowledge and internal testing linking PFAS to health problems—and examines how regulatory failures allowed widespread exposure. The book combines document-based investigative reporting with the story of local residents who fought to reveal the contamination and seek accountability.

A concise biography of Peter Matthiessen that follows his life as a novelist, naturalist, and Zen teacher. It covers his early literary work (including cofounding The Paris Review), adventurous field expeditions—from the Amazon and New Guinea to the Himalayas—his influential nature writing and advocacy on environmental and Native American issues, and his lifelong spiritual search, presented without revealing major personal spoilers.