After decades of obscurity, mystery novelist Duncan Torrens draws sudden interest when a blogger and publishing figures start probing who controls the rights to his backlist. Told through five unreliable narrators—the Librarian, the Reader, the Publisher, the Editor and the Writer—the race to claim those rights uncovers secrets, rivalries and increasingly dangerous consequences. A darkly comic, twisty crime novel that plays with perspective without revealing the outcome.

Hendrix Barry has a successful life and big ambitions, but caring for an aging parent and past disappointments have left her wary of romance. At a high‑profile party she meets Maverick Bell, a charismatic tech mogul who sees and pursues her in a way no one has before. Their chemistry forces Hendrix to confront her boundaries and decide whether to risk her carefully planned path for a relationship that feels both irresistible and complicated.

Curtis Wilson is a classical music prodigy who has risen from inner‑city Washington, D.C., to international acclaim. When his father gets entangled with a ruthless cartel, Curtis, his father Zippy, and Larissa enter witness protection and abandon his career. With law enforcement unable to stop the threat, the family must take matters into their own hands, forcing Curtis to choose between his music and protecting the people he loves.

In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, four ICU nurses in San Bernardino—Larette Embers, Cherrise Martinez, and traveling nurses Pam Ott and Marisol Manalang—live in RVs beside the hospital and form a makeshift household. Facing extreme heat, family strains, and the relentless demands of caring for dying patients, they forge a fragile community of solidarity, care, and survival.

In a Britain shaped by living stories, witch Simran and knight Vina are bound to repeat the tragic tale of the Knight and the Witch across centuries. As the two women fall in love, they must decide whether to follow their desires when doing so seems to doom them both. When a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs, they seek a way to break the cycle by creating a story strong enough to change their fate.

Thrilled to Death is a selection of Lynne Tillman’s short stories from across her career. The pieces are playful and formally inventive, following wry, ambivalent characters as they grapple with sex, death, memory, anxiety, and questions about art and culture. The collection emphasizes voice, intellectual wit, and reflective, often paradoxical perspectives rather than conventional plot.

In Regency England, Gothic novelist Lady Georgiana Cleeve suspects a rival of lifting her plots and is shocked to discover the author is Cat Lacey, the butler’s daughter and an old secret crush. When both women become trapped in an eerie manor while working on their next books, rivalries and ghostly happenings give way to a complicated, growing attraction.

Set in the summer of 1986 in New York, the novel follows Nina Jacobs as she navigates her volatile home life and tries to fit into the privileged Upper East Side scene. Determined to lose her virginity and find connection, she turns to alcohol, prescription drugs and cocaine while pursuing the charismatic Gardner Reed, with consequences that force her to confront the risks of that world.

To Lose a War compiles Jon Lee Anderson’s on-the-ground reporting from Afghanistan — spanning his first coverage in the late 1980s through the post‑9/11 invasion and the Taliban’s return in 2021. Using previously published dispatches and new material, the book offers a chronological, eyewitness account of the hopes, strategic missteps, and long-term consequences of the U.S.-led intervention, presented without revealing key plot details.

Adam Becker critiques Silicon Valley’s fixation on space colonization, digital immortality, and superintelligent AI, arguing these visions lack strong scientific grounding and often serve power-seeking interests. He shows how such fantasies distract attention from urgent social and environmental problems and rest on shallow futurism and harmful assumptions.

A practical, research-informed handbook for conducting better conversations and interviews, blending storytelling from reporting with cognitive science and concrete techniques to help readers ask more effective questions, build rapid rapport, and elicit honest, revealing answers; it emphasizes preparation, curiosity, active listening, managing power dynamics and cultural differences, using silence and follow-ups, and ethical responsibility, offering actionable frameworks and real-world examples to disarm subjects and get beyond surface responses.

Flashes of Brilliance traces the experiments and eccentric figures who shaped photography from the 1830s to the early 20th century. It covers daring technical breakthroughs and projects—from underground and night photography to underwater, aerial, and microscopic imaging—and profiles innovators such as Anna Atkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Étienne-Jules Marey. The book also looks at early challenges that endure today, including image manipulation, surveillance of suffragists, and how Black figures like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass used self-portraiture to claim identity. A compact, spoiler-free survey of how early photographic experiments changed the way we see the world.

A collection of essays in which Lawrence Burney examines his Baltimore upbringing, Black diasporic music, and family traditions. Blending personal memoir with cultural criticism, he writes about trips to Lagos and Johannesburg, a childhood memory of his mother opening for Gil Scott-Heron, and family gatherings in Maryland to reflect on identity, belonging, and how art shapes self-understanding.

Shadow Cell is a firsthand memoir by married CIA officers Andrew and Jihi Bustamante about being deployed after a mole compromised the agency’s source network in a rival country codenamed 'Falcon.' Considered expendable because they lacked local experience, the couple build a covert cell, recruit sources, and use unconventional tradecraft to uncover the insider threat. The book recounts their covert operations, the techniques they used in the field, and the personal risks of life in intelligence, without revealing key outcomes.

A behind-the-scenes account of the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, offering inside access to Springsteen and his band and detailing the writing and recording of each song while exploring the album’s creative process in a concise, spoiler-free way.

A searing collection of essays and reportage that traces the contours of Black life and American democracy, blending historical analysis, keen political commentary, and personal reflection to explore protest, policing, institutions, and the persistent fight for racial justice. Through examinations of moments from the civil rights era to contemporary movements, the book interrogates how power is wielded and contested, how narratives are shaped by media and politicians, and how everyday acts of resistance reveal the stakes of citizenship. Crisp, erudite, and morally urgent, the pieces illuminate both the structural forces that constrain Black lives and the improvisational strategies communities use to resist, persist, and imagine a more democratic future.

David Denby profiles Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer, showing how their Jewish heritage and American freedom shaped their work and reshaped mid‑20th‑century U.S. culture. Operating in music, comedy, feminism, and literature, they altered public tastes and debates while revealing ambition, contradictions, and intense personalities. The book examines their influence and character without revealing personal spoilers.

American Scare by Robert W. Fieseler examines how a mid-20th-century Florida legislative investigation, the Johns Committee, targeted Black and queer citizens. Using newly available primary documents and focusing on cases such as Art Copleston’s coercive interrogation, the book details how the committee—led by politician Charley Johns—used legal and extra-legal means to intimidate NAACP members, professors, and students, and shows the personal and community harms that resulted while drawing connections to present-day issues.

A lively culinary memoir that weaves together memories of living in the American West with recipes, folk stories, and meditations on hunger, survival, and identity; the narrator recounts episodes of childhood, relationships, farm and ranch life, and encounters with landscape and animals, using food as a lens to explore cultural history, personal loss, sexuality, creativity, and resilience, blending practical cookery with wry, lyrical observation.

After losing his corporate job and facing health challenges, Steve Grant becomes a rural letter carrier in his Appalachian hometown. As he delivers mail and supplies, he reconnects with neighbors, confronts family and identity issues, and finds renewed purpose, community, and meaning through the routine and relationships of daily postal work.

Aflame recounts Pico Iyer’s decades of silent retreats at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur and how those periods of stillness brought clarity and joy to his life. Facing personal upheavals—fires, loss, a daughter’s illness—he reflects on silence, inwardness, and how solitude can strengthen our capacity for companionship. The book blends memoir and observation of monastic practice to explore how quiet can reshape how we live and love.

Splendid Liberators is a narrative history of the 1898 Spanish–American War and its aftermath, exploring how the conflict expanded U.S. influence and affected Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Through portraits of central figures—Teddy Roosevelt, José Martí, Emilio Aguinaldo, Clara Barton, Mark Twain, and others—and scenes from battlefields, disease-ridden camps, and political debates, the book examines the human costs, resistance, and lasting consequences of America’s first major overseas intervention from American, Cuban, and Filipino perspectives.

Dinner with King Tut follows experimental archaeologists who recreate ancient foods, tools, technologies, and rituals to recover the sensory details of past lives. Sam Kean joins their hands-on experiments—firing catapults, building Roman-style roads, trying ancient surgery and tattooing, and sailing reconstructed boats—to evoke how people looked, sounded, and tasted across eras and cultures. The book offers a lively, research-based tour of everyday experience in history without revealing specific plot details.