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A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counter-culture, disappeared in the 1970s, then released arguably the worst music of his career in the 1980s—only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative. That is not this story. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, After the Flood reveals Dylan’s output during the last three decades as his most ambitious yet. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films and books since the early 1990s, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito shows how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has embodied and resisted its era–interweaving Ovid and Americana, film noir and the Civil War. Imaginatively researched, After the Flood is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.

Like other great epics, Shahnameh is a chronicle of the human imaginative consciousness. It tells the long history of the Persian people beginning with the creation of the world and the origin myths of civilization and ending with the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century. A mix of myth, epic tales, and history, Shahnameh takes the reader on heroic adventures filled with superhuman champions, magical creatures, heart-wrenching love stories, and centuries-long battles."The illustrations of this Shahnameh, while totally dependent on the art of the past, most closely evoke the fantasy literature of today in visual form. Thanks to the dramatic dynamism of Ferdowsi's epic, its contemporary interpretation in images is a vibrant feast for the imagination, making this a Shahnameh for the digital age." —Sheila Canby, Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Remarkably, a nineteen-year-old, writing her first novel, penned a tale that combines tragedy, morality, social commentary, and a thoughtful examination of the very nature of knowledge", writes Leslie S. Klinger. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often reductively dismissed as a monster film or a cautionary tale about experimental science gone haywire. Illuminating every hidden dimension of the "first truly modern myth", Klinger does for Shelley’s story of early nineteenth-century horror what he did for Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and H.P. Lovecraft, bringing this gothic tale to nightmarish life by reproducing the original text with the most lavishly illustrated and comprehensively annotated edition to date.

In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrolcolored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the second-century Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent specters of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlors laborers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city.Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, Alan Moore’s epic novel, Jerusalem, is the tale of Everything, told from a vanished gutter.

For three decades following World War II, the Great Lakes overtook Europe as the epicenter of global economic strength. The region was the beating heart of the world economy, possessing all the power and prestige Silicon Valley does today. And no ship represented the apex of the American Century better than the 729-foot-long Edmund Fitzgerald—the biggest, best, and most profitable ship on the Lakes.But on November 10, 1975, as the “storm of the century” threw 100 mile-per-hour winds and 50-foot waves on Lake Superior, the Mighty Fitz found itself at the worst possible place, at the worst possible time. When she sank, she took all 29 men onboard down with her, leaving the tragedy shrouded in mystery for a half century.In The Gales of November, award-winning journalist John U. Bacon presents the definitive account of the disaster, drawing on more than 100 interviews with the families, friends, and former crewmates of those lost. Bacon explores the vital role Great Lakes shipping played in America’s economic boom, the uncommon lives the sailors led, the sinking’s most likely causes, and the heartbreaking aftermath for those left behind—"the wives, the sons, and the daughters,” as Gordon Lightfoot sang in his unforgettable ballad.Focused on those directly affected by the tragedy, The Gales of November is both an emotional tribute to the lives lost and a propulsive, page-turning narrative history of America’s most-mourned maritime disaster.

Finally in paperback and featuring seven new song commentaries, the #1 New York Times bestseller celebrates the creative life and unparalleled musical genius of Paul McCartney.Spanning sixty-four years—from his early days in Liverpool, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo career—Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics revolutionized the way artists write about music. An unprecedented “triumph” (Times UK), this handsomely designed volume pairs the definitive texts of over 160 songs with first-person commentaries on McCartney’s life, revealing the diverse circumstances in which songs were written; how they ultimately came to be; and the remarkable, yet often delightfully ordinary, people and places that inspired them. The Lyrics also includes:· A personal foreword by McCartney· An unprecedented range of songs, from beloved standards like “Band on the Run” to new additions “Day Tripper” and “Magical Mystery Tour”· Over 160 images from McCartney’s own archivesEdited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, The Lyrics is the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

The product of a ten-year-long collaboration between one of our most respected scholars of Islam (Bruce B. Lawrence) and a poet and scholar of literature (M.A.R. Habib), The Qur’an: A Verse Translation offers readers the first edition in English to echo, in accessible and resonant verse, the sonorous beauty of the Arabic original as well as the complex nuances of its meaning. Those familiar with the Arabic—and especially the faithful who hear the text recited aloud—know that the Qur’an is a perfect blend of sound and sense. While no translation can perfectly capture these complementary virtues of the original, Habib and Lawrence have come closest to an accessible, clear and fluid English Qur’an that all readers, no matter their faith or familiarity with the text, can read with pleasure and with a deeper appreciation for the book and the religious tradition founded upon it.

Originating nearly four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, the epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of a tyrannical king and his wild counterpart, Enkidu, spawned by the gods to rein in the king’s cruel tendencies. They face off in a violent wrestling match, but the clash forges a bond between them. The deep, fiercely intimate camaraderie that emerges carries the two men through extraordinary adventures, from a bloody battle with the fearsome forest guardian, Humbaba, to a cataclysmic struggle with the Bull of Heaven. As the friends venture further into the unknown, they find themselves confronted with the ultimate, defining fate of all humankind.At once a story about love among men and a timeless meditation on loss, grief, and the longing to outlast death, Gilgamesh is at its core one of the oldest and most majestic depictions of human resilience and dignity.Now, in the hands of Simon Armitage, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, this primeval epic swells and flows in rhythmic, contemporary English with a vitality and immediacy that only a genuinely poetic rendering can achieve. Grounded in the latest scholarship but always propulsively readable, Armitage’s version brings the ancient text to new life, offering a new generation of readers a thrilling portal into the very dawn of storytelling.PRAISE FOR SIMON ARMITAGE“Simon Armitage . . . continues the tradition of great poet-translators such as Edward FitzGerald, Arthur Waley, and Seamus Heaney."—John Ashbery“He reminds me of early Auden, a comparison that doesn’t strike me as extravagant."—Peter Sansom, The Poetry Business“Simon Armitage’s work is earthed—no matter what he is writing about, his poetry is never shallow-rooted.” —Kate Kellaway, GuardianPraise for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight“Drives the force of the old poem through the green Armitage fuse. Highly charged work” —Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize–winning translator of Beowulf“Full of make-believe and festivity, this wonderful narrative poem possesses a Mozartean lightness and wit. . . . Deftly replicate[s] much of the feel and rhythm of the Middle English original.” —Michael Dirda, Wall Street JournalPraise for Pearl“[Armitage] conveys that feeling of the almost-but-not-quite comprehensible, the feeling that can make medieval art at once eerie and wonderful.”—Jo Livingstone, The New Yorker“Armitage continues to contribute the same service to culture as Carson, Heaney, Hughs and Graves; he gives blood transfusions to the texts which deserve preservation.” —Huffington Post [UK]

When How to Make It in the New Music Business hit shelves in 2016, it instantly became the go-to resource for musicians eager to make a living in a turbulent industry. Widely adopted by music schools everywhere and considered “the best how- to book of its kind” (Music Connection), this essential work has inspired tens of thousands of aspiring artists to stop waiting around for that “big break” and take matters into their own hands. In this highly anticipated new edition, Ari Herstand reveals how to build a profitable career with the many tools at our fingertips in the post-COVID era and beyond, from conquering social media and mastering the digital landscape to embracing authentic fan connection and simply learning how to persevere. This edition breaks down these phenomena and more, resulting in a timeless must-have for anyone hoping to navigate the increasingly complex yet advantageous landscape that is the modern music business.

A pioneer of social psychology, Claude M. Steele is renowned for Whistling Vivaldi, a bestseller that analysed societal stereotypes—from beliefs about racial and gender test score gaps to the athletic prowess of Black men—and how to mitigate them. In Churn, he coins a new term to identify “the agitation we can feel in diverse settings”, such as everyday exchanges between teachers and students; police and the public; managers and employees; parents and children; and strangers, or even friends, of different sexes and races. Steele braids together psychological research with his own biracial life story, demonstrating how initial wariness between people of different identities is as much a product of our history as of our biases. Through brilliant analysis Churn reveals how trust building can be a fresh and powerful strategy for mitigating these tensions in the real-life settings of our lives and for realising the full potential of a multiracial, multiethnic and multi-classed democracy.

The culmination of a half-century of historical investigation, A People Betrayed is not only a definitive history of modern Spain but also a compelling narrative that becomes a lens for understanding the challenges that virtually all democracies have faced in the modern world.Whereas so many twentieth-century Spanish histories begin with Franco and the devastating Civil War, Paul Preston’s magisterial work begins in the late nineteenth century with Spain’s collapse as a global power, especially reflected in its humiliating defeat in 1898 at the hands of the United States and its loss of colonial territory.This loss hung over Spain in the early years of the twentieth century, its agrarian economic base standing in stark contrast to the emergence of England, Germany, and France as industrial powers. Looking back to the years prior to 1923, Preston demonstrates how electoral corruption infiltrated almost every sector of Spanish life, thus excluding the masses from organized politics and giving them a bitter choice between apathetic acceptance of a decrepit government or violent revolution. So ineffective was the Republic—which had been launched in 1873—that it paved the way for a military coup and dictatorship, led by Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923, exacerbating widespread profiteering and fraud. When Rivera was forced to resign in 1930, his fall brought forth a succession of feeble governments, stoking rancorous tensions that culminated in the tragic Spanish Civil War.With astonishing detail, Preston describes the ravages that rent Spain in half between 1936 and 1939. Tracing the frightening rise of Francisco Franco, Preston recounts how Franco grew into Spain’s most powerful military leader during the Civil War and how, after the war, he became a fascistic dictator who not only terrorized the Spanish population through systematic oppression and murder but also enriched corrupt officials who profited from severe economic plunder of Spain’s working class.The dictatorship lasted through World War II—during which Spain sided with Mussolini and Hitler—and only ended decades later, in 1975, when Franco’s death was followed by a painful yet bloodless transition to republican democracy. Yet, as Preston reveals, corruption and political incompetence continued to have a corrosive effect on social cohesion into the twenty-first century, as economic crises, Catalan independence struggles, and financial scandals persist in dividing the country.Filled with vivid portraits of politicians and army officers, revolutionaries and reformers, and written in the “absorbing” (Economist) style for which Preston is so revered, A People Betrayed is the first historical work to examine the continuities of political unrest and national anxiety in Spain up until the present, providing a chilling reminder of just how fragile democracy remains in the twenty-first century.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that the need to matter is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the very crux of the human experience. Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through stories of people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns; and a skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that past. These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture and conflict–and they point the way to a future where we might see there is enough mattering to go around. Deeply revealing and insightful, The Mattering Instinct is for those curious about why we seek to matter to ourselves and others–and how this insatiable longing that drives us apart may be the key to understanding each other.

An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a cult following in Italy for forty years. Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fuelled by social media, we find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria’s vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet—and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing—this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever.Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, The Twenty Days of Turin establishes De Maria’s place among the literary ranks of Italo Calvino and beside classic horror masters. Hauntingly imaginative, with viscerally chilling prose, the novel is an eerily clairvoyant magnum opus.

In a bunker deep below Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, took their own lives just after 3:00 p.m. on April 30, 1945—Hitler by gunshot to the temple, Braun by ingesting cyanide. But the Führer’s suicide did not instantly end either Nazism or the Second World War in Europe. Far from it: the eight days that followed were among the most traumatic in modern history, witnessing not only the final paroxysms of bloodshed and the frantic surrender of the Wehrmacht, but the total disintegration of the once-mighty Third Reich.In Eight Days in May, the award-winning historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich draws on an astonishing variety of sources, including diaries and letters of ordinary Germans, to narrate a society’s descent into Hobbesian chaos. In the town of Demmin in the north, residents succumbed to madness and committed mass suicide. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers raped German civilians on a near-unprecedented scale. In Nazi-occupied Prague, Czech insurgents led an uprising in the hope that General George S. Patton would come to their aid but were brutally put down by German units in the city. Throughout the remains of Third Reich, huge numbers of people were on the move, creating a surrealistic tableau: death marches of concentration-camp inmates crossed paths with retreating Wehrmacht soldiers and groups of refugees; columns of POWs encountered those of liberated slave laborers and bombed-out people returning home.A taut, propulsive narrative, Eight Days in May takes us inside the phantomlike regime of Hitler’s chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, revealing how the desperate attempt to impose order utterly failed, as frontline soldiers deserted and Nazi Party fanatics called on German civilians to martyr themselves in a last stand against encroaching Allied forces. In truth, however, the post-Hitler government represented continuity more than change: its leaders categorically refused to take responsibility for their crimes against humanity, an attitude typical not just of the Nazi elite but also of large segments of the German populace. The consequences would be severe. Eight Days in May is not only an indispensable account of the Nazi endgame, but a historic work that brilliantly examines the costs of mass delusion.

During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, leading scholar of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualise the early stages of his magnum opus, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, had never before been published in English, the Viennese-born Perloff determinedly set about translating them.Beginning with the anxious summer of 1914, this historic, en-face edition presents the first-person recollections of a foot soldier in the Austrian Army, fresh from his days as a philosophy student at Cambridge, who must grapple with the hazing of his fellow soldiers, the stirrings of a forbidden sexuality and the formation of an explosive analytical philosophy that seemed to draw meaning from his endless brushes with death. Much like Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, Private Notebooks takes us on a personal journey to discovery as it augments our knowledge of Wittgenstein himself.

First published in 1844, Søren Kierkegaard’s concise treatise identified—long before Freud—anxiety as a profound human condition, portraying human existence largely as a constant struggle with our own spiritual identities.

Dostoevsky’s final, greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, paints a complex and richly detailed portrait of a family tormented by its extraordinarily cruel patriarch, Fyodor Pavlovich, whose callous decisions slowly decimate the lives of his sons—the eponymous brothers Karamazov—and lead to his violent murder. In the aftermath of the killing, the brothers contend with dilemmas of honour, faith and reason as the community closes in on the murderer in their midst. Acclaimed translator Michael R. Katz renders this masterpiece’s nuanced and evocative storytelling in a vibrant, signature prose style that captures all the power of Dostoevsky’s original—the clever humour, the rich emotion, the passion and the turmoil—and that will captivate and unsettle a new generation of readers.

Robert Hayden was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Also included is an introduction by American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as an afterword by Arnold Rampersad that provides a critical and historical context. In Hayden’s work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice—characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern—is a seminal one in American life and literature.

So essential is Crime and Punishment (1866) to global literature and to our understanding of Russia that it was one of the three books Edward Snowden, while confined to the Moscow airport, was given to help him absorb the culture. In a work that best embodies the existential dilemmas of man’s will to power, an impoverished student, sees himself as extraordinary and therefore free to commit crimes.English translators have struggled with excessive literalism and no translation is felicitous to the literary nuances of the original prose. Now, Michael Katz addresses these challenges with new insights into the linguistic richness, the subtle tones and the cunning humour in this sparkling rendition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece.

In a revelatory work praised as “excellent and timely” (New York Times Book Review, front page), Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight, once again makes sense of our fraught constitutional history in this incisive portrait of how American businesses seized political power, won “equal rights,” and transformed the Constitution to serve big business.Uncovering the deep roots of Citizens United, he repositions that controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision as the capstone of a centuries-old battle for corporate personhood. “Tackling a topic that ought to be at the heart of political debate” (Economist), Winkler surveys more than four hundred years of diverse cases—and the contributions of such legendary legal figures as Daniel Webster, Roger Taney, Lewis Powell, and even Thurgood Marshall—to reveal that “the history of corporate rights is replete with ironies” (Wall Street Journal). We the Corporations is an uncompromising work of history to be read for years to come.

On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two white fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, this act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America.In Covered with Night , leading historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of white colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period. As she shows, the murder of the Indigenous man set the entire mid-Atlantic on edge, with many believing war was imminent. Isolated killings often flared into colonial wars in North America and colonists now anticipated a vengeful Indigenous uprising. Frantic efforts to resolve the case ignited a dramatic, far-reaching debate between Native American forms of justice—centred on community, forgiveness and reparations—and an ideology of harsh reprisal, unique to the colonies and based on British law, which called for the killers’ swift execution.In charting the far-reaching ramifications of the murder, Covered with Night —a phrase from Iroquois mourning practices—overturns persistent assumptions about “civilised” Europeans and “savage” Native Americans. As Eustace powerfully contends, the colonial obsession with “civility” belied the reality that the Iroquois, far from being the barbarians of the white imagination, acted under a mantle of sophistication and humanity as they tried to make the land- and power-hungry colonials understand their ways. In truth, Eustace reveals, the Iroquois—the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, as they are known today—saw the killing as an opportunity to forge stronger bonds with the colonists. They argued for restorative justice and for reconciliation between the two sides, even as they mourned the deceased.An absorbing chronicle built around an extraordinary group of characters—from the slain man’s resilient widow to the Indigenous diplomat known as “Captain Civility” to the scheming governor of Pennsylvania—Covered with Night transforms a single event into an unforgettable portrait of early America. A necessary work of historical reclamation, it ultimately revives a lost vision of crime and punishment that reverberates down into our time.

From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian” (the first was his bestselling debut, Faserland). Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his eighty-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her. As they traverse Switzerland together in a hired cab, mother and son attempt to give away her vast fortune, stuffed in a large plastic bag, to random strangers.By turns disturbing, disorienting, hilarious, and poignant, and brilliantly rendered in English by prize-winning translator Daniel Bowles, Eurotrash tells an intensely personal and unsparingly critical story of contemporary culture; a story that shows us a writer at the pinnacle of his powers of insight and observation.

“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. “In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first “clinic for the past,” an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine’s assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives—a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself.“A trickster at heart, and often very funny” (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).

“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: “I want to make life fuller and fuller.” Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.“This book is splendid: Impish, irate, deep, courageous. . . . Brava!”—Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport

With this “impeccable” (BBC History) chronicle, acclaimed popular historian Ruth Goodman reveals a Renaissance Britain particularly rank with troublemakers. From snooty needlers who took aim with a cutting “thee,” to lowbrow drunkards with revolting table manners, Goodman’s “gleeful and illuminating” (Booklist, starred review) portrait of offenses most foul draws upon advice manuals, court cases, and sermons. Wicked readers will delight in learning why quoting Shakespeare was poor form, and why curses hurled at women were almost always about sex (no surprise there). “Accessible, fun, and historically accurate” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), How to Behave Badly is a celebration of one of history’s naughtiest periods, when derision was an art form.“Oh, how I wish Ruth Goodman could be my tutor. But settling in for one of her history lessons is better than second best.” — Alicia Becker, New York Times Book Review

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending and weaving—is carried out.In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern.The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.

Acclaimed poet and translator Aaron Poochigian’s vibrant new translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations captures and accentuates an aspect of the best-selling work of classical antiquity that other English translations have, remarkably, overlooked: Marcus’ distinct, varying voices. There’s Marcus the aspirant, speaking encouragingly to himself as a diarist might; Marcus the instructor, exhorting and chiding himself as a “you” that includes us all; Marcus the stylist, spinning memorable, quotable epigrams; and Marcus the philosopher, opining about the “human commonwealth” of which we are all members. This multi-vocal chorus is apparent to all who can read the original Koine Greek text, but Poochigian’s sensitive ear has captured it in English as no translator has before. The result is a Meditations that is as pleasurable to read as it is profound—a revelation even to readers who think they know it well.About Aaron Poochigian’s translation:“Aristophanes was a funny, often obscene social commentator, and he was also a brilliantly fluent, wide-ranging poet, whose lyric rhythms were recited and sung to music, with dancing. It’s very rare for modern translators to convey his poetic virtuosity or make any attempt to bring his meters to life. But Aaron Poochigan has achieved this feat, crafting polymetric translations that convey the whole range of Aristophanes’ larger-than-life characters and provocative, alternative-reality scenarios. This new translation is zany, sharp, inventive, vivacious, and surprisingly relevant for our times.” — Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.

The year is 1991. Eritrea is on the verge of liberation from Ethiopian rule and in Washington, D.C.’s tight-knit Eritrean community, change is in the air. Thirteen-year-old Lydia and her family are grappling with what peace might mean for their future, just as they welcome a new relative into their home: Berekhet, a cousin newly arrived from Ethiopia to attend medical school. Berekhet encourages Lydia to confront a barrage of new ideas for the first time, about nationhood, family and what it means to be truly free. Meanwhile, her mother, Elsa, a former rebel fighter, and the family matriarch, Mama Zewdi, contend with regrets and secrets long-buried—secrets that the emboldened Lydia is determined to uncover, including the truth about her martyred father. Written with warmth and sharp humour, Bsrat Mezghebe’s mesmerising debut novel is a loving ode to an immigrant community on the cusp of a new age.