John J. Lennon’s book, written in his twenty-fourth year in prison, provides a bracing reckoning with guilt, remorse, and the possibility of change.

Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness follows four friends through personal and political upheavals.

Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flames argues that landlords—driven by financialization and the development of insurance “brownlining” in the 1960s and 1970s—are largely to blame.

A new book on the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz focuses on music that was sanctioned by the SS and used for sadistic purposes.

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death posited that we act out in antisocial ways—and even embrace authoritarians—because we cannot face our own unavoidable demise.

In the wake of the forever wars, the U.S. military has largely looked the other way while criminality and violence pervade its largest base.

By restricting circulation of his work and cultivating an intimate yet prominent group of friends who championed it, the “poet of Alexandria” helped ensure his stature would only grow after his death.

The essays in Jamaica Kincaid’s Putting Myself Together: Writings 1974– track the maturation of one of our most distinguished writers.

Ross Barkan’s engrossing, literary analysis of the 2024 election disappoints with its blinkered vision of U.S. politics.

The Cycles of American History foresaw American voter dealignment, and an electronic age that would see voters prioritize personality over party—but it didn’t anticipate Trump.

Street vending has become a necessary alternative for many to make ends meet, forging a sense of solidarity while reinforcing inequities.

Alice Bolin’s essay collection, Culture Creep, interrogates the preoccupation with 2000s-era icons and aesthetics—and how it prevents us from engaging with their more noxious elements.

The Möbius Book explores love, faith, and cliché—​but its experiments in form don’t live up to their promise.

William F. Buckley Jr. was the erudite heart of American conservatism. But the political vision that he helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.

A psychoanalyst trains her attention on the act of breathing, and it no longer seems quite so simple.

The paranoia and conspiracy theories of the McCarthy era still inform our culture and politics in the present day.

In a smart, well-observed memoir, a longtime reporter on internet culture explores how childbearing has become inescapably mediated by technology.

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.

At the turn of the century, the expatriate novelist visited the U.S. for the first time in decades. He left feeling more estranged from his home country than ever.