Novelist, essayist, and critic Wideman delivers a profound, career-spanning collection of essays on literature, sports, and culture … Incisive and enthralling, the collection puts Wideman’s keen critical eye and cultural awareness on full display. The result is an essential chronicle of the American experience. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Religion, technology, power, and the rise and fall of entire empires are tied up with economics and commerce in McWilliams’ excellent whistle-stop tour of the way money has shaped world history. Covering centuries of innovations—from an ancient baboon femur called the Ishango Bone, possibly used for accounting, to digital-age solutions like M-Pesa, a service in Africa that turns mobile-phone credit into money—it’s a blast of a book. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Speculative fiction and the funkier corners of digital culture go together like chocolate and peanut butter—see Ryan North’s crowdsourced Machine of Death series or the novels based on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale for prime examples. Here, qntm (aka British author Sam Hughes) offers a legally sanitized but fantastically composed take on the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction project that blends horror and SF tropes with satire and literary experimentation. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
While obviously appealing to word nerds and writers, Fatsis’s narrative is more broadly relevant to anyone who speaks, reads, and writes in American English. It provides a thorough, thoughtful history of dictionaries and the language they both shape and record, while championing the dictionary’s continued relevance in the 21st century. Lively, well-researched, and often entertaining, Unabridged is an essential resource for anyone interested in understanding how language evolves. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. “Enshittification,” coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
[Frances] Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam – and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject … A brilliant book … There is an uncanny closeness between biographer and subject at play here, and I find myself wondering whether Wilson didn’t feel at times as if her manuscript wasn’t a form of automatic writing. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Rosson, who put a fresh spin on the zombie apocalypse trope in the Fever House duology, is equally creative with vampires in this brilliant horror novel set in 1970s Oregon … Rosson expertly balances action and character development to craft an edge of the seat thrill ride. Readers will be hooked. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Samanta Schweblin is the master of dread. Her stories are part of the growing literary movement that mixes psychological and social realism with touches of horror and suspense; releases such as 2014’s Fever Dream have enchanted and haunted readers. This new collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, will pull in readers and leave them, shivering, in the dark. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Damrosch is one of the preeminent literary biographers of our time, and this magnificent biography of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals much about a writer that we think we knew. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Alongside H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Nikola Tesla’s claim to have intercepted an extraterrestrial communication, Lowell’s fantastical lectures depicting “the pathos and heroism of this great civilization fighting to survive” sparked a Mars craze, which included comics, a new dance (“A Signal from Mars”), and claims from some individuals to have visited the Red Planet as “disembodied souls.” Baron astutely examines the societal shifts that account for the Martian fixation, among them the rise of a yellow press that craved sensationalistic stories, a new wave of exploration and invention (the Wright brothers’ flights; expeditions to the North Pole), and divisive earthbound struggles like the Spanish-American War that rendered Mars—an imagined “Planet of Peace”—as a symbol of hope. While Baron points to the dangers of conspiracy theories and bunk science, he also presents the saga as one of infectious optimism that inspired subsequent generations of science fiction writers and scientists. It’s an enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
