Smart, self-aware, fun, creepy, and strange, The Beast You Are is even better than the outstanding Growing Things — and it further cements Tremblay as one of the finest voices in modern horror fiction as well as a dazzling innovator of the short form regardless of genre. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
An efficient, fast-paced cyberpunk story . . . The novel’s speculations about human agency resonate in the current moment, when American tech C.E.O.s oscillate between issuing sonorous warnings about the existential risks of the A.I. systems they’re developing and breathless hype about brain-computer interfaces. The book imagines the imminent emergence of companies run by artificial intelligence—companies as intelligence, a fusion of technology and economic logic that will definitively outrun humanity. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
…it’s a pleasure to encounter Dan Schreiber’s “The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird,” a willfully miscellaneous survey of the bizarre beliefs that people have held over the centuries: the kind of random, strange-for-the-sake-of-strange compendium that’s seldom published anymore. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Erudite, seemingly emotionless, haughty, absolutely unrepentant, and elusive, Macarthur evaded easy analysis. The resulting picture of the killer is seen as if through a proverbial dark glass—and it’s as chilling, in the end, as any Hitchcock film. A superb study of real-life crime and punishment, to say nothing of sociopathy in action. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
She never wallows in loathing, self- or otherwise. Instead, she lets us all in on the joke. And what a joke it is … Calling Quietly Hostile a collection of essays is a bit limiting. These 17 pieces are more like essays crossed with stand-up bits, and that punchline-driven rhythm serves the book spectacularly well … Irby dexterously plays both sides: the awkward people-pleaser and the snarky cynic. Like a cartoon character in a tennis match against herself, she races back and forth between self-deprecation and scalding humor, never once missing a stroke. People may be shallow, Irby is more than happy to point out, but she’s right down there with them — quietly hostile, sure, but also loudly irresistible. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
The enigmatic Susan Taubes wrote the coming-of-age novel “Lament for Julia” in the 1960s; 54 years after her death, its gothic splendors shine. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
In this dazzling memoir, essayist Rosen chronicles his thorny relationship with his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a lawyer and disability rights advocate who made headlines in 1998 for murdering his fiancée during a paranoid episode. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
In the late Sixties, countercultural media was distributed by the Underground Press Syndicate and bankrolled by marijuana. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
In an age variously described as posthumanist, transhumanist, or anti-humanist, an age where inhumane rulers hold sway over large swathes of the globe, an age where artificial intelligence threatens to render humanism a quaint relic from the past, Bakewell makes clear what we risk losing should we fail to connect with our humanist heritage. She distills this credo into three principles: freethinking (which emphasizes our moral conscience and duty to others), inquiry (which privileges reason over dogma as a guide to our lives), and hope (which insists that, though our lives are brief and fallible, we can achieve meaningful things). Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
University of Texas law professor Vladeck debuts with an expert study of how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has increasingly used “obscure procedural orders to shift American jurisprudence definitively to the right.” Unlike the “merits docket,” where justices issue lengthy, signed opinions months after hearing oral arguments, rulings handed down on the “shadow docket” are unsigned, unexplained, and often released in the middle of the night. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
