Catherine Liu doesn’t write like your typical academic. This is what I noticed first about her latest book, Traumatized, a slender volume that delivers in clarity what it lacks in heft. Liu states her ...

What We Can Know is divided into two parts, each covering the same events from information available a century apart. Part One, narrated by a humanities professor, Thomas Metcalf, takes place in the ...

This June and July were two of the hottest months ever recorded. Wildfires in Canada blanketed a swath of the United States in choking smoke. In the state of Vermont in early July, more than nine ...

When considered in the context of everything that befalls its author and its recipient, this opening sentence of V. V. Ganeshanathan’s sprawling second novel, Brotherless Night, encapsulates ...

It’s no surprise that Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a bestseller in the thriller & suspense and—not as obvious to me—literary fiction categories. Thousands of readers are eagerly turning its ...

Who better than Werner Herzog, the Bavarian mad genius, to take us on a heady time-travelling exploration on what truth might mean/be/permit? The Future of Truth is a summation of his life project, ...

“There is simply no accounting for her gifts. She was a unicorn, born among horses.” So wrote author and cultural critic William Deresiewicz in “The Quality to be Tragic,” his sharp and insightful ...

At a mere 4.5 by 6.5 inches, only 122 pages long, with a cover that’s bright white and soothing flamingo pink, Brian Eno and Bette A.’s What Art Does beckons with an easy-going, “See? Manageable.” ...

Peter Kuper’s book-length comic, Insectopolis: A Natural History, begins with an entomologist and her brother walking to the New York Public Library to see an exhibition on insects entitled ...

It’s late November in Norway and the days are cold and short. A woman and her dog occupy a small cabin in a remote, forested area. The woman, whose name we never learn, tells us, “I usually retreated ...

Pria Anand starts The Mind Electric by relating two childhood fascinations—her grandfather’s neurological symptoms from post-polio syndrome and, before she could read, the fantastical tales invented ...

Although the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020 didn’t turn out to be nearly as bad as the 14 th century European Black Death, in the midst of the lockdown people had no idea of what we would ultimately be ...