Recommended Reads

The Benevolent Academy for the Betterment of Young Ladies strives to distract, disrupt, and discredit men in power who would seek to harm the advancement of women. When intrepid newspaper editor Miles Quincey starts to question the school’s intentions, the Academy appoints Penelope “Nell” Trewlove, one of their brightest graduates, to put this nuisance to rest. It would be an easy mission if Miles wasn’t too fascinating to resist -- and if Nell’s visit to London didn’t perfectly coincide with the murder of one of Miles’s reporters. 
 

On Halloween night, Jet Mason is violently attacked by an unseen intruder, suffering a catastrophic head injury. Doctors are certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a fatal aneurysm. But now, in the one week she has left, she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend. As her condition deteriorates, she reconnects with her childhood friend Billy, the only one willing to help her solve her own murder.

In Healthy to 100, longevity expert Ken Stern takes us on a journey to some of the longest-lived countries in the world--Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Spain--places that have achieved great advances in longevity by intentionally strengthening social connections. Science shows that physical and mental health outcomes are all improved by the intergenerational connectedness, sense of purpose, and respect enjoyed by older people in these countries.

In The Fight of His Life, award-winning sports historians Johnny Smith and Randy Roberts tell the story of heavyweight champion Joe Louis's battles both in and out of the ring. Already world-famous at the outset of World War II, Louis enlisted in the army, serving as a goodwill ambassador and promoting unity across military bases that crackled with racial tension. Yet Louis's experience with segregation in the army sparked his political awakening. As the war dragged on, he advocated for Black soldiers facing discrimination. Once the war ended, he joined veterans and civil rights activists to fight for voting rights and racial equality.

Margaret’s rare autoimmune condition destroys her life until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial, providing that she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. Then she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital. Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls.

Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments--a former sanatorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Fern alone is acquainted with the undead, and one day, Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster. Intent on solving the mystery of this discarded corpse, Fern eagerly puts her encyclopedic knowledge of detective novels to good use while dodging warnings from her increasingly paranoid mother. 



 

1963, Guatemala. The country is in turmoil, with a presidential election looming and a charismatic, left-wing ex-priest and trade union leader predicted to win. United Fruits, a giant American corporation responsible for a large percentage of the country's GNP, meanwhile, is not pleased by this prospect. Neither is the CIA. Amid the uncertainty, Gabriel Dax arrives on orders from his MI6 handler Faith Green, who has tasked him with assessing the fallout from the election.

When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin Monife, there is no denying the startling resemblance between the child and the dead woman. So begins the belief, fostered and fanned by the entire family, that Eniiyi is the actual reincarnation of Monife, fated to follow in her footsteps in all ways, including that tragic end. There is also the matter of the family curse: "No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace..." which has been handed down from generation to generation, breaking hearts and causing three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof. 
 

Within these pages, characters—both feline and human—come fully alive as we travel with them through the quiet and changing forests of Amur. The Siberian Tiger Project became the longest-running tiger research initiative; its work continues to guide conservationists today. Jonathan C. Slaght’s Tigers Between Empires is the thrilling saga of the great Amur tiger and the scientists who came together, across the world, to save it.

Drawing from six previously published books--including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things--as well as vibrant new work, Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns--the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe--and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Laney Reynolds knows there's only one place that can help her heal a broken heart: The small town where she grew up, Cherrywood Creek. It feels good to leave the bustling city, where her husband was too busy climbing the corporate ladder to notice the growing distance between them. Connor received his wake-up call loud and clear when Laney left, and there's no way he's giving up on his marriage. If that means dropping everything and trading high-rises for gingerbread houses to sweep his wife off her feet in her hometown, then so be it. 

Gish’s mother, Loo Shu-hsin, is born in 1924 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Sent to a modern Catholic school, she receives not only an English name—Agnes—but also a first-rate education. Agnes finds solace in books and, in 1947, announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. In New York, she begins dating Jen Chao-Pe, and they do their best to successfully establish a new American life. By the time Gish is born, the news from China is proving inescapable; their marriage is foundering; and Agnes is confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself.
 

Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters—but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten. Centuries later, Owen Mallory—failed soldier, struggling scholar—falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives—and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.
 

While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines. For sure no one expected the dead to rise, but they did. No one expected the mountain to fall either, but it did. No one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif, to say nothing of Pillars Meadow. 
 

An inspirational work of wisdom, warmth, and generosity from a three-term US poet laureate.
 

In her best-selling memoir Poet Warrior, Harjo led readers through her lifelong process of artistic evolution. In Girl Warrior, she speaks directly to Native girls and women, sharing stories about her own coming of age to bring renewed attention to the pivotal moments of becoming including forgiveness, failure, falling, rising up, and honoring our vast family of beings.

Welcome to the merriest, most stylish guide to holiday joy ever made. This dazzling book has it all—including recipes (some from iconic people, such as Abraham Lincoln’s gingerbread recipe and Jackie Kennedy’s Polet a l’Estragon); decor advice (all decadent-looking but easily achievable, thanks to input from designers); monthly to-do list calendars for your sanity; playlists of unexpected holiday jams for different types of events (from cocktail parties to lingering candlelight suppers); and DIY gift ideas that will actually be adored.

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood--overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences--swoops in and stays. As these friends move from the late 2000's into the late 2020's, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another amid the increasing volatility of modern American life.

Chloe Vance, dreamer of the family, needs to tell her pragmatic mom, Edie, that she has accepted a low-paying position as an art instructor. Her older sister, Lauren, is doing all she can to hide the fact she's been fired for a foolish mistake and is desperately seeking her next career move. Edie, estranged from her own sister following their mother's recent death, is in no mood for anything else to change. As the three women embark on a nine-day road trip to visit significant literary sites throughout America's heartland, they hope to find inspiration through the works and lives of literary greats. 

Seven strangers meet for an anonymously hosted dinner party. As the evening winds down, seven cards appear, one in front of each of the guests, noting the age at which they will die. Two weeks later, one of them is dead at exactly the age the card predicted. As more guests die, each one dead at the same age as their card, it soon becomes clear that something sinister is afoot. It's up to the group to figure out who (or what) was behind that fateful dinner party before their numbers catch up with them.

Jamie Wendon-Dale creates haunted houses for a living, but nobody working New Orleans' spooky circuit actually believes in ghosts. Edgar Lovejoy has been tormented by ghosts since childhood. Opposites? Get ready to attract. But while Jamie's biggest concern is that Edgar sometimes seems a bit distracted, Edgar fears encountering the dearly departed whenever he leaves the house AND he's terrified of making himself vulnerable to Jamie. After all, how do you tell someone who believes ghosts only exist as smoke and mirrors that you see them everywhere you go? 

In this startlingly original, deeply irreverent cultural history, Ruby Tandoh traces that transformation, exposing how cult cookbooks, bad TV, visionary restaurants, and new social media have all wildly overhauled our appetites. A deep dive into the social, economic, cultural, legislative, and demographic forces that have reshaped our relationship with food, All Consuming questions how our tastes have been shaped—and how much they are, in fact, our own.

Author of the celebrated A History of America in Ten Strikes, Erik Loomis uncovers a rich and revealing history of social change activism with immediate relevance to our present. In twenty short biographies, Organizing America tells the story of America through its most important organizers. A chronological story with a vast sweep, Organizing America considers a cross section of social justice activists across time, race, gender, and movement, examining lives as varied as Benjamin Lay, Ida B. Wells, Eugene V. Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bob Moses, Yuri Kochiyama, Daniel Berrigan, Dolores Huerta, Barbara Gittings, and many more.

With the CIA’s Moscow Station paralyzed by a catastrophic intelligence failure, Stansfield seeks help from Mitch Rapp, a newly minted assassin in the secretive Orion program. But Rapp has problems of his own: when his Swiss girlfriend Greta’s grandfather receives a box containing the head of a former Cold War comrade along with a note promising that Greta’s head will be next, Rapp finds himself on the frontlines in a war between the American and Russian intelligence services. 

The rain brings Mma Ramotswe a new client, who suspects his wife of having an affair. Mma Ramotswe decides to bring Charlie along on the matter, and they begin to suspect their client may not have been entirely truthful in explaining his predicament. She can always rely on her Mma Potokwane for a steaming cup of red bush tea, some wise counsel, and a generous slice of cake. The pumpkins in Mma Potokwane’s garden flourish, as do her keen insights, both of which will prove invaluable to Mma Ramotswe as she investigates.

Alex Delmore needs a miracle. Good thing there's a genie in town--and he's hiring at the Wellspring Mall. It'd help if the Jinn-formerly-of-the-Ring-of-Khorad knew even one thing about 21st-century America. When Alex and the genie set up their wishing kiosk, they face seemingly-endless setbacks. But when the wishing biz might start working, the biggest problem of all remains: People are really terrible at wishing.

Mary Darling is a pretty wife whose boring husband is befuddled by her independent ways. But one fateful night, Mary becomes the distraught mother whose three children have gone missing from their beds. To save her family, Mary must escape an attempt to have her locked away as mad, and to travel halfway around the world. 

In the spring of 2018, Tom Piazza climbed into a 1977 Coupe de Ville with the great singer-songwriter John Prine to write an article for the Oxford American. Their Florida road trip ignited a deep friendship, full of tall tales over epic meals, long nights playing guitar and trading songs, and visits back and forth between their homes in Nashville and New Orleans. When Prine died suddenly of COVID in April 2020, that unfinished memoir evolved into an intimate and very personal narrative of the artist's final years. 

Prudence Welch has found solace in her introverted life in Baysville, a charming tourist town in Northern Ontario. Enter Milo Kablukov, an enigmatic wanderer whose beat-up van covered with ill-advised bumper stickers rolls into town just when Prue needs a change. Milo, a man of many adventures and countless stories, is not one to settle down. However, his brother’s urgent need for help has brought him to Baysville, and now the intriguing Prue has given him more reason to stay.

How Your House Works provides a working overview of all the basic systems that make up your home, from electrical systems to HVAC to plumbing and beyond. Richly illustrated and with clear, accessible language, this book demystifies the foundations of home ownership and puts you in control of the structures that make your house work.

Brittany Tinsley, a self-injury recovery advocate, shares her deeply personal journey from self-harm to healing and offers readers a transformative path from isolation to connection, fear to hope, and hurt to wholeness. Perfect for anyone facing personal challenges, Stories Our Scars Tell speaks to the heart of identity, self-worth, and the pursuit of hope. 

Growing up with her younger siblings in the unforgiving New Zealand bush, Effie believed their parents had cut them off from civilization because they loved Nature. She never suspected that their reasons might be more menacing. After witnessing a terrifying episode of violence, she escaped the wilderness to forge a life for herself halfway across the globe. In order to find out once and for all what became of her family—and possibly help a mysterious girl who could be her younger self—Effie must face her greatest fears once more.

The Berisha family runs one of the largest import-export companies in the world, and they’ve always been lucky. At least that is what Zef, the patriarch, has always told his three children. And each of them knows their place in the family—Dardan, as the only male heir, must prepare to take over as keeper of the Berisha secrets, Maris’s most powerful contribution, much to her dismay, will be to marry strategically, and Nora’s job, as the youngest, is to just stay out of the way. But when things stop going as planned, and the family blessing starts looking more like a curse, the Berishas begin to splinter, each hatching their own secret scheme. They didn’t get to be one of the richest families in the world without spilling a little blood, but this time, it might be their own.

On the cusp of seventeen-year-old Phoebe high school graduation, her adoptive mother, Greta, insists on a visit to meet her biological parents and siblings. The encounter is a jolt, a revelation that derails Phoebe. She runs away to her friend Patrick O'Connor's chaotic home, where she hopes to go unnoticed among his thirteen siblings. Patrick's older brothers can't help but notice the striking  stranger who has suddenly appeared in their midst.

Olivia Blunt is thrilled to be hired as assistant to the nationally renowned investigator Aubrey Merritt. After weeks of boring computer work, Olivia is finally invited to join Merritt on an important case. On the night of her sixty-fifth birthday party, Victoria Summersworth somehow fell over her balcony railing to her death on the rocky shore of Vermont’s Lake Champlain. The police ruled her death a suicide, but Victoria’s daughter Haley thinks it was murder.

In Dream School, Jeffrey Selingo shifts the spotlight from how colleges pick students to how students can better pick colleges.
Dream School reveals what really matters in a college: strong job prospects after graduation, hands-on learning experiences, and a sense of belonging. To help students find their perfect match, Selingo highlights 75 accessible and affordable colleges that will satisfy those priorities.

Dark Renaissance illuminates both Christopher Marlowe's times and the origins and significance of his astonishing literary success. Introducing us to Marlowe's transgressive genius in the form of a thrilling page-turner, Stephen Greenblatt brings a penetrating understanding of the literary work to reveal the inner world of the author, bringing to life a homosexual atheist who was tormented by his own compromises, who refused to toe the party line, and who was murdered just when he had found love. 

Twenty-eight-year-old Kiki Banjo hosts the popular podcast The HeartBeat, solving romantic conundrums and dishing out life advice but career setbacks and a devastating breakup have left her hanging on by a thread. As she's preparing to be the Maid of Honor in her best friend's wedding, Kiki finds herself face-to-face with the Best Man, her ex-boyfriend, Malakai--the man who stole her heart and then shattered it. Now they have no choice but to play nice until the wedding is over. 

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously powerful: the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers. Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told after she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled. But on graduation day, the faculty embark on a ravenous rampage, feasting on their students. Trapped in the school’s cavernous library, Alessa and her surviving classmates must do something they were never taught: work together.

Attracting record-shattering attendance and TV ratings, Caitlin Clark has riveted the nation with her famous logo threes and thrilling passes and changed how fans across the country view women’s sports. Clark arrived as a sports and cultural icon a little more than fifty years after the passage of Title IX, the 1972 law that opened the floodgates for girls and women to play sports in America. On Her Game is a sports story, certainly, but it’s also the story of a nation falling in love with what it has created because of that law—millions of new athletes, led by the magical Caitlin Clark.

Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week. There’s a Kinga for every day: On Mondays, you can catch Kinga-A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga-E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath. Kingas A–G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life—between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer, and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion, and bossiness. But when Kinga-A discovers a man tied up in their apartment, the Kingas have to reckon with the possibility that one of them might be planning to destroy them all.

Jim and his closest college friends get together to rekindle the bonds of their friendship in his family’s beautiful, generations-old vacation home along Buzzards Bay, the demands of work and family having caused them to drift apart over recent years. But what begins as a quiet and restorative seaside escape takes a darker turn when Bruce, an aloof but successful writer, disappears from the house without a trace, sending the group into an uneasy tension.

At the center of Baron's historical drama is Percival Lowell, who observed "canals" etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. Martian excitement reached its zenith when Lowell financed an expedition to photograph Mars from Chile's Atacama Desert. Those wild claims and highly speculative photographs emboldened Lowell's critics. Although Lowell would die discredited and delusional in 1916, the Mars frenzy spurred a nascent literary genre called science fiction, and the world's sense of its place in the universe would never be the same.

 

Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries--finance, insurance, and real estate-- eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as "Disco Inferno." Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks.

In 1765, plague sweeps through Zacatecas. Alba flees with her wealthy merchant parents and fiancé, Carlos, to his family’s isolated mine for refuge. Alba begins to suffer from strange hallucinations, sleepwalking, and violent convulsions. Elías, haunted by a troubled past, came to the New World to make his fortune. But he can’t help but notice the growing tension between himself and Alba every time she enters the room as well as her deterioration under these strange symptoms. In the fight for her life, Alba and Elías become entangled with the occult, the Church, long-kept secrets, and each other.

Immigrating alone from Paris to New York after the crucible of World War II, young Gazala becomes friends with two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala’s lost, beloved brother, Samir, joins her in Manhattan, this contentious, inseparable foursome makes their way into the twenty-first century, becoming the beating heart of a multigenerational found family. Through it all, amid the tumult of these decades, the four friends and their best beloveds stand by one another, protecting, annoying, and celebrating themselves, steadfastly unapologetic about their desires and the unorthodox family they have created. 

Invisible to the naked eye and telescopes, black holes have mystified and entranced astronomers, scientists, and humanity for more than a century. The first image of a supermassive black hole was only unveiled in 2019, and new black holes are continually discovered. Supermassive illuminates what we know about black holes so far and what we have yet to uncover.

When disaster strikes, hearing-impaired Laelia Wylde leaves London with her new partner, Aidrian, and her young children, hoping for a fresh start in the verdant jungle of Belize. While the jungle is mesmerizingly beautiful, Laelia's fragmented recollections of the past are increasingly bewildering, the gunshots she hears at night through her worsening tinnitus seem to be getting closer, and she still doesn't understand why her father tried to turn her against Aid when they first met. Uncovering long-buried secrets that threaten to derail everything, Laelia must somehow find the courage and resilience she needs to survive. 

The spellbinding story Scott Anderson weaves is one of a dictator, the Shah of Iran, blind to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian revolutions. In the Middle East, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, and now in the United States, the hatred of economically-marginalized, religiously-fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval - and Iran was the template. King of Kings is a bravura work of history, and a warning.

New folklore-inspired tales abound in this anthology of eight fantasy stories written and drawn by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, featuring a bonus sketchbook section. From a search for the beating heart of a long-dead sorcerer, to a pirate girl who makes a deal with the devil, to the titular boy who wins a grim prize in a game with some undead interlopers, and more.

Young Todd Cooper has a dream: Run away and join the Doodah Brothers’ Astral Traveling Entertainment and Fun Brigade, traveling from planet to planet with its incredible cast of Greebles, Flurps, Bearded Plankton, and Klone-Klowns—and avoiding the deadly Sky-Pirates!

In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world that is riven with gun violence. One is on a global book tour after a big prize win; the other is set to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. And as their two storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: characters drink booze out of an award trophy; menaces lurk in the shadows; tiny French cars putter around the countryside; handguns seem to hover in the air; and dreams endure against all odds.
 

Long ago and far away (and somewhere south of France) lies the kingdom of Esquaveta. There, Princess Tullia is in nearly as much peril as her struggling kingdom. When Tullia falls in love with a lowly apprentice scribe before the wedding, the king turns to his magician Anatole and orders him to brew a potion that will ensure Tullia agrees to the wedding. With one chance to save the marriage, the kingdom, and, of most importance to him, his reputation, will Anatole betray the princess—or risk ruin?

Black genius sits at the heart of the American story. In his probing essay collection, Black Genius, cultural critic Tre Johnson examines how Black American culture has, against all odds, been the lifeblood of American ingenuity. At times using his own personal and professional stories,  Johnson surveys Black cities, communities, and schools with an ever-watchful eye of what transpires around Black mobility.

Cold canning is a revolutionary new approach to preserving the best produce of the season, without the headache of traditional canning methods. Bestselling authors Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough are among America's most trusted culinary experts, and here they gather 425 recipes showing how to pickle and preserve foods from across the world. With Cold Canning, it is easier than ever to save a taste of the summer for any time of the year.

Annie Bot was created to be the perfect girlfriend for her human owner Doug. Doug says he loves that Annie's AI makes her seem more like a real woman, so Annie explores human traits such as curiosity, secrecy, and longing. But becoming more human also means becoming less perfect, and as Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder: Does Doug really desire what he says he wants? 

Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. But even good girls have secrets and regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she's had her fair share of both. Their bond—forged when May was just twelve years old—has withstood a tragic accident, individual scandals, heartbreak and loss. Now the three friends have reunited for the first time in years for a few days of sun and fun in the Hamptons. But a chance encounter with a pair of strangers leads to a drunken prank that goes horribly awry. When she finds herself at the center of an urgent police investigation, May begins to wonder whether Lauren and Kelsey are keeping secrets from her, testing the limits of her loyalty to lifelong friends.
 

Beautiful, royal, rich: Rhea has it all—until her father loses his kingdom in a treacherous coup, and she is sent to the order of the Vestal Virgins to ensure she will never produce an heir. Except when mortals scheme, gods laugh. Rhea becomes pregnant, and human society turns against her. Abandoned, ostracized, and facing the gravest punishment, Rhea forges a dangerous deal with the divine, one that will forever change the trajectory of her life…and her beloved land. To save her sons and reclaim their birthright, Rhea must summon nature’s mightiest force – a mother’s love – and fight.

With playful curiosity and a breadth of scientific interest across neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and even literature, THE FORGOTTEN SENSE reveals the wonders of smell, and all that we lose in neglecting it. We meet ancient philosophers who prized smell as well as the nineteenth-century scholars who associated it with "beastly" instincts and charted its devaluation for over a century. Olofsson untangles the role of smell in human evolution and answers the question of why two people can interpret the same smell differently. And, crucially, we see smell as the intellectual exercise that it is, with invaluable insight into how we might train our brains to strengthen and even regain our sense of smell after illness. 

On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—but the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornell’s death. In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson re-examines Cornell's death. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the research gaps  to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present.

The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.

In The Tiger Slam, Kevin Cook delivers a gripping, inside-the-ropes account of an astonishing streak of victories that left Woods’s rivals scrambling to keep up. Readers will hear from many of golf ’s biggest names—Tiger’s caddie, his coach, his opponents, his idols, and others, all offering fresh insight into the electrifying highs of his victories and the obstacles on and off the course that threatened his relentless pursuit of perfection.

 

In this book, historian Frank Guridy recounts the contested history of play, protest, and politics in American stadiums. From the beginning, stadiums were political, as elites turned games into celebrations of war, banned women from the press box, and enforced racial segregation. By the 1920s, they also became important sites of protest as activists increasingly occupied the stadium floor to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism, and more. Following the rise of the corporatized stadium in the 1990s, this complex history was largely forgotten. But today's athlete-activists, like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, belong to a powerful tradition in which the stadium is as much an arena of protest as a palace of pleasure.

It’s bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard’s workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something. It’s a lot worse when you realize that Dread Lord Whomever is… you. Gav isn’t really sure how he ended up with a castle full of goblins, or why he has a princess locked in a cell. All he can do is play along with his own evil plan in hopes of getting his memories back before he gets himself killed. But as he realizes that nothing – from the incredibly tasteless cloak adorned with flames to the aforementioned princess – is quite what it seems, Gav must face up to all the things the Dread Lord Gavrax has done. And he’ll have to answer the hardest question of all – who does he want to be?

A violent storm washes a mysterious house onto a rural Pacific Northwest beach, stopping the heart of the only woman who knows what it means. Her grandson, Simon Culpepper, vanishes in the aftermath, leaving two of his childhood friends to comb the small, isolated island for answers. Now they'll have to put aside old rivalries and grudges if they want to find or save the man who brought them together in the first place--and on the way they'll learn a great deal about the sinister house on the beach, the man who built it, and the evil he's bringing back to Marrowstone Island.

Erebus Resort, occupying a magnificent, hundred-thousand acre valley deep in the Colorado Rockies, offers guests the experience of viewing woolly mammoths, Irish Elk, and giant ground sloths in their native habitat, brought back from extinction through the magic of genetic manipulation. When a billionaire's son and his new wife are kidnapped and murdered in the Erebus back country by what is assumed to be a gang of eco-terrorists, Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Frances Cash partners with county sheriff James Colcord to track down the perpetrators. As killings mount and the valley is evacuated, Cash and Colcord must confront an ancient, intelligent, and malevolent presence at Erebus, bent not on resurrection—but extinction.

Verona, 1947. Textile historian Marianne Baxter comes to post-war Italy with one thing on her mind: three pristine Victorian dresses, once owned by the famous poet Christina Rossetti. Hidden away in a trunk for nearly a century, they were recently discovered at the Fondazione Museo Menigatti and Marianne’s expertise is needed before they go on exhibit. Verona, 1864. Christina Rossetti returns to her family’s homeland in hopes of leaving her unfulfilled personal life and poetry career in England and beginning a new chapter. After a chance encounter with an old family friend, she finds a gift her father once gave her: a small ornate box with the three Muses carved into the lid. When she stumbles across a secret compartment, Christina finds a letter from her father with an urgent and personal request. The letter, speaking of a pendant and stolen book that must be returned, connects Marianne and Christina—and leaves them both with more questions than answers. 

A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember, pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Over just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a moral revolution on behalf of animals. Before the Civil War, animals' suffering had rarely been discussed. But in 1866, a group of activists began a dramatic campaign to change the nation’s laws and norms, and by the century’s end, most Americans had adopted a very different way of thinking and feeling about the animals in their midst. On the side of reform were such leaders as George Angell, the inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society and the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty; Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments that used live animals; and many more, including some of the nation’s earliest veterinarians and conservationists. Caught in the movement’s crosshairs were transformational figures in their own right: animal impresarios such as P. T. Barnum, industrial meat barons such as Philip D. Armour, and the nation’s rising medical establishment, all of whom put forward their own, very different sets of modern norms about how animals should be treated.