A civilization transmits its location into the cosmos. On Earth, the signal is received. A reckoning with survival, first contact, and the merciless logic of the three body problem.
Patti Smith moves through a year of loss and dreaming — a fever state between the real and the imagined. Grief, art, and the relentless spirit to create.
Hollywood called her the most beautiful woman alive. The patent office held the invention that became WiFi and GPS. Hedy Lamarr contained multitudes her era refused to see.
Across four centuries — a British Columbia forest, a moon colony, a far-future quarantine — a single fractured moment in time keeps recurring. Mandel folds pandemic, time travel, and art into a meditation on what it means to be alive at all.
A flu collapses civilization in a matter of weeks. Twenty years on, a troupe of actors and musicians walks the ruined Great Lakes, keeping Shakespeare alive because survival is insufficient. A tender elegy for the world we take for granted.
A chance meeting in an airport bar unspools a chain of disappearances spanning continents and decades. One woman hunts the figure who keeps taking the people she loves — and finds something far older than grief waiting at the end of the trail.
A Beijing taxi driver begins receiving anonymous letters from someone claiming to have loved him across a thousand years — as slave, concubine, Red Guard. China's blood-soaked history told through six reincarnations of a single, inescapable bond.
Pieced together from hundreds of hours of interviews Newman recorded then nearly destroyed. The movie star, race car driver, and reluctant icon reckons — unsparingly — with fame, marriage, drink, and the self he never quite trusted.
Found within Ficciones: Borges imagines the universe as an endless honeycomb of hexagonal galleries holding every book that could ever be written — and the slow madness of those who wander it searching for meaning.
Ayn Rand remade herself in America's image — or made America in hers. Burns traces the woman behind the myth and the ferocious hunger that made Objectivism possible.
Jane Franklin was as sharp as her brother Benjamin, and history swallowed her whole. Lepore reconstructs a rich life from the ephemera of the past, utilizing marginalia and correspondence to resurrect a woman all but lost to history.
Frank Lloyd Wright built temples to American ego and burned the rest down. Hendrickson finds the wound at the center of the genius.
Teddy Roosevelt once said that he could either run the country or control Alice, but not both. Alice Roosevelt Longworth is the quintessential counterexample of a well-behaved woman. She made history, after all.
A Wall Street tycoon builds a secret palace of science, gathering Einstein and Fermi to develop radar that helped win WWII and pushed FDR toward the atomic bomb.