It may be comforting to see the invasion of Ukraine as arising solely from Vladimir Putin’s desire to resurrect the glory days of Russian imperialism. But Haslam, a professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge and a leading expert on the Soviet Union, convincingly traces a line from America’s conduct during and after the fall of the USSR to Russia’s bellicosity today. Haslam is by no means a Putin apologist, but kicking a country while it was down, he shows, was always bound to have serious consequences.

Publishing on Jan. 28, 2025

In theory, venture capital is just a way to direct money from institutional investors to fledgling businesses. Every major American tech company to emerge in the past few decades, and countless less famous ones, has been backed by VC. And yet Bracy, the chief executive officer of advocacy group TechEquity, argues this model is pernicious in ways we’re only beginning to grasp. She takes issue with what she describes as venture capital’s emphasis on “hyper maximalist growth”—saying it focuses too much on short-term success—and persuasively demonstrates how VC’s prevalence has created a startup monoculture.

Publishing on March 4, 2025

If contemporary readers think of Twain (and one suspects they rarely do unless they’re in high school English class), they tend to associate him with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This is a grave injustice to Twain (real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens) and to themselves. Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning Chernow has written one of his trademark lengthy, gripping and accessible biographies, in this case burnishing the reputation of one of the 19th century’s greatest literary voices.

Publishing on May 13, 2025

Nguyen, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer, has compiled the essays he delivered in 2023 and 2024 at Harvard’s Norton Lectures into this compact volume. Topics range from the value (social, financial) of his cultural “otherness” to the responsibilities of minority creators in the arts. Slight as the book may be, it’s packed with what we’ve come to expect from Nguyen: clean, fluid prose, a combination of political and social critique with allusions to his own biography, as well as arguments so compelling they feel like simple recitations of fact.

Publishing on April 8, 2025

Forest fires are now a fact of life in the US, as evidenced recently by thousands of acres of New Jersey burning for weeks. East Coast fires, though, are nothing compared with the million-acre infernos experienced in California, which are fueled by both climate change and overdevelopment. The immediacy, danger and horror of the destruction are vividly described in this first-person account of fighting them as part of the elite Los Padres Hotshots crew by Thomas, an anthropologist and scholar. This isn’t merely a triumphant story of machismo and heroism; Thomas is just as interested in how we got into this mess as what he did to mitigate it.

Publishing on May 27, 2025

This novel follows Shiv, the son of a prominent Indian lawyer who’s sent to the UK to study law in the 1930s. (The plan was devised by his father’s friend, Mahatma Gandhi.) The idea is for Shiv to return to India and use his newfound skills to help it achieve independence. Of course, it isn’t that simple, largely because aspects of assimilation prove more seductive than Shiv anticipates. Kamlani, a veteran editor and writer who’s somehow only now publishing her first novel, does a superb job of illustrating the barbarity of the British ruling class while underscoring the nobility and contradictions of their subjugated Indian counterparts. The book never feels moralizing or pedantic, even as it introduces a range of figures we’re more accustomed to seeing in history books.

Publishing on Jan. 28, 2025

A bar mitzvah is a coming-of-age ceremony that brings opportunity for limitless forms of misery and stress to the pubescent man-to-be. And when that “man” standing in front of the Torah in an Israeli synagogue is perhaps slightly more neurotic and definitely more gay than his peers, those flash points are compounded. Rather than dwell on the slapstick of adolescence, Zuzovsky, a Rhodes scholar currently getting his Ph.D. at the University of Oxford, positions his protagonist within the complex and often problematic context of his family, country and community.

Publishing on Feb. 11, 2025

Kelley, a former fact-checker at the New Yorker, has written a debut novel about (you guessed it) a fact-checker at a magazine like the New Yorker. And while this line of work is perhaps not as scintillating as he’d have us believe, the plot that springs from such humble beginnings is worth a read. While working on an inconsequential piece about the Union Square Greenmarket, his protagonist trips into a rabbit hole populated with odd, only-in-New-York characters.

Publishing on April 15, 2025

Calhoun is best known for Also a Poet, a much-heralded 2022 memoir that detailed her complicated relationship with her father, the late art critic Peter Schjeldahl. This novel follows an accomplished freelance writer living in New York who embarks on a sanctioned extramarital affair. It has parallels to Miranda July’s All Fours, which also revolves around a woman of a certain age experimenting with sex and romance beyond her nuclear family. But Calhoun’s book is lighter and a bit grittier, with the consequences of infidelity delivered as a relief.

Publishing on Feb. 25, 2025

It’s rare to find a book this well written and paced. Giardina takes his time setting up the stakes: Miranda is a would-be biographer of an overlooked painter named Anna Soloff, who’s becoming a market sensation after her death. Miranda’s father, Henry, has been an overlooked playwright for much of his own life, until a self-help book makes him belatedly famous. Separately the two dance around their responsibilities (to themselves and everyone else) as they gradually find a middle ground among art and compromise.

Publishing on March 4, 2025