Books of the Year

Great Books at Your Fingertips


As a reference librarian I often have requests for what books to read. People want variety, depth, and books they can relate to, sink their teeth into, and come out on the other side feeling as if their brain has been stimulated. While not promising that all the books on the following lists can accomplish these feats, there is a wide variety to choose from, taken from well-respected and enjoyed sources, that cover the multiple genres people enjoy.

Our goal is to make finding great books easy. This site offers one-stop access for visitors to view the current top recommended books, brought to you by such agencies as The New York Times, NPR, and the Economist to name a few. We also provide genre fields, to allow for browsing by one's favorite subjects.

Additionally, one can purchase books that appear upon the site, with an easy to use, safe online ordering system. We list prices from Amazon, as well as the lowest current market price for both new and used editions. Any purchases made support this site.

Good Books, Good World

Good books open up the world for each and every reader, and we hope that by visiting BooksoftheYear.org, your world will be a richer and more fulfilling place.

Molly Brown, MSLIS
(The uneditable Molly Brown, not the unsinkable Molly Brown)
Reference Librarian and Archivist
Wells College, Aurora, NY

NY TIMES 100 NOTABLE BEST BOOKS 2010

American Subversive: A Novel

by: David Goodwillie

ThumbnailIn David Goodwillie's thrilling debut novel, the lives of a young radical and a failed journalist intertwine in the wake of a botched terrorist bombing.

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Angelology: A Novel

by: Danielle Trussoni

Thumbnail A thrilling epic about an ancient clash reignited in our time- between a hidden society and heaven's darkest creatures There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Genesis 6:5 Sister Evangeline wa

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The Ask: A Novel

by: Sam Lipsyte

ThumbnailMilo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has “not been developing”: after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former

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Bound: A Novel

by: Antonya Nelson

ThumbnailAntonya Nelson is known for her razor-sharp depictions of contemporary family life in all of its sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious complexity. Her latest novel has roots in her own youth in Wichita, in the neighborhood stalked by the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). A story of wayward lo

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Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel

by: Hans Keilson

ThumbnailA penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation—and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners—Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella

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Double Happiness: Stories

by: Mary-Beth Hughes

ThumbnailBest-selling author Mary-Beth Hughes delivers a seductive, deeply human, and sophisticated collection about the universal need to be loved, and the complicated imperfections that jeopardize the ties that bind us.The stories inDouble Happinessare extraordinary portrayals of the ordinariness of life. By pinpoi

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Foreign Bodies

by: Cynthia Ozick

Thumbnail Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s literary treasures. For her sixth novel, she set herself a brilliant challenge: to retell the story of Henry James’s The Ambassadors—the work he considered his best—but as a photographic negative, that is the plot is the same, the meaning is reversed. At the core

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Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)

by: Jonathan Franzen

ThumbnailPatty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an en

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Fun with Problems

by: Robert Stone

ThumbnailIn Fun with Problems, Robert Stone demonstrates once again that he is "one of our greatest living writers" (Los Angeles Times). The pieces in this new volume vary greatly in length—some are almost novellas, others no more than a page—but all share the signature blend of longing, violence, black humor, se

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Girl by the Road at Night: A Novel of Vietnam

by: David Rabe

ThumbnailDavid Rabe’s award-winning Vietnam plays have come to embody our collective fears, doubts, and tenuous grasp of a war that continues to haunt. Partially written upon his return from the war, Girl by the Road at Night is Rabe’s first work of fiction set in Vietnam—a spare and poetic narrative about a you

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Great House: A Novel

by: Nicole Krauss

ThumbnailFinalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Fiction: A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through.For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet w

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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel

by: Charles Yu

ThumbnailNational Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time.  Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctua

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How to Read the Air

by: Dinaw Mengestu

ThumbnailFrom the prizewinning international literary star: the searing and powerful story of one man's search for redemption. Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards

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I Curse the River of Time: A Novel (The Lannan Translation Series)

by: Per Petterson

ThumbnailAn enthralling novel of a mother and son's turbulent relationship from the author of Out Stealing HorsesNorway, 1989: Communism is unraveling all over Europe. Arvid Jansen, thirty-seven, is trying to bridge the yawning gulf that opened up years earlier between himself and his mother. He is in the throes of a

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Ilustrado: A Novel

by: Miguel Syjuco

ThumbnailGarnering international prizes and acclaim before its publication, Ilustrado has been called “brilliantly conceived and stylishly executed . . .It is also ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy, and effervescent with humor” (2008 Man Asian Literary Prize panel of judges).It begins with a body. On a

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The Imperfectionists: A Novel

by: Tom Rachman

ThumbnailSet against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Tom Rachman’s wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English language newspaper as they struggle to keep it—and themselves—afloat.Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the

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The Invisible Bridge

by: Julie Orringer

ThumbnailJulie Orringer’s astonishing first novel, eagerly awaited since the publication of her heralded best-selling short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater (“fiercely beautiful”—The New York Times; “unbelievably good”—Monica Ali), is a grand love story set against the backdrop of Budapest and

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Lisa Roberton's Magenta Soul Whip

by: Lisa Robertson

ThumbnailA New York Times 100 Notable Book and longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip collects occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turning vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

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The Long Song: A Novel

by: Andrea Levy

ThumbnailTHE AUTHOR OF SMALL ISLAND TELLS THE STORY OF THE LAST TURBULENT YEARS OF SLAVERY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF FREEDOM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAMAICASmall Island introduced Andrea Levy to America and was acclaimed as “a triumph” (San Francisco Chronicle). It won both the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of th

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The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel

by: Zachary Mason

ThumbnailA BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITERZachary Mason’s brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer’s classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terri

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The Lotus Eaters

by: Tatjana Soli

ThumbnailA unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men. On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lov

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Memory Wall: Stories

by: Anthony Doerr

ThumbnailFrom an award-winning and extraordinarily eloquent author whose "prose dazzles" (The New York Times Book Review) comes a second stunning collection.Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's new stories are about memory, the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to our

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The Nearest Exit

by: Olen Steinhauer

ThumbnailMilo Weaver has nowhere to turn but back to the CIA in Olen Steinhauer’s brilliant follow-up to the New York Times bestselling espionage novel The Tourist The Tourist, Steinhauer’s first contemporary novel after his awardwinning historical series, was a runaway hit, spending three weeks on the New York T

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The New Yorker Stories

by: Ann Beattie

ThumbnailWhen Ann Beattie began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-seventies, she emerged with a voice so original, and so uncannily precise and prescient in its assessment of her characters’ drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a voice of her generation. Her name became an a

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One Day. David Nicholls

by: David Nicholls

Thumbnail'I can imagine you at forty,' she said, a hint of malice in her voice. 'I can picture it right now.' He smiled without opening his eyes. 'Go on then.' 15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways. So where will they be on t

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The Privileges: A Novel

by: Jonathan Dee

ThumbnailSmart, socially gifted, and chronically impatient, Adam and Cynthia Morey are so perfect for each other that united they become a kind of fortress against the world. In their hurry to start a new life, they marry young and have two children before Cynthia reaches the age of twenty-five. Adam is a rising star

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Room: A Novel

by: Emma Donoghue

ThumbnailTo five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is

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The Same River Twice

by: Ted Mooney

ThumbnailWhen Odile Mével, a French clothing designer, agrees to smuggle ceremonial May Day banners out of the former Soviet Union, she thinks she’s trading a few days’ inconvenience for a quick thirty thousand francs. Yet when she returns home to Paris to deliver the contraband to Turner, the American art expert

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Selected Stories

by: William Trevor

ThumbnailA marvelous collection from "the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" (The New Yorker). Four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, three-time winner of the Whitbread Prize, and five-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, William Trevor is one of the most acclaimed authors of our ti

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Shadow Tag: A Novel

by: Louise Erdrich

Thumbnail "Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could." When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. There she records the truth

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Solar

by: Ian McEwan

ThumbnailThe literary event of the season: a new novel from Ian McEwan, as surprising as it is masterful. Michael Beard is a Nobel prize–winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and

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Something Red: A Novel

by: Jennifer Gilmore

ThumbnailIn Washington, D.C., life inside the Goldstein home is as tumultuous as the swiftly changing times. In 1979, the Cold War is waning and the age of protest has come and gone, leaving a once radical family to face a new set of challenges. Something Red is a masterly novel that unfurls with suspense, humor, and

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Sourland: Stories

by: Joyce Carol Oates

Thumbnail A gripping and moving new collection of stories that reimagines the meaning of loss—through often unexpected and violent means. Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled master of the short story. Sourland—sixteen previously un

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The Spot: Stories

by: David Means

ThumbnailThe Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which three men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery. The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair is about to come to an end.The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in

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Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by: Gary Shteyngart

ThumbnailThe author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and ten

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The Surrendered

by: Chang-rae Lee

Thumbnail The bestselling, award-winning writer of Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft returns with his biggest, most ambitious novel yet: a spellbinding story of how love and war echo through an entire lifetime. With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the mo

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel

by: David Mitchell

ThumbnailIn 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential novelists in the world. He has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The New York Times Book Review called him simply “a genius.” Now David Mitchell lends fresh credence to The Guardian’s claim that “each of his books seems entir

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The Three Weissmanns of Westport: A Novel

by: Cathleen Schine

ThumbnailJane Austen’s beloved Sense and Sensibility has moved to Westport, Connecticut, in this enchanting modern-day homage to the classic novel When Joseph Weissmann divorced his wife, he was seventy eight years old and she was seventy-five . . . He said the words “Irreconcilable differences,” and saw real c

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To the End of the Land

by: David Grossman

ThumbnailFrom one of Israel’s most acclaimed writers comes a novel of extraordinary power about family life—the greatest human drama—and the cost of war. Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensiv

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Vida

by: Patricia Engel

ThumbnailFresh, accomplished, and fearless,Vidamarks the debut of Patricia Engel, a young author of immense talent and promise.Vidafollows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, p

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A Visit from the Goon Squad

by: Jennifer Egan

ThumbnailJennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along wit

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What Becomes

by: A. L. Kennedy

ThumbnailTwice selected for Granta’s list of Best Young British Novelists, winner of the 2007 Costa Book Award for her acclaimed novel Day (“Day is a novel of extraordinary complexity”—The New York Review of Books), which was also chosen as one of New York magazine’s top ten books of the year—the internati

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White Egrets: Poems

by: Derek Walcott

ThumbnailA DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career—the Caribbean’s complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, th

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Wild Child: and Other Stories

by: T.C. Boyle

Thumbnail A superb new collection from "a writer who can take you anywhere" (The New York Times) In the title story of this rich new collection, T.C. Boyle has created so vivid and original a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, that

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All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

by: Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera

Thumbnail"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here." -Shakespeare, The Tempest As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or

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Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

by: Jennifer Homans

ThumbnailOne of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the YearFor more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. A ballerina dancing The Sleeping Beauty today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching ba

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Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

by: Rebecca Traister

ThumbnailREBECCA TRAISTER, whose coverage of the 2008 presidential election for Salon confirmed her to be a gifted cultural observer, offers a startling appraisal of what the campaign meant for all of us. Though the election didn’t give us our first woman president or vice president, the exhilarating campaign was no

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The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by: David Remnick

ThumbnailNo story has been more central to America’s history this century than the rise of Barack Obama, and until now, no journalist or historian has written a book that fully investigates the circumstances and experiences of Obama’s life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those familiar with Obama’s own

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Cleopatra: A Life

by: Stacy Schiff

ThumbnailThe Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an inge

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Colonel Roosevelt

by: Edmund Morris

ThumbnailOf all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain “Colonel Roosevelt,” he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. “If I see another king,” he joked,

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Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

by: Lewis Hyde

ThumbnailCommon as Air offers a stirring defense of our cultural commons, that vast store of art and ideas we have inherited from the past that continues to enrich our present. Suspicious of the current idea that all creative work is “intellectual property,” Lewis Hyde turns to America’s founding fathers—men l

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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

by: James Shapiro

ThumbnailFor more than two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one doubted that he had written his plays. Since then, however, dozens of candidates have been proposed for the authorship of what is generally agreed to be the finest body of work by a writer in the English language. In this remarkable bo

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Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by: Peter Hessler

Thumbnail From the bestselling author of Oracle Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China. In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the

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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by: Siddhartha Mukherjee

ThumbnailThe Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and

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Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by: S. C. Gwynne

ThumbnailIn the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all.S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon spans two asto

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Encounter

by: Milan Kundera

Thumbnail A brilliant new contribution to Kundera's ongoing reflections on art and artists, written with unparalleled insight, authority, and range of reference and allusion Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the sam

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The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

by: Eric Foner

ThumbnailWinner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize: from a master historian, the story of Lincoln's—and the nation's—transformation through the crucible of slavery and emancipation.In this landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Eric Foner gives us the definitiv

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Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes

by: Stephen Sondheim

ThumbnailStephen Sondheim has won seven Tonys, an Academy Award, seven Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize and the Kennedy Center Honors. His career has spanned more than half a century, his lyrics have become synonymous with musical theater and popular culture, and in Finishing the Hat—titled after perhaps his most autobiogr

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Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

by: Paul Greenberg

ThumbnailOur relationship with the ocean is undergoing a profound transformation. Whereas just three decades ago nearly everything we ate from the sea was wild, rampant overfishing combined with an unprecedented bio-tech revolution has brought us to a point where wild and farmed fish occupy equal parts of a complex an

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Hitch-22: A Memoir

by: Christopher Hitchens

ThumbnailOver the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the worl

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The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen

by: Kwame Anthony Appiah

ThumbnailIn this landmark work, a leading philosopher demonstrates the revolutionary power of honor in ending human suffering.Long neglected as an engine of reform, honor strikingly emerges at the center of our modern world in Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Honor Code. Over the last few centuries, new democratic movement

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by: Rebecca Skloot

ThumbnailHer name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they a

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Insectopedia

by: Hugh Raffles

ThumbnailA stunningly original exploration of the ties that bind us to the beautiful, ancient, astoundingly accomplished, largely unknown, and unfathomably different species with whom we share the world.  For as long as humans have existed, insects have existed, too. Wherever we’ve traveled, they’ve traveled, too

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Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic

by: Michael Scammell

ThumbnailFrom award-winning author Michael Scammell comes a monumental achievement: the first authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Over a decade in the making, and based on new research and full access to its subject’s papers,

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The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood

by: Jane Leavy

Thumbnail Jane Leavy, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, returns with a biography of an American original—number 7, Mickey Mantle. Drawing on more than five hundred interviews with friends and family, teammates, and opponents, she delivers the definitive account of

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Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

by: Daniel Okrent

ThumbnailA brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America’s most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America’s favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages. From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought

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The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron

by: Howard Bryant

ThumbnailIn the thirty-four years since his retirement, Henry (Hank) Aaron’s reputation has only grown in magnitude. But his influence extends beyond statistics, and at long last here is the first definitive biography of one of baseball’s immortal figures. Based on meticulous research and extensive interviews The

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The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

by: Nathaniel Philbrick

ThumbnailThe bestselling author of Mayflower sheds new light on one of the iconic stories of the American West Little Bighorn and Custer are names synonymous in the American imagination with unmatched bravery and spectacular defeat. Mythologized as Custer's Last Stand, the June 1876 battle has been equated with othe

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Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality

by: Jonathan Weiner

Thumbnail From the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner comes a fast-paced and astonishing scientific adventure story: has the long-sought secret of eternal youth at last been found? In recent years, the dream of eternal youth has started to look like more than just a dream. In the twentieth centu

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The Mind's Eye

by: Oliver Sacks

ThumbnailIn The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to re

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Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

by: Ben Macintyre

ThumbnailBen Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will de

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Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives

by: Annie Murphy Paul

ThumbnailWhat makes us the way we are? Some say it’s the genes we inherit at conception. Others are sure it’s the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics—our health, our intelligence, our temperaments—are influenced by the conditions we encountered be

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The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

by: Elif Batuman

ThumbnailTHE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED—ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!—TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICSNo one who read Elif Batuman’s first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford Universit

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The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness

by: Oren Harman

ThumbnailThe moving tale of one man's quest to crack the mystery of altruism, an evolutionary enigma that has haunted scientists since Darwin.Survival of the fittest or survival of the nicest? Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly.

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The Promise: President Obama, Year One

by: Jonathan Alter

Thumbnail Barack Obama’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of “Change We Can Believe In” was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in W

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The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by: Alan Brinkley

ThumbnailAcclaimed historian Alan Brinkley gives us a sharply realized portrait of Henry Luce, arguably the most important publisher of the twentieth century.As the founder of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, Luce changed the way we consume news and the way we understand our world. Born the son of missionaries, Henr

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Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

by: Pauline Maier

ThumbnailWhen the delegates left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787, the new Constitution they had written was no more than a proposal. Elected conventions in at least nine of the thirteen states would have to ratify it before it could take effect. There was reason to doubt whether that wo

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The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by: Judith Shulevitz

Thumbnail“Everyone curls up inside a Sabbath at some point or other. Religion need not be involved.” The Sabbath is not just the holy day of rest. It’s also a utopian idea about a less pressured, more sociable, purer world. Where did this notion come from? Is there value in withdrawing from the world one day i

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Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

by: Noah Feldman

Thumbnail A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America's leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important internatio

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Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

by: Justin Spring

ThumbnailDrawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alic

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Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court

by: Jeff Shesol

ThumbnailIn the years before World War II, Franklin Roosevelt's fiercest, most unyielding opponent was neither a foreign power nor "fear itself." It was the U.S. Supreme Court.Beginning in 1935, in a series of devastating decisions, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority left much of FDR’s agenda in ruins. The

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The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

by: Joan Schenkar

ThumbnailPatricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling  as that of her favorite "hero-criminal," talented Tom Ripley. In this revolutionary biography, Joan Schenkar paints a riveting portrait, from Highsmith's birth in Texas to Hitchcock's  filming of

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The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam

by: Eliza Griswold

ThumbnailA riveting investigation of the jagged fault line between the Christian and Muslim worldsThe tenth parallel—the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator—is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. More than half of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims l

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Travels in Siberia

by: Ian Frazier

ThumbnailA Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great PlainsIn Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier trains his eye for unforgettable detail on Siberia, that vast expanse of Asiatic Russia. He explores many aspects of this storied, often grim region, which takes up one-seventh of the land on earth. He

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by: Isabel Wilkerson

ThumbnailOne of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the YearIn this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and wes

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Washington: A Life

by: Ron Chernow

ThumbnailFrom National Book Award winner Ron Chernow, a landmark biography of George Washington. In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of Washington, this crisply paced narra

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The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean

by: Susan Casey

ThumbnailFrom Susan Casey, bestselling author of The Devil’s Teeth, an astonishing book about colossal,  ship-swallowing rogue waves and the surfers who seek them out. For centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dis­missed these stories—waves th

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Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend

by: James S Hirsch

ThumbnailAuthorized by Willie Mays, the definitive biography of one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

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Elizabethan Architecture (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)

by: Mr. Mark Girouard

ThumbnailElizabethan and Jacobean architecture— the uniquely strange and exciting buildings built by the great and powerful, ranging from huge houses to gem-like pavilions and lodges designed for feasting and hunting—is a phenomenon as remarkable as the literature that accompanied it, the literature of Shakespeare,

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The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well

by: Lynne A. Isbell

Thumbnail From the temptation of Eve to the venomous murder of the mighty Thor, the serpent appears throughout time and cultures as a figure of mischief and misery. The worldwide prominence of snakes in religion, myth, and folklore underscores our deep connection to the serpent—but why, when so few of us have first

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Family Britain, 1951-1957

by: David Kynaston

ThumbnailFamily Britain continues David Kynaston’s groundbreaking series, telling as never before the story of Britain from VE Day in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. As in his highly acclaimed Austerity Britain, David Kynaston invokes an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voi

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Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by: Peter Longerich

ThumbnailIn 1998, Peter Longerich published Politik der Vernichtung (Politics of Destruction), a stunning re-examination of the Holocaust. The book received universal acclaim, and is now generally recognized by historians as the standard account of this horrific chapter in human history. Now finally available in E

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The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan

by: Richard Nickel, Aaron Siskind, John Vinci, Ward Miller

Thumbnail Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) was a giant of architecture, the father of architectural modernism, and one of the earliest builders of the skyscraper. Along with Dankmar Adler (1844–1900) he designed many of the buildings that defined nineteenth-century architecture not only in Chicago but in cities across

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Rethinking France: Les Lieux de memoire, Volume 1: The State

by:

ThumbnailLes Lieux de mémoire is perhaps one of the most profound historical documents on the history and culture of the French nation. Assembled by Pierre Nora during the Mitterand years, this multivolume series has been hailed as "a magnificent achievement" (The New Republic) and "the grandest, most ambitious effor

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Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-C)

by: Nicholas Phillipson

ThumbnailAdam Smith (1723–90) is celebrated all over the world as the author of The Wealth of Nations and the founder of modern economics. A few of his ideas--that of the “invisible hand” of the market and that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,

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My Hollywood

by: Mona Simpson

ThumbnailA wonderfully provocative and appealing novel, from the much-loved author of Anywhere But Here and A Regular Guy, her first in ten years. It tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can

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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

by: Timothy Snyder

ThumbnailAmericans call the Second World War “The Good War.” But before it even began, America’s wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other European

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Muriel Spark: The Biography

by: Martin Stannard

ThumbnailThe compelling first biography of a twentieth-century literary enigma.Born in 1918 into a working-class Edinburgh family, Muriel Spark became the epitome of literary chic and one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, recorded her early years but politely blurred h

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Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater

by: Larry Stempel

ThumbnailThe definitive history of the Broadway musical: the shows, the stars, the movers, and the shakers.Showtime brings the history of Broadway musicals to life in a narrative as engaging as the subject itself. Beginning with the scandalous Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849, Larry Stempel traces the growth of mu

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Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865

by: Christopher Tomlins

ThumbnailFreedom Bound is about the origins of modern America - a history of colonizing, work, and civic identity from the beginnings of English presence on the mainland until the Civil War. It is a history of migrants and migrations, of colonizers and colonized, of households and servitude and slavery, and of the fre

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Trespass: A Novel

by: Rose Tremain

ThumbnailAn electrifying novel about disputed territory, sibling love, and devastating revenge from the celebrated author of The Road Home and Restoration.In a silent valley in southern France stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Aramon, the owner, is so haunted by his violent past that he's become incap

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