The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis

Davis’ shorts are very short—sometimes only a paragraph—but they leave impressions larger than the tiny space they consume.

Common as Air

Lewis Hyde

Hyde addresses the history of copyright, and demonstrates that the founding fathers were not at all fans of it.

Trickster Makes This World

Lewis Hyde

Trickster shows how our most playful, devious stories are also (perhaps not surprisingly) our most revealing.

Hild

Nicola Griffith

From the scant historical record of Hild of Whitby, Griffith spins an extraordinary story of a girl who learns to navigate the world of kings and thegns.

Can’t and Won’t

Lydia Davis

Critical and flippant, funny and devastating, calming and maddening.

Too Much and Not the Mood

Durga Chew-Bose

It’s difficult to describe this collection of essays; I’m not convinced I should even refer to them as essays, exactly, as they often feel more like lyric than prose.

So Lucky

Nicola Griffith

So Lucky begins with Mara Tagarelli, the successful leader of an AIDS foundation, saying farewell to her wife, who is leaving for another woman.

Infinite Detail

Tim Maughan

Tim Maughan’s debut novel is tragic and charming and very close to home: in response to the normalization of extreme surveillance, an anonymous cyberterrorist group figures out how to take the whole internet down, sending the world into chaos.

Beowulf

Maria Dahvana Headley

“Bro!” begins Headley’s delightful new translation of Beowulf, and from there unravels a tale of heroism and machismo and masculinity that honors the origins of the epic poem while also carrying it forward.

The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber & David Wengrow

Some books seek to simplify or clarify the past; this one seeks to complicate it.

Ways of Being

James Bridle

Amid a drive for more “artificial” intelligence, James Bridle here asks what counts as intelligence, and then reframes fears about a future AI takeover into more productive—and present—ends.

Strangers to Ourselves

Rachel Aviv

Strangers to Ourselves asks questions about how we name and respond to people with “unsettled” minds.

Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Judith Butler

Judith Butler looks hard at the rise of anti-gender ideology in order to break apart how it works, and what, in turn, we must do about it.