The Peripheral
William Gibson
Drones, haptics, ocular implants, virtual reality, climate change, nanotechnology, celebrity: like all of Gibson’s novels, The Peripheral is a novel of the future that’s entirely about the present.
The People’s Platform
Astra Taylor
A vigorous defense of the value of culture and a rejection of simplistic market fantasies that reduce art, journalism, and music to demand economics.
This Changes Everything
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein’s newest book has a singular and irrefutable claim: responding to climate change requires nothing less than dismantling capitalism from the ground up.
Bad Feminist
Roxane Gay
We should all be as bad at feminism as Roxane Gay is.
The Boy Kings
Katherine Losse
An important counter-narrative to the usual mythical startup genre.
How to Live
Sarah Bakewell
Bakewell brilliantly extracts principles for living from Montaigne’s life and letters; this is a biography which is transparent about its purpose.
Men Explain Things to Me
Rebecca Solnit
The title is cheeky, the subject is not: Solnit’s explorations into the power structures that underlie violence against women, rape culture, marriage equality, and, yes—mansplaining—is both scathing and hopeful.
Every Day Is for the Thief
Teju Cole
Cole’s second work of fiction maintains the line of his first.
Madness, Rack, and Honey
Mary Ruefle
“I never set out to write this book,” Mary Ruefle begins. And yet, she did write it, and that contradiction is the first of many.
Tigerman
Nick Harkaway
Harkaway’s fiction occupies an extraordinary space between evocative sci-fi dystopia and Hollywood action-adventure—in other words, it is completely irresistible.
Merchants of Doubt
Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway
An important and infuriating book. The authors describe in detail the methods by which a few scientists successfully manipulated public opinion about tobacco, DDT, the ozone hole, global warming, and more.
Open City
Teju Cole
Teju Cole’s first novel is uneventful, but don’t let that deter you.
The Manual of Detection
Jedediah Berry
A playful novel, part Kafka, part Borges. Reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s films (in the best possible way).
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie skewers racism and sexism in America in a story that is both affecting and hilarious.
Submergence
J. M. Ledgard
Escaping into Ledgard’s language is itself a kind of submergence—the book has a vaguely liquid quality as it moves between its characters and between the surface and the lower depths.
Lilith’s Brood
Octavia E. Butler
This collection of novels begins with a woman named Lilith, who survives a disastrous war on Earth only to find the planet invaded by aliens, themselves refugees from a world they can no longer remember.
The Once and Future World
J. B. MacKinnon
MacKinnon calls for a “rewilding,” bringing the wild back into our lives rather than carving out a separate place for it. A compelling and beautiful read.
The Sixth Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert
From frogs to bats to megafauna and the Great Barrier Reef, Kolbert’s tale is a terrifying and fascinating travelogue.
The Rise of the Meritocracy
Michael Young
Young’s 1958 treatise introduced the word “meritocracy” into the lexicon, something he himself would later regret.
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.