Uncanny Valley

Anna Wiener

I avoided this book when it first came out because I feared it would hit too close to home. I wasn’t wrong.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Andreas Malm

This is a clear-eyed call for the climate movement to go beyond peaceful protest in order to avert ecological collapse.

Under a White Sky

Elizabeth Kolbert

“We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Robinson writes science fiction that aspires to be a New Yorker essay. This is not entirely bad.

The Unreal and the Real

Ursula K. Le Guin

The titles of the two parts of this selected edition of Le Guin’s stories are Where on Earth and Outer Space, Inner Lands—Le Guin leaves it to the reader to decide which of these is real and which unreal.

Witches, Midwives & Nurses

Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English

First published in 1973, this pamphlet outlines the ways in which the medical establishment created generations of women ignorant of the workings of their bodies and disempowered from their own care.

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.

A Stranger in Olondria

Sofia Samatar

As he travels to Olondria to sell the family harvest, Jevick meets a young woman on the verge of death.

A Memory Called Empire

Arkady Martine

Mahit Dzmare is abruptly ordered to report for duty as the new ambassador to the Teixcalaan empire—with no word as to what might have happened to her predecessor.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke

When young Jonathan Strange sets it upon himself to become a magician, he ends up as Mr. Norrell’s only pupil—but it’s a dry sort of magic Norrell preaches, absent any of the mystery or terror of the old days.

Down Girl

Kate Manne

Kate Manne’s core premise is this: sexism is a set of beliefs that positions women as inferior to men, while misogyny is the system that enforces and polices women’s subordination.

The Book of Lamps and Banners

Elizabeth Hand

Cass Neary needs to get home, but a string of suspicious deaths has accumulated behind her, and she isn’t sure where is safe.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

“I was in a house with many rooms. The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.”

Staying with the Trouble

Donna Haraway

“Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future,” declares Donna Haraway in the opening paragraph of this astonishing book.

What Can a Body Do?

Sara Hendren

Among the core premises of this provocative and deeply humane book is this: disability is in part a product of the intersection of a body and the built world, where the latter often presumes there is only one way a body can be.

Alone

Richard E. Byrd

In 1934, Richard Byrd—famous for a previous expedition to the Antarctic—decided to over winter on the ice near the South Pole, alone.

Vesper Flights

Helen Macdonald

The titular essay in this collection concerns the flight of swifts: twice a day, at twilight, they fly high up into the sky, a movement Macdonald describes as both a devotion and a kind of planning.

The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa

Objects are disappearing: not the things themselves, although that is soon to follow, but the memory of them, the recognition and understanding of what they are and have been.

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