Can you taste it? The taste of joy when quarantine ends, the panic shopping eases up, and we can get on with the new reality of civilian life. The coronavirus pandemic will change the way we live. However the new reality takes shape, we’ll be ready and eager to get back outside. Not to mention delirious with relief. Until then, safety first. But at least we have plenty of books to turn to as resources and for escape during quarantine! Read more →

A Q&A with Howard Axelrod | “The Stars in Our Pockets” considers the questions I’ve wrestled with since returning from the Vermont woods: How do environments, both natural and digital, change our orientation in the world? And if adapting to the digital environment means losing traits that you value, how do you determine which trades are worth making? Read more →

By Howard Axelrod | Apple Sirs, I thank you for your appreciation of my lecture at the recent TED Dead conference: “Thinkers of Yesterday, Challenges of Today.” (Your company, as Mr. Jobs declared in his own lecture, truly has eyes and ears everywhere.) I must confess some of your letter eluded my understanding—for instance, the polite imperative: “Please drill down to deliverables.” Am I to understand that you view my ideas as buried underground, like a vein of gold or a healing spring? Read more →

What’s your News Years resolution? To read more books, of course! But where to start? Why not with our bestsellers? For your perusal, we’ve put together a list of our bestsellers this year. We are so thrilled that some of these titles that have appeared on best-of lists, have won and have been nominated for awards! You can get these titles, as well as all our other titles, for 30% off using code HOLIDAY30 through December 31st. You still have time. Check out our website. Read more →

No one knows if Elena Ferrante is a tennis fan. No one knows much about her at all. The identity of the author of the wildly popular Neapolitan novels remains a useful mystery—useful because it reveals the poverty of our literary-critical apparatus: without the usual cues of biography and author appearances and interviews, critics have been tripping over themselves to place her work. Feminist. Post-ideological. Neo-neo-realist. They’re not wrong, exactly. But to understand Ferrante, it might help to be a tennis fan—or, at least, to be a fan of one particular match. Krickstein vs Connors, U.S. Open, 1991. Read more →

As a teenager, I didn't pay much attention to posted signs. I was a strange kid—both very confident and very lost. My façade, my own sign posted for the world, was a lie and I knew it. But I believed if I could just be patient enough, a kind of secret door would eventually open to a new land, one that looked more or less the same as the old—same streets, same school, same annoying older brother—but would include a sense of orientation, which meant a sense of the world with my place in it. So, what interested me was the other kind of sign. The kind that might offer a portent of my life to come, or an insight into the way things really were. Read more →