High School has not been kind to outcast duo Coy and Monroe, but while things may be looking up for one, the other continues in a downward spiral. "Nickel", from Robert Wilder, explores the complicated relationships and balance between... Read More

From Mussolini and Marie Antoinette to Telemachus and Booker T. Washington, Katherine Ashenburg gets intimate with the ever-evolving customs and convictions behind bathtime in All the Dirt: A History of Getting Clean. Going all the way... Read More

Isolate. Compartmentalize. Control. This is the motto of Amanda Sinclair, who used to belong to a cult—a cult that rears its ugly head again just when Amanda felt sure she had put the past behind her. Dark and charged from the start,... Read More

Like some white-coated poet-anthropologist, Cathleen Calbert’s ginned-up history of notable off-center women takes dead aim at what you thought you knew. A Pushcart Prize and The Nation Discovery award winner*, The Afflicted Girls* is... Read More

The happy-making invention of neon, those gas-filled glass tubes of brilliant color, was patented by Georges Claude in France in 1910, and by 1913 a large Cinzano vermouth sign illuminated the Paris night. A marketer’s dream, it may be... Read More

Hifalutin art snobs say that designers don’t qualify as artists because they’re constrained by budget, production specifications, and the unglamorous nuts-and-bolts parts needed to make things functional. In our mind, that’s like... Read More

Jeanne Marie Beaumont writes the sort of poetry that causes page-turning hands a split second of hesitation—oh, lord, what will we face next? Limbo, in these pages, has physical borders and a ministry of culture where Beaumont issues... Read More

The depraved nature of the two-and-a-half-year siege of a cultured European metropolis further confirms the Nazis’ unmatched penchant for evil. One million citizens died of starvation, bitter cold, relentless shelling. During the war,... Read More