A colorfully detailed analysis of why horses, paradoxically, thrived in the age of industrialization.

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In his first story collection, set mostly in Alaska, David Vann exorcises demons born from the suicide of his father.

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The novelist Amitav Ghosh reimagines the lives of Indian peasants on the eve of the Opium Wars.

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In this novel of the 17th century, Morrison performs her deepest excavation yet into America?s history and exhumes our twin original sins: the enslavement of Africans and the near extermination of Native Americans.

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An exploration of the 17th-century shift in French cooking, when chefs rejected pseudomedical dictates to emphasize a more novel merit of food: its taste.

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A fictionalized account of the short life and squalid death of Henry McCarty, a k a Billy the Kid.

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How government managers encouraged inflation in the 1960s and ?70s and led the American economy into recession.

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Sarah Vowell?s pop history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony hums along with chipper personal details and genial talk-show banter. It?s also really annoying.

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How McGeorge Bundy, a key architect of the Vietnam War, began an agonized search to understand himself.

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Malcolm Gladwell says success depends not only on brains and drive, but on where we come from ? and what we do about it.

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A new short-story collection takes Stephen King back to the form that gave him his seat-of-the-pants start.

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A history of the 1910 bombing of The Los Angeles Times, and the made-for-Hollywood trial that followed.

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Richard Wagner?s daughter-in-law and the F

Two centuries after Gibbon, a historian plots the trajectory of another great empire?s demise.

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This biography of V. S. Naipaul is a monument truly worthy of its subject, elucidating the enduring but painfully asymmetrical love triangle at the core of Naipaul?s life and work.

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An English journalist?s memoir of Russia — and his Russian ancestors.

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Carolyn Chute?s new novel is a love song to a voiceless part of America: the rural poor.

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An astonishing account of the intricate and unexpected swarm intelligence of wasps, bees, ants and termites.

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The son of a Lisbon drag queen narrates this novel of obsession.

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How Florenz Ziegfeld used comedy, sex, exoticism and style to perfect a whole new variety of musical entertainment.

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Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, discerns a democratic dignity in the seventh president?s populism.

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A novel about a working-class boyhood in Glasgow, told in Scots English.

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A study of all the criticism that has been directed against the car, and why none of it has seemed to matter.

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A. B. Yehoshua?s novel wrestles with the complexities of Israeli identity.

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A hugely entertaining oral history of the journalist and literary celebrity George Plimpton.

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