A Marriage at Sea
Sophie Elmhirst
The New Yorker
Best books of 2025
The New Yorker’s books of 2025: 24 main picks and 312 more recommendations, across fiction, poetry and nonfiction.
Main picks
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A Truce That Is Not Peace
Miriam Toews
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Buckley
Sam Tanenhaus
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Dead and Alive
Zadie Smith
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The Fort Bragg Cartel
Seth Harp
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Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane
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Lorne
Susan Morrison
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Melting Point
Rachel Cockerell
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Strangers in the Land
Michael Luo
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Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
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We the People
Jill Lepore
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The Zorg
Siddharth Kara
Also recommended
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Atlas’s Bones
D. Vance Smith
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Sitting Bull’s War
Paul L. Hedren
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Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever
Lamorna Ash
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Godstruck
Kelsey Osgood
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Little Red Barns
Will Potter
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Heiresses
Miranda Kaufmann
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A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls
Adam Morgan
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Unabridged
Stefan Fatsis
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Daring to Be Free
Sudhir Hazareesingh
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The Second Estate
Ray D. Madoff
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Matching Minds with Sondheim
Barry Joseph
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Ninette’s War
John Jay
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Bigger Than Fashion
Tyler Watamanuk
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Peacemaker
Thant Myint-U
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Razzle Dazzle ’Em
John Lahr
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Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney
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Run the Song
Ben Ratliff
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The Running Ground
Nicholas Thompson
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Troublemaker
Carla Kaplan
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The Diversity of Morals
Steven Lukes
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Night People
Mark Ronson
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The Tragedy of True Crime
John J. Lennon
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The Emperor of All Maladies
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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The Innocents of Florence
Joseph Luzzi
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Embracing Exile
David Kraemer
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Splendid Liberators
Joe Jackson
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The Season
Helen Garner
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Two Paths to Prosperity
Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr and Guido Tabellini
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The Insider
Gerald Howard
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The Salt Stones
Helen Whybrow
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The Age of Extraction
Tim Wu
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Languages of Home
John Edgar Wideman
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A Hollywood Ending
Yaron Weitzman
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The Genius of Trees
Harriet Rix
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When Caesar Was King
David Margolick
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Flashes of Brilliance
Anika Burgess
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We Did OK, Kid
Anthony Hopkins
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Bread of Angels
Patti Smith
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Paper Girl
Beth Macy
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Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
Barbara Demick
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We Survived the Night
Julian Brave NoiseCat
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Life on a Little-Known Planet
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Ready for My Close-Up
David M. Lubin
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The Eternal Forest
Elena Sheppard
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Death in a Shallow Pond
David Edmonds
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Selected Letters of John Updike
John Updike
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Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything
Alyson Stoner
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Dinner with King Tut
Sam Kean
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True Nature
Lance Richardson
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The Gods of New York
Jonathan Mahler
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Joyride
Susan Orlean
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Trying
Chloé Caldwell
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Original Sin
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
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Deep House
Jeremy Atherton Lin
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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
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The Improbable Victoria Woodhull
Eden Collinsworth
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The Einstein of Sex
Daniel Brook
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Good Things
Samin Nosrat
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Stan and Gus
Henry Wiencek
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On Antisemitism
Mark Mazower
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No Sense in Wishing
Lawrence Burney
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The Martians
David Baron
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Tomorrow Is Yesterday
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
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Cryptic
Garry J. Shaw
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Breakneck
Dan Wang
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Threads of Empire
Dorothy Armstrong
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Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy
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Dark Renaissance
Stephen Greenblatt
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Hollywood High
Bruce Handy
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Here Comes the Sun
Bill McKibben
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Augustine the African
Catherine Conybeare
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Changeover
Giri Nathan
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Twelve Churches
Fergus Butler-Gallie
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My Childhood in Pieces
Edward Hirsch
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Everything Evolves
Mark Vellend
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Positive Obsession
Susana M. Morris
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Baldwin
Nicholas Boggs
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Empty Vessel
Ian Kumekawa
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To Lose a War
Jon Lee Anderson
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Shade
Sam Bloch
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King of Kings
Scott Anderson
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Make It Ours
Robin Givhan
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A Day Like Any Other
Nathan Kernan
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A Flower Traveled in My Blood
Haley Cohen Gilliland
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Putting Myself Together
Jamaica Kincaid
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Blessings and Disasters
Alexis Okeowo
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The Broken King
Michael Thomas
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Clint
Shawn Levy
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Inventing the Renaissance
Ada Palmer
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The Key to Everything
Margaret A. Brucia
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Total Defense
Andrew Preston
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Misbehaving at the Crossroads
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
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The Mission
Tim Weiner
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The Place of Tides
James Rebanks
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Wild Thing
Sue Prideaux
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Whiskerology
Sarah Gold McBride
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The Strangers
Ekow Eshun
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Theater Kid
Jeffrey Seller
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The Invention of Design
Maggie Gram
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Homework
Geoff Dyer
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The Aviator and the Showman
Laurie Gwen Shapiro
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How We Grow Up
Matt Richtel
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Cooler Than Cool
C. M. Kushins
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I’ll Tell You When I’m Home
Hala Alyan
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We Are Eating the Earth
Michael Grunwald
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Toni at Random
Dana A. Williams
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How to Feed the World
Vaclav Smil
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The Second Coming
Carter Sherman
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How Things Are Made
Tim Minshall
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Murderland
Caroline Fraser
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The Last Supper
Paul Elie
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Apple in China
Patrick McGee
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Apocalypse
Lizzie Wade
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Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg
Kenneth Turan
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The End Is the Beginning
Jill Bialosky
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Eminent Jews
David Denby
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Unforgiving Places
Jens Ludwig
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The Very Heart of It
Thomas Mallon
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Marketcrafters
Chris Hughes
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The Haves and Have-Yachts
Evan Osnos
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The Spinach King
John Seabrook
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Children of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
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Antimemetics
Nadia Asparouhova
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When It All Burns
Jordan Thomas
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William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love
Philip Hoare
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Shamanism
Manvir Singh
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Valley of Forgetting
Jennie Erin Smith
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Who Knew
Barry Diller
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The Weaponization of Expertise
Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson
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The Thinking Machine
Stephen Witt
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In Covid’s Wake
Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
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The Lost Orchid
Sarah Bilston
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Ghosts of Iron Mountain
Phil Tinline
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I Regret Almost Everything
Keith McNally
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Turning to Birds
Lili Taylor
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America, América
Greg Grandin
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A Fractured Liberation
Kornel Chang
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Capitalism and Its Critics
John Cassidy
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Careless People
Sarah Wynn-Williams
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Lincoln’s Peace
Michael Vorenberg
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Crumb
Dan Nadel
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Second Life
Amanda Hess
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1861
Jay Winik
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When the City Stopped
Robert W. Snyder
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The Maverick’s Museum
Blake Gopnik
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Sister, Sinner
Claire Hoffman
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The Franklin Stove
Joyce E. Chaplin
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Atomic Dreams
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
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In Praise of Floods
James C. Scott
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The Crossing
Richard Parker
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Taking Manhattan
Russell Shorto
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The Containment
Michelle Adams
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Miracles and Wonder
Elaine Pagels
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Seeking Shelter
Jeff Hobbs
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No Fault
Haley Mlotek
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Adaptable
Herman Pontzer
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Dust and Light
Andrea Barrett
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Original Sins
Eve L. Ewing
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Immaculate Forms
Helen King
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When the Going Was Good
Graydon Carter
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Strike
Sarah E. Bond
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Lower Than the Angels
Diarmaid MacCulloch
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Red Scare
Clay Risen
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Rot
Padraic X. Scanlan
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The Moral Circle
Jeff Sebo
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A Matter of Complexion
Tess Chakkalakal
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Homes for Living
Jonathan Tarleton
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Jesus Wept
Philip Shenon
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The Many Lives of Anne Frank
Ruth Franklin
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Ends of the Earth
Neil Shubin
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Cold Kitchen
Caroline Eden
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Love and Need
Adam Plunkett
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Land Power
Michael Albertus
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After Lives
Megan Marshall
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The Secret History of the Rape Kit
Pagan Kennedy
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Shattered
Hanif Kureishi
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In Defense of Partisanship
Julian E. Zelizer
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Somewhere Toward Freedom
Bennett Parten
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Everything Must Go
Dorian Lynskey
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Black in Blues
Imani Perry
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Make Your Own Job
Erik Baker
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American Laughter, American Fury
Eran A. Zelnik
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Open Socrates
Agnes Callard
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American Oasis
Kyle Paoletta
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Before Elvis
Preston Lauterbach
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The Sirens’ Call
Chris Hayes
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Embers of the Hands
Eleanor Barraclough
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Aflame
Pico Iyer
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Mood Machine
Liz Pelly
