The Plantagenets

The legendary -- and infamous -- dynasty may have unwittingly sown the seeds of monarchy's end.

 

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The First Muslim

Is it possible to write the mind of a prophet?

 

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Thornton Wilder: A Life

The intensely private life of an artist who married the quotidian and the revolutionary.

 

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Sweet Tooth

The author of Atonement launches a tale of narrative deception from the spy games of a dying Cold War.

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The Lost Battles

A story of the rivalry between the two greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance -- and the vanished masterpieces their competition produced.

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George Orwell: Diaries

The journals of one of the twentieth century's most powerful voices contain the seeds of the ideas his books explored.

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Prairie Fever

How the wide-open spaces of the American frontier became a playground for English bluebloods.

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Ride a Cockhorse

Raymond Kennedy's ribald comedy pinned a satire of late-1980s excess on a small-town banker's sudden mania.

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Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand

A fresh translation of a classic novel unveils an Austrian life overshadowed by the rise of fascism.

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How It All Began

A delicate network -- and a vulnerability to chaos -- connect the characters in this thoughtful comedy.

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If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

The history of domestic life, the author argues, tells the story of our deepest secrets.

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Tolstoy: A Russian Life

A new life of the writer focuses on Tolstoy's place in a changing Russian society.

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The Beauty and The Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War

A war correspondent and historian brings to life the voices of World War I.

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The Forgotten Waltz

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering comes a new novel that reckons the cost of love.

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Columbus: The Four Voyages

The legendary navigator's journeys after the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

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Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein

A new biography of the playwright explores the secrets she guarded so closely.

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Turn of Mind

A once-brilliant surgeon battles Alzheimer's disease. But is she forgetting a monstrous crime? 

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Machiavelli

A new biography of the Florentine diplomat and author who gave birth to modern political theory, and blackened his own name in the process.

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Lives and Letters

Sparkling insights on art and artists are matched with a taste for scandal's allure in these essays.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

120 years after its original publication, Oscar Wilde's masterpiece stands fully revealed—and annotated.

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No Regrets

The passions—musical and otherwise—of the great singer Edith Piaf.

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Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

The letters of travel writer Bruce Chatwin reveal genius driven by an uncontainable enthusiasm.

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The Memory of Love

Echoes of Graham Greene can be heard in Aminatta Forna's tale of youth, love, politics and betrayal in Africa.

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Tablet & Pen

Reza Aslan's new collection unlocks a treasure trove of Middle Eastern writing.

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An Object of Beauty

A tale of a "rake's progress" through a trend-maddened art world.

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Songs of Blood and Sword

A new memoir from a member of Pakistan's storied political dynasty.

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The Weekend

The release of a terrorist raises uncomfortable questions about Germany's past, and present.

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A Life Like Other People's

The acclaimed British playwright details the shyness and madness that were his family inheritance.

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Comedy in a Minor Key

An urgent moral fable set in Nazi-occupied Holland, Keilson's novel proves that even death guaranteed no escape from the terror of the war.

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The Fall of the House of Walworth

A true-life tale of madness, scandal, and murder in Gilded Age New York.

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About the Columnist
Brooke Allen is the author of Twentieth-Century Attitudes; Artistic License; and Moral Minority. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, and The Nation, among others. She was named a finalist for the 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

May 18: Parade, the "first modern ballet," premiered in Paris on this day in 1917. The production was a collaboration of some of modernism's most famous -- music by Erik Satie, scenario by Jean Cocteau, costumes by Picasso,…

Ethan Rutherford and Matt Burgess (Dogfight: A Love Story) on the writing of Rutherford's surreal and fiercely funny story collection The Peripatetic Coffin

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Books, CDs, DVDs to know about now
The Innocence Game

Three Chicago journalism students attend an “innocence” seminar that will teach them how to release the wrongfully accused from prison. But as innocents are jailed, a killer roams free, and the students are next on the hit list.

Little Green

Walter Mosley's suave detective Easy Rawlins is back among the living after a literal cliffhanger of a car crash, in pursuit of a  LSD-addled boxer roaming Los Angeles, 1967.

The Peripatetic Coffin

A Russian ship trapped in ice, the first Confederate submarine, and the world's worst summer camp are just three of the settings for Ethan Rutherford's tales of expeditions gone awry.  A Discover Great New Writers selection.