In 1919, a group of English women received a life-changing revelation: the incarnation of God lived in their midst.

A new history of "the Rodney Dangerfield of America's wars."

Scholars have pored over his writing, but the life of the author of 1984 and Animal Farm remains mysterious.

The legendary sci-fi writer's growth from high school student to master of imagination.

A "Cabinet of Canine Curiosities" that chronicles four-legged feats, both mythical and real.

A "characteristically sly" memoir of the writer's work as an architect of meticulously detailed fictions. 

 The history of an icon so entrenched it seems to have grown right out of the hillside.

The strange and complex history of pica—the practice of eating dirt.

 What separates a great orator from a tedious windbag? And does it matter?

Beauty and dread in the quartets Shostakovich created in Stalin's shadow.

The legendary mathematician and his tragic fate.

A new life of one of the great masters of Hollywood spectacle, a restless and reckless pursuer of excess.

The Red Planet has inspired scientific fantasies ranging from little green men to monstrous canal-builders.

Twenty-two versions of San Francisco, in the form of revelatory, provocative maps.

The poet remembered for his witty treatment of love lived on the razor's edge of 17^th-century political intrigue.

Was the pig roast the most important discovery Europeans made in the New World?

The award-winning novelist on the suffering in her Haitian birthplace, and the role of the immigrant artist.

An argument that one of the core beliefs of our age was only recently invented.

A cultural historian tracks the rise and rise of the culture of fame, from Byron to Cary Grant and beyond.