W.W. Norton Company

This book contains more than a hundred wonderful and sensitive black-and-white portraits of our major novelists, poets and playwrights. Paired with the photographs are fascinating texts from each writer on writing-thoughts on the craft, recollections of significant moments from their personal history and meditations on the civic importance of...

"Claudio Saunt tells a story of an immense and restless continent connected in surprising ways. In 1776, the Spanish landed in San Francisco, Creek emissaries sailed to Cuba and the Sioux discovered the Black Hills. Decisions made across the Atlantic affected Indian trade routes on the Mississippi, set off an environmental revolution in Canada and...

When people think about Marlon Brando, they think of the film star, the hunk and the scandals. Susan L. Mizruchi finds the Brando others have missed: the man who collected four thousand books; the man who rewrote scripts, trimming his lines to make them sharper; the man who consciously used his body and employed the objects around him to create...

During his impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon boasted, "I can go into my office and pick up the telephone and in twenty-five minutes seventy million people will be dead." In this incisive, masterfully argued new book, award-winning social theorist Elaine Scarry demonstrates that the power of one leader to obliterate millions of people with a...

The gruesome disease typhus, transmitted by body lice, afflicts the desperate: refugees, soldiers and ghettoised peoples. The Nazis, who equated the louse with "parasitic, subhuman" Jews, so feared the disease that they granted special status to the Polish scientist Rudolf Weigl, the only one who could make an effective vaccine. Weigl's laboratory...

Interstellar, from acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan, takes us on a fantastic voyage far beyond our solar system. Yet in The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne, the physicist who assisted Nolan on the scientific aspects of Interstellar, shows us that the movie's jaw-dropping events and stunning, never-before-attempted visuals are grounded in...