Books

An Untamed State Roxane Gay Kidnapped in Port-au-Prince while her father refuses to pay, and the aftermath nobody wants described. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath Everything that survives from 1950 to 1962, unedited, including what Ted Hughes cut. Ambition, rage and craft at a length that makes the poems look like distillations. 1 recommender The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead Colson Whitehead reimagines the escape network as a literal railroad in a Pulitzer-winning novel of one woman’s flight from slavery. 1 recommender The Undertow Jeff Sharlet A reporter drives through the American right and finds grief where he expected rage. 1 recommender The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution Benjamin Schneider Why American cities have stopped being able to build, and what would have to change to reverse it. 1 recommender The Unforgivable Cristina Campo She published almost nothing and was revered by the handful who read her. Fairy tales, liturgy, attention, and the case for doing very few things exactly. 1 recommender The Untethered Soul Michael A. Singer The constant mental chatter and emotional reaction we mistake for ourselves, and what happens when you stop believing it is you. 3 recommenders The Unwinding of the Miracle Julie Yip-Williams Written for her daughters while dying, by someone whose life had already refused several endings. 1 recommender Uncle Rabbit & the Wax Doll Jonathan Amith A children's book in Nahuatl, Spanish and English, illustrated in a tradition most readers never encounter. 1 recommender Uncle Vanya Anton Chekhov A country estate where everyone has given up their life for someone who never deserved it. 1 recommender Uncommon Genius Denise Shekerjian Interviews with MacArthur "genius" grant winners on where their best ideas actually came from. 1 recommender Uncommon Type Tom Hanks A collection of seventeen warm, humane short stories, each one visited somewhere by a typewriter, from Hollywood's most beloved everyman. Unconditional Parenting Alfie Kohn A challenge to the rewards and punishments at the heart of parenting advice: praise, stickers and time-outs teach children to chase approval. 1 recommender Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy Henry Farrell America turned the plumbing of the world economy into a weapon, and most countries only noticed afterwards. 1 recommender Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War Martin Plaut The deadliest war of recent years killed hundreds of thousands and barely reached the news. 1 recommender Understanding Power Noam Chomsky Decades of unscripted talks, footnoted so every claim can be checked. The accessible way in. Understanding Salafism Yasir Qadhi A scholar from inside the tradition separates Salafism as a method of reading scripture from the politics attached to its name. Underworld Don DeLillo A baseball from the 1951 pennant game passes through fifty years of American paranoia. 1 recommender Unflinching Jody Mitic A sniper loses both feet to a landmine in Afghanistan, and the harder story starts there 1 recommender Universal Women Mark Garrett Cooper Eleven women directed 170 films at Universal before 1920, then the doors closed. 1 recommender Unlimited Power Tony Robbins Robbins's first book: the belief and physiology of peak performers, reverse-engineered into steps you can copy Unscripted MJ DeMarco DeMarco's blunt manifesto against the school-job-debt-retire script, arguing a purpose-driven business is how you rewrite a life engineered for mediocrity. Unshakeable Tony Robbins A shorter, sharper sequel: how to stay invested and calm through the market crashes that wreck most people Unstoppable Maria Sharapova Sharapova's candid memoir of her rise from a Siberian town to tennis stardom, the loneliness, the Serena rivalry, and the doping ban that upended it. Untamed Glennon Doyle Doyle on leaving a marriage, meeting her wife, and unlearning the training that teaches women to distrust what they want. 1 recommender Unto This Last John Ruskin Four essays that got Ruskin dropped by his magazine for arguing an economy answers to justice, not efficiency 1 recommender Up at the Villa W. Somerset Maugham An English widow in a Florentine villa performs one impulsive act of charity and spends the night disposing of the consequences. Maugham at his most economical. 1 recommender Upstream: Selected Essays Mary Oliver Oliver on attention, solitude, and the three selves competing inside any working artist. Quieter than the poems, and considerably more explicit about how the work gets done. 1 recommender Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier Robert Fishman Garden suburb, rural dispersal, tower and park: three plans to abolish the industrial city, taken seriously as social theory and followed through to what got built. 1 recommender Use What You’ve Got, and Other Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom Barbara Corcoran, Bruce Littlefield Corcoran turns her mother's homespun wisdom into street-smart business lessons, tracing her rise from waitress to real-estate mogul.