Books

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington Leonora Carrington The surrealist painter's short fiction gathered in a single volume for the centennial of her birth. 1 recommender The Compound Effect Darren Hardy Small repeated choices, and the long unglamorous stretch where compounding is real but invisible. 1 recommender The Conscience of a Liberal Paul Wellstone The Minnesota senator's account of grassroots organising and the politics he thought worth defending. 1 recommender The Constitution in Exile Andrew Napolitano A former judge argues that Washington seized its powers not by amendment but by quiet reinterpretation, one ruling at a time. The Convoy Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse She survived the Rwandan genocide in a humanitarian convoy, then spent decades tracking down proof it happened. 1 recommender The Copernican Question Robert S. Westman 1 recommender The Corrections Jonathan Franzen Jonathan Franzen's novel gathers a scattered Midwestern family for one last Christmas as the aging parents and grown children confront their failures. 1 recommender The Couple Next Door Shari Lapena Shari Lapena's domestic suspense novel of a couple, their neighbours and a crime on the night of a dinner party. 1 recommender The Courage to Be Disliked Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga A dialogue between a philosopher and a sceptical young man, distilling Alfred Adler's psychology into a provocative argument about freedom. 2 recommenders The Covenant of Water Abraham Verghese Abraham Verghese's epic follows three generations of a family in South India haunted by a mysterious pattern of drownings. 1 recommender The Crack-Up F. Scott Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald's essays, letters and notes on his breakdown, collected by Edmund Wilson. 1 recommender The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms Margaret A. Boden Boden separates combinational, exploratory and transformational creativity, then tests each against what machines could do, back when computational models were still in their infancy. 1 recommender The Cross and the Crescent Jerald F. Dirks A comparison of Christianity and Islam by a former Methodist deacon. 1 recommender The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings M. C. Richards A poet and potter from Black Mountain College gathers talks on craft and education, written from the conviction that art and life were never separate activities. 1 recommender The Culture of Food Massimo Montanari How Europe's food cultures formed and clashed, from Roman bread and wine to the modern table. 1 recommender The Cure Within Anne Harrington A Harvard historian traces the stories we tell about the mind's power to heal, from the placebo effect to positive thinking and meditation. 1 recommender The Daily Laws Robert Greene One short lesson a day, drawn from across Greene's work, arranged to be read a page at a time over a year The Daily Stoic Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman A year of daily Stoic wisdom, one short meditation a day drawn from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus. 2 recommenders The Dark Lemony Snicket A picture book by Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen about a boy who is afraid of the dark. 1 recommender The Dark Enlightenment Nick Land Democracy as a failure mode, and exit in place of voice. The founding text of neoreaction, cited constantly and read rarely, listed here because Cowen read it. 1 recommender The Dark Talent Brandon Sanderson Alcatraz infiltrates the Highbrary itself, in the book where the series stops joking and the unreliable narrator finally costs him something. The Darkness Ragnar Jónasson The Hulda trilogy begins here, with a Reykjavík detective pushed into retirement at 64. The Day of the Locust Nathanael West Hollywood's failures and hangers-on, circling a film industry that has no use for them. 1 recommender The Dearly Beloved Cara Wall Two ministers, two wives, one congregation, and faith treated as a real intellectual problem. 1 recommender The Death of a Beekeeper Lars Gustafsson Lars Gustafsson's Swedish novel told through the notepad entries of a dying beekeeper. 1 recommender The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories Leo Tolstoy A judge on his deathbed discovers that his proper, successful life was empty, in Tolstoy's great novella. 1 recommender The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Horacio Quiroga Tales of horror and the Latin American jungle from the writer often called the Poe of South America. 1 recommender The Decline and Fall of the British Empire Piers Brendon 1 recommender The Deep Blue Good-by John D. MacDonald The first Travis McGee novel, in which a Florida houseboat dweller who recovers lost property for a fee goes after a charming and brutal thief. 1 recommender The Deep End of the Ocean Jacquelyn Mitchard A family is upended when a three-year-old vanishes from a hotel lobby, in the debut novel that became the first Oprah’s Book Club pick. 1 recommender The Deer Park Norman Mailer A war hero in a desert resort town, deciding what his own life story is worth on the open market. 1 recommender The Deficit Myth Stephanie Kelton An economist's case for rethinking government debt through modern monetary theory. 1 recommender The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Carl Sagan Sagan finished it while dying: alien abduction, faith healing, witch trials, and the Baloney Detection Kit that has outlived almost everything else on the subject. 1 recommender The Descent of Man Charles Darwin Darwin turns evolution on his own species, and is at his least guarded when the subject reaches imagination, music and beauty. 1 recommender The Desert Fathers ed. Benedicta Ward 1 recommender The Devil Finds Work James Baldwin Baldwin on the movies he grew up on, and what they were quietly teaching him about himself. 1 recommender