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Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.

The 1990s and early 2000s were a time of intense change and experimentation for Marvel Comics. Out of this emerged The Ultimates—a comic which would have an explosive impact on Marvel and the broader pop culture landscape. Writer Mark Millar, with artists Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie, and Paul Neary, reimagined the classic characters that made up Marvel’s premiere super hero team, the Avengers. Looking at them through a modern, post-9/11 lens, the creators treated the characters as super soldiers who reported to the US government.

A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver’s license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth’s pass to regulated vice—cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom’s flipside: screening. The airport’s heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws...

Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it’s also waste—or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse.

When is the “beautiful game” at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What’s right in front of fans that they never see? Football celebrates and scrutinizes the world’s most popular sport—from top-tier professionals to children just learning the game. As an American who began playing football in the 1970s as it gained a foothold in the States, Mark Yakich reflects on his own experiences alongside the sport’s social and political implications, its narrative and documentary depictions, and its linguistic idiosyncrasies

Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility: where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us?

No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world.

The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop there, clanking on the docks just out of sight…. 90% of the goods and materials that move around the globe do so in shipping containers. It is an absolutely ubiquitous object, even if most of us have no direct contact with it. But what is this thing? Where has it been, and where is it going? Craig Martin’s book illuminates the “development of containerization”...

An American Girl Anthology: Finding Ourselves in the Pleasant Company Universe turns American Girl dolls―and the ever-growing ecosystem surrounding them―inside out. Editors Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler and KC Hysmith, along with an expansive list of contributors, explore Pleasant Company (American Girl's parent corporation) and the social and cultural impact the dolls and broader American Girl universe continue to have for generations of American consumers through thoughtful and fun essays.

A lively inquiry into a literary genius, the translators who immortalized him, and what it means to cultivate a rich inner life in turbulent times "What happens to a writer's work when it is translated–specifically, what happens if his name is Franz Kafka?" In Kafkaesque, Maïa Hruska traces...

A masterful collection of stories that showcases one of the country’s most beloved and acclaimed writers—award-winning author, Walter Mosley. Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for...

A probing essay collection that chronicles one woman’s complicated quest to find home in a fractured America, from the award-winning author of Field Study “In Chet’la Sebree’s sensitive and tender hands, this book’s quest (and question) of home is captivating. An intimate rendering of...

Conventional wisdom has it that the origins of the horror genre are found in the nineteenth century, in works like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this paradigm-shaking new book, Bible scholar and cultural historian Brandon Grafius argues that the Bible is, among other things, the world's first work of horror literature. The tropes and themes that we find in slasher movies, body horror, folk horror, and zombie apocalypses were kickstarted by the Bible. Before Godzilla, there were the monsters arising from the sea in the book of Daniel.

Read by Ellen Burstyn The legendary Academy Award–winning actress reflects on her love affair with poetry and makes us believers. In this beautiful book, Ellen Burstyn celebrates poetic magic and shares her favorite works. Now into her nineties, Ellen reveals she had an evangelical response to...

UPLIFTING, PRACTICAL AND SURPRISING WISDOM FROM THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLING CLASSICIST 'Wonderful. Thoughtfully chosen, carefully explained and beautifully expressed' NATALIE HAYNES 'A literary phenomenon' TLS 'She leaves her readers inspired, invigorated and sincerely grateful' TELEGRAPH Why...

From Ireland and the Shetlands up to Greenland, across to Baffin Island, Newfoundland, the US, and the Caribbean – prize-winning author David Gange embarks on a seabound journey through North-Atlantic coasts and islands, exploring ways of life that have been built on small rowed or paddled...

After the death from cancer of his husband, Antony Sher, Greg Doran stepped down from his role as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio, and inspired by the surprising history of the company's own copy, he set out to see how many of these important volumes he could find. The journey took him to Japan, where Doran met the emperor, and to New Zealand and South Africa where the legacy of Shakespeare has become entwined with the story of colonialism.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. His short stories, poems, essays, and translations explore Argentine mythology, mysticism, philosophical ideas, and myriad other topics. This Very Short Introduction gives an engaging overview of Borges's life and the major themes of his oeuvre.

Robert J. Patterson examines so-called "traditional" slave narratives alongside writings from non-enslaved Black people in the nineteenth century, the imaginative works of twentieth century fiction, and twenty-first century cinema to create a compelling and informative introduction to the long historical arc of slavery woven into the cultural and political fabric of America.

How does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word is changed? In this playful, meditative exploration of translating the world’s most beloved playwright, Daniel Hahn guides us through the magic of bringing the Bard to a global audience. Shakespeare may have breathed the air of...