March
Raising Hare: A Memoir
by Chloe Dalton
Dalton, a political adviser based in London, was not much of a naturalist when she retreated to the English countryside during the pandemic. That changed one frigid morning in 2021, when she rescued an abandoned newborn hare. Their resulting bond prompts her to meditate on humans’ relationship to animals, to ourselves and to the rhythms of life. “If I could derive this much pleasure from something so simple,” she writes, “what else might be waiting to be discovered?”
Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech
by Maureen Dowd
Dowd, the veteran Times Opinion columnist, has rubbed shoulders with an array of American celebrities and elites across her career. She draws on past interviews and reporting here while injecting blunt impressions on her past encounters with personalities as disparate as Jane Fonda, Mel Brooks and Peter Thiel. “These are stardust sketches,” she writes, “of ensorcelling, electric, arrogant, narcissistic, whimsical, notorious people.”
Abundance
by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
“Each individual decision is rational,” Klein and Thompson write about government regulation. “The collective consequences are maddening.” In this polemic, the two journalists — Klein hosts a podcast for the Times Opinion section, and Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic — offer a lofty reimagining of American liberalism, one organized around building and away from the morass of bureaucratic red tape.
Funny Because It’s True: How the Onion Created Modern American News Satire
by Christine Wenc
This history delves deep into the lore of The Onion, the satirical publication known for its deadpan headlines and, most recently, for its attempt to purchase Alex Jones’s right-wing site, Infowars. Through interviews with original staffers, Wenc’s account sheds light on its humble beginnings as a small magazine by students at the University of Wisconsin and follows the publication through its boom in the early days of the internet, various doomed business decisions and its ongoing survival.
Yoko
by David Sheff
In 1980, Sheff interviewed Yoko Ono and John Lennon for Playboy months before the Beatle’s death. Sheff has maintained a friendship with Ono since, developing a closeness that enriches this biography, which aims to demystify and offer a defense of the enigmatic and divisive artist. It covers her solitary childhood in Tokyo, struggles with heroin addiction, romance with Lennon and more, lifting the veil on her irreverent and uncompromising approach to art.
April
Authority
by Andrea Long Chu
In a series of essays, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic takes aim at nearly everything, and everyone: literary darlings, “Phantom of the Opera” and even mealy mouthed critics themselves. “The only criticism worth doing, for my money, is not the kind that claims to improve society in general,” Chu writes of her own approach. “It is, as the late John Berger once wrote, the kind that helps to destroy this particular one.”
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
by Vauhini Vara
In 2021, Vara, a technology reporter, asked an AI chatbot for help writing about her sister’s death. The resulting essay, “Ghosts,” went viral, and now appears in this experimental collection — interspersed with Amazon reviews and Google search histories — about technology’s increasingly dystopian hold on its human counterparts.
The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward
by Melinda French Gates
The philanthropist reflects on the inevitable but uncertain periods of change — from new parenthood to career pivots to the loss of loved ones — that punctuate a lifetime. Though focused primarily on her personal experiences, French Gates also offers guidance to readers seeking support through their own times of transition.
The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary
by Susannah Cahalan
Despite orchestrating Timothy Leary’s infamous 1970 jail break, Woodruff was long considered, in Cahalan’s words, a “footnote” in the messy history of American counterculture. This biography draws on interviews, diaries, archives and other sources to establish Woodruff, Leary’s third wife and fellow outlaw, as an influential figure in the psychedelic movement.
The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood
by Matthew Specktor
As the son of a legendary film agent, Specktor, a screenwriter and former studio executive, has been a lifelong witness to the inner workings of Hollywood. This insider history recounts childhood dinners with Beau Bridges and long-winded voice mail messages from Marlon Brando while examining the clashes between artists, agents, unions and corporate power brokers that shaped the industry over 75 years.
Matriarch: A Memoir
by Tina Knowles
This personal history from Knowles spans generations: her grandmother, Celestine; her own childhood in Galveston, Texas; and her daughters’ — Beyoncé and Solange Knowles — meteoric rise to superstardom. A testament to Black motherhood, this memoir offers a look behind the curtain at one of the best-known mothers in the entertainment industry.
Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
by Mary Annette Pember
As recently as the 1930s, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were subjected to abuse, neglect and cultural genocide, all under the guise of educational advancement. Pember, an Ojibwe journalist, blends literary reportage and personal memoir in this harrowing history of government-sponsored boarding schools for Native youth in the United States. She tells this story of forced assimilation in an effort to better understand her mother, a boarding school survivor, and her own Indigenous identity.
Notes to John
by Joan Didion
By 1999, Joan Didion had been going through a “rough couple of years” and sought the help of a psychiatrist, which she then described in exacting detail in a series of journal entries addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This collection of entries — Didion’s first newly published works in more than a decade — showcases her style at a moment of uncharacteristic vulnerability.
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780
by Rick Atkinson
The second installment of Atkinson’s American Revolution trilogy picks up two years into the war, with an exhausted Continental Army, a raging English monarch and other European powers threatening to intervene. This volume offers the narrative thrill of landmark battles at Brandywine, Saratoga, Monmouth and Charleston, as well as details from the day-to-day lives of soldiers at Valley Forge and political machinations of the founding fathers.
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
by Michael Luo
With a title taken from language a Supreme Court justice used to justify Chinese exclusion in 1889, Luo, a New Yorker editor, covers two centuries of achievements and abuse endured by the Chinese in America. But underlying the book’s historical breadth are Luo’s narrations of individual lives, such as that of Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university, and Gene Tong, a victim of an often-overlooked mass lynching in Los Angeles in 1871.
May
Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land
by Rachel Cockerell
The largely unknown Galveston movement, in which some 10,000 Russian Jews sailed to Texas between 1907 and 1914 amid splintering debates over Zionism and deadly pogroms across Eastern Europe, is a central thread in this immersive family history. Cockerell chronicles her great-grandfather’s role in organizing the long, grueling journeys to Texas and Jewish life in the Southwest over the ensuing decades.
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
by Amanda Hess
Hess, a critic at large for The Times and a shrewd commentator on online culture, blends personal history with social inquiry into the peculiarities of parenthood in a terminally online era. When her baby received a mysterious diagnosis after an ultrasound, Hess fell headfirst into a knotty algorithmic world of disability influencers and anonymous message boards, upending her relationship to the internet and eliciting timely reflections on eugenics, online advocacy and ethical parenting.
Mark Twain
by Ron Chernow
Chernow, the author of acclaimed biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, has a well-earned reputation for his hefty and scrupulously researched books. For this highly anticipated and exhaustive account of Twain’s life, Chernow consulted thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts to reveal the author as “a protean figure” who played roles ranging from journalist and novelist to pilot, miner and inventor. Be prepared: It clocks in at well over 1,000 pages.
Is a River Alive?
by Robert Macfarlane
What happens when rivers are considered living entities with rights? Macfarlane, a prolific nature writer, journeys to the polluted Ennore Creek in India, recounts activist efforts to conserve the Los Cedros River in Ecuador and kayaks along Canada’s Magpie River — officially recognized as “a living, rights-bearing being” — in search of an answer. His resulting book is a lyrical hybrid narrative of travel, history and environmentalism.
Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson
by Tourmaline
Johnson, the Black transgender activist, was a prominent voice in the L.G.B.T. rights movement and on the front lines of the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Tourmaline, an artist, filmmaker and writer, offers the first comprehensive biography of Johnson’s life, delving into her advocacy for gay rights and the buzzing creativity that characterized her drag performances and captivated the likes of Andy Warhol and Earth, Wind & Fire.
Who Knew
by Barry Diller
“I’ve had a history with telling stories and I thought mine was a good yarn,” writes Diller, the media mogul who oversaw the production of such cultural touchstones as “The Simpsons” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He expands on his storied career in this memoir, from his beginnings as a college dropout working in a talent agency mailroom to becoming the C.E.O. at Paramount Pictures at age 32 and launching the Fox television network in 1986.
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