W. W. Norton & Company

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet reveals how poetry is a powerful tool of connection and understanding in a fractured world Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterised as “inaccessible”, “irrelevant” or “intimidating”. She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to love, dream, question and engage across diverse cultures and backgrounds. Lifting the veil on her own creative process, Smith shows us how reading and writing poetry allows us to confront life’s many uncertainties and losses, to build camaraderie with strangers and to understand ourselves. She grounds readers in the technical elements of the craft and provides close readings of the works of contemporary poets, alongside classic poems. By reimagining and re-examining the age-old art form, Fear Less is a warm invitation to find meaning, consolation and hope through poetry. A Norton Short

A rich and intimate exploration of how women have used textile work to create meaningful lives, from ancient mythology to our current moment Psychologist and knitter Nicole Nehrig delves into the myriad ways that art forms such as knitting, sewing and embroidery are liberating for women. Spanning continents and centuries, Nehrig brings together remarkable stories of women, from an eighteenth-century Quaker boarding school that used embroidered samplers to teach girls maths and geography to the Quechua weavers working to preserve and revive Incan traditions today, and from the Miao women of southern China who pass down their histories in elaborate “story cloths” to a mid-century British women’s postal art exchange. Throughout history, textiles have been a way for women to explore their intellectual capacities, seek economic independence, create community, process traumas and convey powerful messages of self-expression and political protest. With Her Own Hands is a celebration of women who have woven their own stories and created objects of beauty and significance.

A tech insider explains how capitalism and software development make for such a dangerous mix. Software was supposed to radically improve society. Outdated mechanical systems would be easily replaced; programs like PowerPoint would make information flow more freely; social media platforms like Facebook would bring people together; and generative AI would solve the world’s greatest ills. Yet in practice, few of the systems we looked to with such high hopes have lived up to their fundamental mandate. In fact, in too many cases they’ve made things worse, exposing us to immense risk at the societal and the individual levels. How did we get to this point? In Fatal Abstraction, Darryl Campbell shows that the problem is “managerial software”: programs created and overseen not by engineers but by professional managers with only the most superficial knowledge of technology itself. The managerial ethos dominates the modern tech industry, from its globe-spanning giants all the way down to its trendy startups. It demands that corporate leaders should be specialists in business rather than experts in their company’s field; that they manage their companies exclusively through the abstractions of finance; and that profit margins must take priority over developing a quality product that is safe for the consumer and beneficial for society. These corporations rush the development process and package cheap, unproven, potentially dangerous software inside sleek and shiny new devices. As Campbell demonstrates, the problem with software is distinct from that of other consumer products, because of how quickly it can scale to the dimensions of the world itself, and because its inner workings resist the efforts of many professional managers to understand it with their limited technical background. A former tech worker himself, Campbell shows how managerial software fails, and when it does what sorts of disastrous consequences ensue, from the Boeing 737 MAX crashes to a deadly self-driving car to PowerPoint propaganda, and beyond. Yet just because the tech industry is currently breaking its core promise does not mean the industry cannot change, or that the risks posed by managerial software should necessarily persist into the future. Campbell argues that the solution is tech workers with actual expertise establishing industry-wide principles of ethics and safety that corporations would be forced to follow. Fatal Abstraction is a stirring rebuke of the tech industry’s current managerial excesses, and also a hopeful glimpse of what a world shaped by good software can offer.

The strange story of the twentieth-century artists who sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life “Art has poisoned our life”, proclaimed Dutch artist and De Stijl co-founder Theo van Doesburg. Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth century, especially the horrors of the First World War, avant-garde artists and writers sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life. Following the evolution of these revolutionary groups, How to Be Avant-Garde charts its pioneers and radical ideas. From Paris to New York, from Zurich to Moscow and Berlin, avant-gardists challenged the confines of the definition of art along with the confines of the canvas itself. Art historian Morgan Falconer starts with the dynamic Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose manifesto extolling speed, destruction and modernity seeded avant-gardes across Europe. In turn, Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings sought to replace art with political cabaret and the Surrealists tried to exchange it for tools to plumb the unconscious. He guides us through the Russian Constructivists with their adventures in advertising and utopianism and then De Stijl with the geometric abstractions of Piet Mondrian. The Bauhaus broke more boundaries, transmuting art into architecture and design. Finally, the Situationists swapped art for politics, with many of their ideas inspiring the 1968 Paris student protests. How to Be Avant-Garde is a journey through the interlocking networks of these richly creative lives with their visions of a better world, their sometimes sympathetic but often strange and turbulent conversations and their objects and writings that defied categorisation. “Art has poisoned our life”, proclaimed Dutch artist and De Stijl co-founder Theo van Doesburg. Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth century, especially the horrors of the First World War, avant-garde artists and writers sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life. Following the evolution of these revolutionary groups, How to Be Avant-Garde charts its pioneers and radical ideas. From Paris to New York, from Zurich to Moscow and Berlin, avant-gardists challenged the confines of the definition of art along with the confines of the canvas itself. Art historian Morgan Falconer starts with the dynamic Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose manifesto extolling speed, destruction and modernity seeded avant-gardes across Europe. In turn, Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings sought to replace art with political cabaret and the Surrealists tried to exchange it for tools to plumb the unconscious. He guides us through the Russian Constructivists with their adventures in advertising and utopianism and then De Stijl with the geometric abstractions of Piet Mondrian. The Bauhaus broke more boundaries, transmuting art into architecture and design. Finally, the Situationists swapped art for politics, with many of their ideas inspiring the 1968 Paris student protests. How to Be Avant-Garde is a journey through the interlocking networks of these richly creative lives with their visions of a better world, their sometimes sympathetic but often strange and turbulent conversations and their objects and writings that defied categorisation.

We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we're living in a long, violent Eurasian century. That giant, resource-rich landmass possesses the bulk of the global population, industrial might and potential military power; it touches all four of the great oceans. Eurasia is a strategic prize without equal-which is why the world has been roiled, reshaped and nearly destroyed by clashes over the supercontinent. Since the early twentieth century, autocratic powers-from Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Soviet Union-have aspired for dominance by seizing commanding positions in the world's strategic heartland. Offshore sea powers, namely the United Kingdom and America, have sought to make the world safe for democracy by keeping Eurasia in balance. America's rivalries with China, Russia and Iran are the next round in this geopolitical game. If this new authoritarian axis succeeds in enacting a radically revised international order, America and other democracies will be vulnerable and insecure. Hal Brands, a renowned expert on global affairs, argues that a better understanding of Eurasia's strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today's world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the centre of twentieth-century geopolitics-with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.

From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanised and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us. A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech and media democratisation. He reveals how messaging apps strip nuance from conversation, how “digital crowding” erodes empathy and triggers aggression, how online political debates narrow our minds and distort our perceptions and how advances in AI are further blurring the already hazy line between fantasy and reality. Even as Carr shows how tech companies and their tools of connection have failed us, he forces us to confront inconvenient truths about our own nature. The human psyche, it turns out, is profoundly ill-suited to the “superbloom” of information that technology has unleashed.With rich psychological insights and vivid examples drawn from history and science, Superbloom provides both a panoramic view of how media shapes society and an intimate examination of the fate of the self in a time of radical dislocation. It may be too late to change the system, Carr counsels, but it’s not too late to change ourselves.

A deeply reported business history of the chip-designer Nvidia—from its founding in 1993 to its recent emergence as one of the most valuable corporations in the world—explaining how the company’s culture, overseen by co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, has powered its incredible success Nvidia is the darling of the age of artificial intelligence: its chips are powering the generative-AI revolution, and demand is insatiable. For all the current interest and attention, however, Nvidia is not of our time. Founded more than three decades ago in a diner in California, for years it was known primarily in the then-niche world of computer gaming. In fact, the company’s leather-jacketed leader, Jensen Huang, is the longest-serving CEO in an industry marked by near constant turmoil and failure. In The Nvidia Way, acclaimed tech writer Tae Kim draws on more than one hundred interviews—including Jensen (as he is known) and his co-founders, the two original venture capital investors, early former employees and current senior executives—to show how Nvidia played the longest of long games, repeatedly creating new markets and out-manoeuvring competitors, including the original semiconductor giant, Intel, which now finds itself well behind the upstart. Kim offers revelations at every step, among them: —An authoritative, myth-busting account of Nvidia’s founding in 1993 —How Nvidia managed to overcome early missteps that would have killed most start-ups —The benefits of Nvidia’s flat organisational structure, which allows even low-level employees to contribute to the direction of the company —How Jensen’s obsession with solving the Innovator’s Dilemma—the problem of an entrenched market leader falling to smaller, nimbler companies—drove him to reinvent his approach to corporate strategy —How Nvidia saw the coming AI wave sooner than anyone else, and how it bet its future on a technology that had not yet arrived A rare view into Nvidia's distinct culture and Jensen's management principles, The Nvidia Way is a book for our moment as well as an instant classic of business history, with enduring lessons for entrepreneurs and managers alike.

The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity. In a truly inclusive account of exploration, historian Matthew Lockwood interweaves stories of famous figures—including Sacagawea, Pocahontas and Dr Livingstone—with tales of individuals who are usually denied the title “explorer.” Lockwood’s new cast of adventurers includes Rabban Bar Sawma, a Uighur monk who traversed the Middle East and Europe; Yatsuke, an East African traveller to Japan during the sixteenth century; and David Dorr, a man born in slavery whose travelogues reshaped Americans’ understanding of Africa. In lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection and exchange, these figures unfurl a human tapestry of discovery. Spanning forty centuries and six continents, this thrilling and concise history redefines what it means to discover, who counts as an explorer and what counts as exploration.

Monasteries, temples, mosques and synagogues have long been centers of culinary innovation. No mere relics of the past, they reflect our modern world and are as dynamic and fundamental to our society as they ever were. Granted rare access to closely guarded religious sanctuaries, Jody Eddy demonstrates how the monastic culinary philosophy can be adopted by any home cook or professional chef interested in integrating sustainable, time-honoured cooking practices into their daily lives. Her 100 recipes include dumplings (momos) inspired by the cooking of monks at Thikse, a Buddhist temple in Ladakh, India, nestled in the Himalayas. From Kylemore Abbey, in Connemara, Ireland, she brings instructions for cooking Lamb Burgers with Creamy Red Cabbage Slaw and Rosemary Aioli as the nuns do, with enough leftover sauce to drizzle over smoked salmon bagels the next day. From a Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, come time-tested kosher recipes, including Potato Kugel and Matzo Ball Soup. Ginger and Ginkgo Nut Stuffed Cabbage Rolls illustrate Zen Buddhist cooking from Eihei-ji in Japan. In Morocco, she finds a Sufi chicken and olive tajine recipe that makes for a perfect dinner. And for dessert, Panellets (tiny sugar-and-almond cookies), courtesy of an 1100-year-old Spanish monastery. A global story of cooking across communities, Elysian Kitchens contributes to the most important conversations taking place in the food world today by examining a gastronomic heritage that has until now been virtually unexplored. This is a cookbook for anyone eager to discover the traditions of magnificently beautiful, endlessly compelling places that embody the wisdom of the ages and offer the promise of a more optimistic and sustainable future.

The 1976 publication of Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, “was and remains one of the most somberly beautiful and influential photography collections of its era” (Holland Cotter, senior art critic of The New York Times). When Hujar passed away in 1987, his work was relatively unknown except for a small following. The importance and artistic mastery of Hujar’s photography, its tender gravity and intimacy, became recognised and canonical only after his death. The republication of this collection is composed of the original introduction by Susan Sontag and preceded by a new foreword by Benjamin Moser, with photographs presented in two sequences. A stirring ode to the flourishing downtown scene of the 1970s, this collection remains a deeply moving artefact of post-Stonewall New York City.

Long hailed as a masterwork of modern German literature, The Book of Hours (1905) marks the origin of Rainer Maria Rilke's distinctive voice and vision-where clarity of diction meets unexpected imagery, where first-person poetry discovers its full lyric possibility. In these audacious poems, a devout but intimately candid speaker addresses an ultimately unknowable deity. "What will you do, God, when I die?" Rilke's speaker asks, passing through love, fear, guilt, anger, bewilderment, loneliness, tenderness and exaltation in his search for meaning. In this dual-language edition, Edward Snow, "the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke's contemporary translators" (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post), makes Rilke's achievement accessible as never before in English. Snow combines striking fidelity to the German text with an uncanny ability to convey not just its tones and cadences but the captivating psychological presence that animates Rilke's best poems. Mystical and moving, The Book of Hours retains its power to astonish.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER One of Smithsonian's 10 Best Science Books of 2024 Neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals the deep connections between music and healing. Music is one of humanity’s oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind. In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain. Levitin is not your typical scientist - he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today’s most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old. 40 line drawings

Sylvia Plath is an object of enduring cultural fascination-the troubled patron saint of confessional poetry, a writer whose genius is buried under the weight of her status as the quintessential literary sad girl. Emily Van Duyne-a superfan and scholar-radically reimagines the last years of Plath's life, confronts her suicide and the construction of her legacy. Drawing from decades of study on Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, the chief architect of Plath's mythology; the life and tragic suicide of Assia Wevill, Hughes's mistress; newly available archival materials; and a deep understanding of intimate partner violence, Van Duyne seeks to undo the silencing of Sylvia Plath and resuscitate her as the hardworking, brilliant writer she was.

When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017-revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, The Washington Post)-critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, The New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other great epic-the most revered war poem of all time. The Iliad roars with the clamour of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world-the fierce beauty of nature and the gods' grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson's hands, this thrilling, magical and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem's deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even "complicated," characters-both human and divine. The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity's most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson's Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation. Specially bound paperback edition, with deckle-edging (rough-cut) pages and French flaps.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and Literary Hub This lucent anti-memoir from celebrated novelist Lydia Millet explores the pain and joy of being a parent, child, and human at a moment when the richness of the planet’s life is deeply threatened. Across more than a dozen acclaimed works of fiction, readers have become intimate with Lydia Millet’s distinctive voice and sly wit. We Loved It All, her first nonfiction book, combines the precision of fact with the power of narrative to evoke our enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Emerging from Millet’s quarter century of wildlife and climate advocacy, We Loved it All marries scenes from her life with moments of nearness to “the others”? the animals and plants with whom we share the earth. Accounts of fears and failures, jobs and friendships, childhood and motherhood are interspersed with exquisite accounts of nonhumans and arresting meditations on the power of story to shape the future. Seeking to understand why we immerse ourselves in the domestic and immediate, turning away from more sweeping views, she examines how grand cultural myths can deny our longing for the company of nature and deprive us of its charisma and inspiration. In a thrilling distillation of experience and emotion, she evinces the familiar sense of feeling both well-meaning and powerless?a creature subject to forces that are baffling in their immensity. The fear and grief of extinction and climate change, Millet suggests, are forms of love that might be turned to resistance. We Loved It All shimmers with curiosity and laconic humor yet addresses with reverence the most urgent crises of our day. An incantatory, bewitching devotional to the vast and precious bestiary of the earth, it asks that we extend to other living beings the protection they deserve?the simple grace of continued existence.

Confronting “the beast within” us all, The Werewolf at Dusk celebrates the singular genius of David Small, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Stitches. Long celebrated as a modern master of graphic literature, David Small has elicited in his work comparisons to Stan Lee and even Alfred Hitchcock. His internationally acclaimed graphic memoir, Stitches, told the story of a childhood in disarray. Werewolf at Dusk, appearing nearly fifteen years later, turned its attention to the twilight of life and to aging, gracefully or otherwise. Eerily striking and mesmerizing, the three stories in this collection are linked, as Small writes, by the dread of things internal. In the title story, an adaptation of Lincoln Michel’s classic short piece, the dread is that of a man who has reached senility with something repellant in his nature. He?an impotent werewolf, no longer able to hunt?confronts the terror of obsolescence. What do I even look like now, he wonders, when the full moon draws out the wolf inside me? The specter of old age also haunts the semiautobiographical story “A Walk in the Old City.” Brain matter cascades and spiders loom as a psychoanalyst, self-assured in his practice, wanders along empty streets, reality warping into the irrational with the insouciance of a dream. In the final story, a reinterpretation of Jean Ferry’s “The Tiger in Vogue,” this dreamscape gives way to the ominous environs of Berlin in the 1920s. When a peaceful evening at the music hall is interrupted by a garish surprise act, only the protagonist seems to notice. Yet he, too, is transfixed by the performance, watching as a little man with a moustache, pale skin, and tired eyes wills a tiger into submission. With its sharp lines and vibrant blues and oranges, the artwork recalls Edvard Munch’s anguished The Scream, likewise capturing the moment?the dread?before disaster. As fluid as Japanese manga and rife with unsettling imagery, Werewolf at Dusk is a testament to the singular dark genius of David Small. Full-color throughout