When 24-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: At the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?

Garrett was an unusually adventurous and self-assured teenager. In Fairyboy, listeners will follow as he explores the hidden world of gay New York, from the infamous “trucks” along the West Side Highway to the Continental Baths in its opening weeks.

Now, with The Golden Hour, Specktor blends memoir, cultural criticism, and narrative history to tell the story of the modern motion picture industry—illuminating the conflict between art and business that has played out over the last seventy-five years in Hollywood. Braiding his own story with that of his father, mother (a talented screenwriter whose career was cut short), and figures ranging from Jack Nicholson to CAA’s Michael Ovitz, Specktor reveals how Hollywood became a laboratory for the eternal struggle between art, labor, and capital.

Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness—haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.

For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness - how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people - sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society - went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Rosenhan's watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever.

More than a story of personal triumph, Of My Own Making is a soulful and scientific exploration of the power to shape one's destiny. In facing the stark reality of her past, Burke reminds us that every moment demands a choice, and that we owe it to ourselves to reparent our inner child and reclaim the lives we deserve. Part memoir, part methodology, it is a fearless rallying cry inspiring us to excavate and examine the stories that define our lives. Ultimately, the narratives that we craft with ourselves are the only ones that matter.

One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.

In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript. In rural South Carolina, an alligator named Dragon becomes a beloved pet for a precocious, tough-talking twelve-year-old. During a long, muggy July, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills.

On a spring day in 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson wandered into the Pacific Ocean and vanished. Weeks later she reappeared in the desert, claiming to have been kidnapped. A national media frenzy and months of investigation ensued. Who was this woman? America’s most famous evangelist, McPherson was a sophisticated marketer who used spectacle, storytelling, and the newest technology—including her own radio station—to bring God’s message to the masses.

A sweeping and deeply personal account of Native American boarding schools in the United States, and the legacy of abuse wrought by them in an attempt to destroy Native culture and life.

It is the New Time, a time not so different from our own except that the men are gone. All but eleven percent of them, that is, the minimum required to avoid inbreeding. But they are safely under lock and key in “spa” centers for women’s pleasure (trained by amazons to fulfill all desires) and procreation. A few women protest that the males should be treated better–more space, better food, but all agree that testosterone cannot be allowed to roam free. The old patriarchal cities are crumbling, becoming overgrown; people now live in “round communities.”

At a moment when America’s tech gods are more influential than ever, Hubris Maximus is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of lionizing magnetic leaders. Washington Post journalist Faiz Siddiqui offers a gripping, detailed portrait of a singularly messy and lucrative period in Musk’s career, as well as a case study in the power of using one’s platform to shape the public narrative in a world that can’t turn away from its screens.

For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received their country’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic and controversial Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his soldiers on the islands to starvation and surrender but whose vow to return echoed around the globe. The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops whose fate he insisted on sharing even when it meant becoming the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese.

Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic, as iconic as Walt Disney or Charles Schulz. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, a curator and writer specializing in comics and art, shares how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact.

Set in the tumultuous period of the Tudors' ascent, The Pretender brings to life the little-known story of Lambert Simnel. From humble beginnings as a peasant boy, Lambert's life takes an astonishing turn when, at just ten years old, he becomes a claimant to the English throne as one of the last of the Plantagenet line. As Lambert navigates the treacherous waters of royal intrigue and court life, complex themes of identity, power, and destiny unfold, weaving a tapestry of ambition and survival in a world where the stakes couldn't be higher.