COMING SOON: Spring 2025

Franz Boas: In Praise of Open Minds
By Noga Arikha
Publication Date: May 13, 2025

A thought-provoking account of the life and work of Franz Boas and his influential role in shaping modern anthropology
 
Franz Boas (1858–1942) is widely acknowledged for his pioneering work in the field of cultural anthropology. His rigorous studies of variations across societies were aimed at demonstrating that cultures and peoples were not shaped by biological predispositions. This book traces Boas’s life and intellectual passions from his roots in Germany and his move to the United States in 1884, partly in response to growing antisemitism in Germany, to his work with First Nations communities, and his influential role as a teacher, mentor, and engaged activist who inspired an entire generation.
 
Drawing from Boas’s numerous but rarely read writings, Noga Arikha brings back to life the man and the ideas he developed about the complex interplay of mind and culture, biology and history, language and myth. She provides a comprehensive picture of the cultural contexts in which he worked, of his personal and professional relationships, and of his revolutionary approach to fieldwork. He was celebrated in his lifetime for the cultural relativism he developed and the arguments he marshaled against entrenched racialism, but his was a constant battle, and Arikha shows how urgently relevant his voice and legacy have become again today.

Noga Arikha is a research associate at the European University Institute in Florence. She is the author of The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind and Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours. She currently lives in Florence, Italy.

Fall 2025

Carole King: She Made the Earth Move
By Jane Eisner
Publication Date: September 30, 2025

Jane Eisner traces the professional accomplishments and personal challenges of pop icon Carole King, exploring her unique contribution to American music
 
Carole King’s extraordinary career has defined American popular music for more than half a century. Born in New York City in 1942, she shaped the soundtrack of 1960s teen culture with such songs as “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” one of many Brill Building classics she wrote with her first husband, Gerry Goffin. She was a leading figure in the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s, with dozens of Billboard Hot 100 hits and music awards—her 1971 album Tapestry won a record four Grammys. Yet she struggled to reconcile her fame with her roles as a wife and mother and retreated to the backwoods of Idaho, only to emerge in recent years as a political activist and the subject of the Tony-winning Broadway show Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
 
Journalist and author Jane Eisner places King’s life in historical and cultural context, revealing details of her humble beginnings in postwar Jewish Brooklyn, the roots of her musical genius, her four marriages, and her anguish about public life. Drawing on numerous interviews as well as historical and contemporary sources, this book brings to life King’s professional accomplishments, her personal challenges, and her lasting contributions to the great American songbook.

Jane Eisner is a widely published journalist who held leadership positions at the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Forward. She is the author of Taking Back the Vote. Eisner lives in New York City.

Philip Roth: Stung by Life
By Steven J. Zipperstein
Publication Date: October 14, 2025

A revealing biography of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers
 
Philip Roth (1933–2018) is one of the most celebrated American writers of his age. Born in Newark, New Jersey—where his short stories and thirty-one books were often set—he wrote with immense ambition and drive, along with a keen awareness of what must be done to produce great literature. Yet despite rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an “unchaste monk” (his words).
 
In this original and lucid biography, Steven J. Zipperstein captures Roth’s complex life and the astonishing range of his self-reflective writings—from “Goodbye, Columbus” and Portnoy’s Complaint to the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Employing extensive archival research and well over one hundred interviews, including conversations with Roth himself, Zipperstein provides an intimate and probing look at one of the twentieth century’s most influential authors, placing his work in the context of Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality in America.

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author and editor of ten books, including Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing and Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. He lives in Berkeley, CA.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes
By Anthony Gottlieb
Publication Date: October 21, 2025

The first biography in more than three decades of the Austrian-born thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century
 
According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), philosophy is a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought and his place in the history of philosophy.
 
Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cultlike following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna.
 
Gottlieb’s meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him.

Anthony Gottlieb is an author, book critic, and former executive editor of The Economist. He is the author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance and The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy.

Sneak Peek: 2026 + Beyond*

Gertrude Stein by Lauren Elkin
Oppenheimer by David Reiff
Mordecai Kaplan by Jenna Weissman Joselit
Hannah Arendt by Masha Gessen
Walter Benjamin by Peter Gordon
Rebecca by Judith Shulevitz
Bob Dylan by Sasha Frere-Jones
Edmond de Rothschild by James McAuley
Susan Sontag by Benjamin Taylor
Stephen Sondheim by Daniel Okrent
Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Jeffrey Rosen
…and many more.

*A sample of titles in production. Publication dates TBD.