COMING SOON: Spring 2025

The Many Lives of Anne Frank
By Ruth Franklin

Publication Date: January 27, 2025

A revealing biography of Anne Frank, exploring both her life and the impact of her extraordinary diary
 
In this innovative biography, Ruth Franklin explores the transformation of Anne Frank (1929–1945) from ordinary teenager to icon, shedding new light on the young woman whose diary of her years in hiding, now translated into more than seventy languages, is the most widely read work of literature to arise from the Holocaust.
 
Comprehensively researched but experimental in spirit, this book chronicles and interprets Anne’s life as a Jew in Amsterdam during World War II while also telling the story of the diary—its multiple drafts, its discovery, its reception, and its message for today’s world. Writing alongside Anne rather than over her, Franklin explores the day-to-day perils of the Holocaust in the Netherlands as well as Anne’s ultimate fate, restoring her humanity and agency in all their messiness, heroism, and complexity.
 
With antisemitism once again in the news, The Many Lives of Anne Frank takes a fresh and timely look at the debates around Anne’s life and work, including the controversial adaptations of the diary, Anne’s evolution as a fictional character, and the ways her story and image have been politically exploited. Franklin reveals how Anne has been understood and misunderstood, both as a person and as an idea, and opens up new avenues for interpreting her life and writing in today’s hyperpolarized world.

Ruth Franklin is the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation
By Kenneth Turan

Publication Date: February 4, 2025

Kenneth Turan brings to life the extraordinary partnership of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg and their role in creating the film industry as we know it
 
One was a tough junkman’s son, the other a cosseted mama’s boy, but they dreamed the same mighty dream: that the right movies could make a profit and change both the culture and individual lives. Sharing a religion and an evangelical zeal for film, Louis B. Mayer (1884–1957) and Irving Thalberg (1899–1936) were unlikely partners in one of the most significant collaborations in movie history. Over the course of their decade-long relationship, as key players at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and major players in Hollywood, they joined forces in redefining and mastering the template for the film industry.
 
Mayer, older by fourteen years, was the business-minded face of the studio, and Thalberg worked closely with the creative corps, especially writers—together they rarely set a foot wrong. And while Mayer initially viewed Thalberg as the son he never had, the two would go from passionate friends to near enemies before Thalberg’s shocking death at the age of thirty-seven.
 
In the first joint biography of the two men in fifty years, film critic Kenneth Turan traces their fraught relationship while examining the complicated history of Jewish identity in Hollywood.

Kenneth Turan was the film critic of the Los Angeles Times for nearly thirty years and was also a film critic for NPR. He is the author of Not to Be Missed: Fifty-Four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film, among other books. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Abraham: The First Jew
By Anthony Julius

Publication Date: February 11, 2025

The story of Abraham, the first Jew, portrayed as two lives lived by one person, paralleling the contradictions in Judaism throughout its history
 
In this new biography of Abraham, Judaism’s foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham’s life as two separate lives, and as a version of the collective life of the Jewish people.
 
Abraham’s first life is an early adulthood of questioning the polytheism of his home city of Ur Kasdim until its ruler, Nimrod, condemns him to death and he is rescued, he believes, by a miracle. In his second life, Abraham’s focus is no longer on critique but rather on conversion and on his leadership over his growing household, until God’s command that he sacrifice his son Isaac. This test, the Akedah (or “Binding”), ends with another miracle, as he believes, but as Julius argues, it is also a catastrophe for Abraham. The Akedah represents for him an unsurpassed horizon—and in Jewish life thereafter. This book focuses on Abraham as leader of the first Jewish project, Judaism, and the unresolvable, insurmountable crisis that the Akedah represents—both in his leadership and in Judaism itself.

Anthony Julius is deputy chairman of the international law firm Mishcon de Reya and a professor in the Faculty of Laws, University College London. He is the author of T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, and other books. He lives in London, UK.

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.

Sneak Peek: Summer 2025 + Beyond*

Gertrude Stein by Lauren Elkin
Oppenheimer by David Reiff
Mordecai Kaplan by Jenna Weissman Joselit
Hannah Arendt by Masha Gessen
Carole King by Jane Eisner
Philip Roth by Steven J. Zipperstein
Rebecca by Judith Shulevitz
Bob Dylan by Sasha Frere-Jones
Edmond de Rothschild by James McAuley
Susan Sontag by Benjamin Taylor
Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Jeffrey Rosen
…and many more.

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