
A Secular Age
In 1500 disbelief in God was barely possible. By 2000 it is ordinary. Taylor explains the shift not as science clearing away superstition but as Christian reform building a self sealed against transcendence.

In 1500 disbelief in God was barely possible. By 2000 it is ordinary. Taylor explains the shift not as science clearing away superstition but as Christian reform building a self sealed against transcendence.

Guha carries India from independence in 1947 to the present and asks why it never broke apart, given partition, famine and insurgency. He calls it an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy.

Sent to the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace asks whether boiling an animal alive is defensible. The same scruple drives his reports on a porn awards show and Senator McCain's presidential campaign.

Morse tapped the title into the first telegraph line in 1844. Howe's Pulitzer-winning account of antebellum America argues that communications, markets, and revival religion remade the country while Jacksonian politics took the credit.

Elio is seventeen the summer a visiting scholar stays six weeks at his family's house on the Italian coast. Aciman renders desire from the inside, every calculation and humiliation of wanting someone.

Oscar is an overweight Dominican nerd in New Jersey, desperate for love and buried in fantasy novels. Díaz runs his family through Trujillo's dictatorship in footnotes where history and comic books collide.

Soldiers killed Sepha Stephanos's father in Ethiopia, and seventeen years on he keeps a failing store in a Washington neighborhood gentrifying around him. With two African friends he plays at naming dictators.

Working the Disneyland magic shop as a teenager, Martin set out to build comedy without punchlines, so laughter had nowhere to land. He filled arenas with it, then quit for good.