Rory McIlroy contains multitudes. He can overwhelm a golf course with his transcendent talent and then, at the next tournament, look utterly lost. McIlroy is golf’s most eloquent ambassador and a trash-talking troll, sometimes in the same press conference. The child of a working-class family from a small town in a war-torn homeland now commutes to work in his own private jet and counts billionaires as confidants. A dozen years ago, McIlroy asked Alan Shipnuck a question about the player he had modeled himself after, Tiger Woods: “What’s he really like?” As McIlroy enters the last act of his highly eventful career, this book is a chance to redirect that old question and try to understand a man of deep complexity and contradictions.

In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros. backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely unknown filmmaker, Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed 20-year-old, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right. Within a year, the three men would become friends. THE LAST KINGS OF HOLLYWOOD tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how the three filmmakers rivalled and supported each other, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema.

Chuck Klosterman did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of football. He’s not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). Football does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past. Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects --- phenomena that bulk so large that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. This is not an anomaly. This is how society is best understood. Football is not merely the country’s most popular sport; it is ingrained in almost everything that explains what America is, even for those who barely pay attention. Klosterman gets to the bottom of all of it.

Failed lawyer Robert Green has such a good plan: Crack 300 safe-deposit boxes and sail off to South America with his brilliant, morally flexible sister, Penny. If it weren’t for the damned freezing rain. In the dying resort town of Granite Shores, cop Jack Biddle is self-appointed king --- mostly of bad decisions --- and he is looking for a way out. Then he spots a van spinning off a mountain road into the valley below. In the wreckage, Jack finds a very dead Robert, millions in heisted loot…and opportunity. All Jack has to do is clean up the mess, make Robert’s body disappear, make off with the fortune, and not get caught. One hitch is Penny. Another is Mitch Diamond, a wild card ex-con who knows more about the missing fortune than he lets on. Jack, Penny and Mitch each have an endgame. But there’s only one way out, and they’re crashing headlong toward it.

Billy Collins’ DOG SHOW celebrates the joy of our canine best friends, honoring the love we feel for the animals who play such vital roles in our lives. In 25 poems, Collins distills the many ways dogs warm our hearts, from the happiness we experience as we watch a dog run unencumbered by our burdens, to the silliness of cradling a dog in our arms as we step on the scale together. Turning his inimitable eye and ear to the complexities of dog behavior, Collins ponders all that these winning creatures give us and what we learn from them about ourselves.

In 1978, Greta Rideout was the first woman in United States history to accuse her husband of rape, at a time when the idea of “marital rape” seemed ludicrous to many Americans and was a crime in only four states. After a quick and conservative trial acquitted John Rideout and a defense lawyer lambasted that “maybe rape is the risk of being married,” Greta was ridiculed and scorned from public life, while John went on to be a repeat offender. Thrust into the national spotlight, Greta and her story would become a national sensation, a symbol of a country’s unrelenting and targeted hate toward women and a court system designed to fail them at every turn. A now little-remembered trial deserving of close, wide and lasting attention, Sarah Weinman turns her signature intelligence and journalistic rigor to the enduring impact of this case. 

THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER combines Harper Lee’s early short fiction and later nonfiction in a volume that offers an unprecedented look at the development of her inimitable voice. Covering territory from the Alabama schoolyards of Lee’s youth to the luncheonettes and movie houses of midcentury Manhattan, the book invites still-vital conversations about politics, equality, travel, love, fiction, art, the American South, and what it means to lead an engaged and creative life. This collection comes with an introduction by Casey Cep, Lee’s appointed biographer, which provides illuminating background for our reading of these stories and connects them both to Lee’s life and to her two novels, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and GO SET A WATCHMAN.

Simon Latch is a lawyer in rural Virginia, making just enough to pay his bills while his marriage slowly falls apart. Then into his office walks Eleanor Barnett, an elderly widow in need of a new will. Apparently, her husband left her a small fortune, and no one knows about it. Once he hooks the richest client of his career, Simon works quietly to keep her wealth under the radar. But soon her story begins to crack. When she is hospitalized after a car accident, Simon realizes that nothing is as it seems, and he finds himself on trial for a crime he swears he didn’t commit: murder. Simon knows he’s innocent. But he also knows the circumstantial evidence is against him, and he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. To save himself, he must find the real killer.

In the jubilant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, shares a single, life-altering moment with Margaret Salt, a woman determined to outrun her past. Cal is married to Becky, whose spiritual gifts help the living speak to the dead, while Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving at sea, believed to be safe --- until a telegram suggests otherwise. What begins as a fleeting transgression becomes a complex secret that irrevocably binds all four of them in unexpected ways. As their small Ohio town remakes itself in the postwar boom, the Salt and Jenkins families remain in each other’s orbit, and the consequences of choices made long ago begin to emerge, reshaping their lives in ways that will forever impact the next generation.

In THE ELEMENTS, acclaimed Irish novelist John Boyne has created an epic saga that weaves together four interconnected narratives, each representing a different perspective on crime: the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator and the victim. The narrative follows a mother on the run from her past, a young soccer star facing a trial, a successful surgeon grappling with childhood trauma, and a father on a transformative journey with his son. Each is somehow connected to the next, and as the story unfolds, their lives intersect in unimaginable ways.