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Annus Horribilis

Rodney Everlasting

With the magic of Wes Anderson, the imagination of René Magritte, and the mystery of Alfred Hitchcock, Rodney Smith’s photographs—collected in a new coffee-table book—create a fantastical world untouched by time

Daddy Issues

To the outside world, my father was a gifted and accomplished author. To his family, he was a self-destructive and deeply flawed man

The Oddest Couple in American Literature: Part IV

Norman Mailer snubbed Lawrence Schiller when accepting the Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner’s Song. But that didn’t stop Schiller from cutting Mailer in on his latest exclusive: Lee Harvey Oswald’s K.G.B. files

Postmortem of a Marriage

The Cult of Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Norwegian writer inspires a reverence bordering on worship among his mostly male fans. He can bring grown men to tears with a single sentence

Gone with the Winds

How an unexpected shift in the weather brought news of the Chernobyl disaster to the West—and marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union

Pretty Privilege for Sale

GLP-1s are making it possible to rig the genetic lottery. What happens to the people who can’t afford them?

Heil Psychos!

Promising Young Women

Jean Seberg, Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Agnès Varda … a coffee-table book pays tribute to the women of the French New Wave

Modern Times

A new coffee-table book gathers the work of 300 designers—among them Florence Knoll, Lina Bo Bardi, and Charles Eames—whose creations shaped midcentury style around the world

The Worst Years of Their Lives

Dancing with the Devil

“Area Loser Wants Job”

The longest-serving editor of The Onion on how a group of “unemployable” twentysomethings created America’s foremost satirical publication

Christmas in Black and White

From Santas protesting on Fifth Avenue to plastic Nativity scenes, a new coffee-table book collects Lee Friedlander’s pictures of the holidays in America

The Sarkozy Redemption Tour

The former French president has turned his 20 days in prison—Soggy baguettes! Plastic pillows!—into a 200-page best-selling memoir

The Dickens of Detroit

On the centenary of Elmore Leonard’s birth, a look back at how the American novelist redefined the crime genre with his colorful characters and unvarnished prose

AIR MAIL’s Mystery Christmas Grab Bag

A John Banville thriller set in Venice! A murder at the opera! A con man gets his comeuppance! And more mysteries to curl up with this holiday season …

The Best Coffee-Table Books of 2025

Dazzling volumes on the Beatles, Blondie, the French New Wave, panoramic tennis courts, and palazzos, plus photography collections by Weegee and Larry Fink—and a cookbook or two

When Ulysses Came to New York

How Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House and famed publisher of Eugene O’Neill and Truman Capote, brought James Joyce’s controversial novel to the U.S.

AIR MAIL’s 10 Best Mystery Books of 2025

A pub trivia night gone wrong! A post-Brexit government conspiracy! A drug-kingpin granny! And much more …

All That Jazz

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday … a new coffee-table book captures the American music scene of the 1950s with never-before-seen photographs by Lisette Model and text by Langston Hughes

Surviving Picasso

AIR MAIL’s 10 Best Books of 2025

The story of the man who created Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; a bio of William F. Buckley Jr.; a revealing look inside Facebook; a slice of New York history that laid the groundwork for Zohran Mamdani; and more holiday nonfiction reading for every taste!