The Curious Case of Mike Lynch
A toxic culture—complete with piranha tanks and Bond-villain rooms—ran rampant at the company founded by the British tech tycoon, who died in a freak yacht accident
“The Holy Grail of Shipwrecks”
A new book charts one man’s decades-long search for the lost Spanish galleon featured in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera
Editor’s Picks
This week, don’t miss a biography of the literary critic who championed Faulkner and Kerouac; a study of “vampire panics”; and a fresh translation of Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War
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
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
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
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?
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
“Area Loser Wants Job”
The longest-serving editor of The Onion on how a group of “unemployable” twentysomethings created America’s foremost satirical publication
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
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 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.
