“I ate my breakfast—the same banana and toast I’d eaten for a decade,” John Kaag writes in American Philosophy: A Love Story, “and wondered how philosophy had managed to lose its personal character.” In search of an answer, Kaag retreats to the library of William Ernest Hocking, a nearly forgotten American pragmatist who left behind a mind-boggling treasure trove of books after his death. The once grand, now rotting, library at his estate in the woods of New Hampshire held first editions of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Locke, and Jane Addams; author-annotated copies of pragmatist classics by

The academic study of black Republicans is booming. Last year, Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Harvard, published “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” a spirited study of conservatism, politics and race. Now we have Joshua D. Farrington’s “Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP” and Corey D. Fields’s “Black Elephants in the Room.” Other books have been published, and more are on the way. We may soon have more books on black Republicans than actual black Republican voters.

From the first line in his debut novel, “My father said I was living in his house persona non grata and that I needed to find myself a job,” Mike Roberts casually dissolves into myth—a kind of millennial Charon come to guide his reader through a post-9/11 white-American-male version of the River Styx. The book, broken into eighteen parts, is an episodic tour of contemporary America, characterized by random violence, terrible jobs, and madness. It certainly seems like hell. Still, the narrator, our Virgil (although in this case our guide is named Mike, like the author), practically offers readers

Early on in Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Wonder, our heroine Lib Wright poses a riddle to her young patient Anna: “There’s not a kingdom on the earth, but what I’ve travelled o’er and o’er, and whether it be day or night I neither am nor can be seen.” The answer is the wind, invisible but everywhere, an almost menacing presence. This paradox—between what is and what is seen, what is perceived and what is real—is as good a description as any of the novel’s central preoccupation.

Three years after a stint working for Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, Lib is sent to the tiny village

The Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s 2006 novel Ève de ses décombres, just released in an arresting and beautiful translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman as Eve Out of Her Ruins, starts with an image of Eve, a twig-thin girl of seventeen, limping out of the ruined edges of a city, school bag slung across her shoulder. “Walking is hard,” the book begins, “I limp, I hobble along on the steaming asphalt. With each step a monster rises, fully formed. The urban night swells, elastic, around me. The salty air from the Caudan waterfront scrapes my wounds and my skin, but I go on. I clear my own path…. The lack

Dogs may claim the oxidized trademark of “man’s best friend,” but in this country pet cats outnumber dogs by as much as 20 percent. Nearly half of American households are home to one or more cats, and we treat our 86 million felid companions remarkably.