Adam Gopnik compares and contrasts living in Paris in the latter half of the twentieth century while he and his his wife raised their family

Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights...

On February 12, 1809, two men were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. Each would see his life's work inspire a stark change in mankind's understanding of itself. In this bicentennial twin portrait, Adam Gopnik shows how these two giants, who never met, altered the way we think about death and time--about the very nature of earthly existence.

"From the earliest years of the American republic, Paris has provoked an extraordinary American literary response. An almost inevitable destination for writers and thinkers, Paris has been many things to many Americans: a bastion of old-world traditionalism, a hot-bed of revolutionary ideologies in politics and art, and above all a space in which to cultivate an openness to life and love impossible at home. Through stories, letters, memoirs, poems...

In The Peanuts Papers, thirty-three writers and artists reflect on the deeper truths of Schulzs deceptively simple comic, its impact on their lives and art and on the broader culture. These enchanting, affecting, and often quite personal essays show just how much Peanuts means to its many admirersand the ways it invites us to ponder, in the words of Sarah Boxer, zhow to survive and still be a decent human beingy in an often bewildering world. Featuring...