By Jane Eisner
Published September 16, 2025
280 pages

“A robust celebration of a legendary musician” —Publishers Weekly

Jane Eisner traces the professional accomplishments and personal challenges of pop icon Carole King, exploring her unique contribution to American music

Carole King’s extraordinary career has defined American popular music for more than half a century. Born in New York City in 1942, she shaped the soundtrack of 1960s teen culture with such songs as “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” one of many Brill Building classics she wrote with her first husband, Gerry Goffin. She was a leading figure in the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s, with dozens of Billboard Hot 100 hits and music awards—her 1971 album Tapestry won a record four Grammys. Yet she struggled to reconcile her fame with her roles as a wife and mother and retreated to the backwoods of Idaho, only to emerge in recent years as a political activist and the subject of the Tony-winning Broadway show Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.

Journalist and author Jane Eisner places King’s life in historical and cultural context, revealing details of her humble beginnings in Jewish Brooklyn, the roots of her musical genius, her four marriages, and her anguish about public life. Drawing on numerous interviews as well as historical and contemporary sources, this book brings to life King’s professional accomplishments, her personal challenges, and her lasting contributions to the great American songbook.

By Peter E. Gordon
Published February 24, 2026
224 pages

“Illuminating” -The Forward

An accessible and authoritative biography of Walter Benjamin that guides the reader through the complexity of his intellectual legacy and the turbulence of his time

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism—his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving—that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization.

Award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin’s story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin’s life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile, through the romanticism of the youth movements and the conflicts over modernism and Marxism, Gordon brings Benjamin to life.

By Daniel Okrent
Published March 17, 2026
320 pages

“Stellar” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A revelatory look at the complex inner world of one of the twentieth century’s most beloved theatrical composers

Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) was a towering figure in American musical theater. Celebrated for such iconic Broadway shows as Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods, his accolades include eight Tony Awards, multiple Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. In this intimate biography, Daniel Okrent follows Sondheim through the tumult of his upbringing and his parents’ divorce, his life-changing relationship with Oscar Hammerstein II and subsequent immersion in musical theater, and his rise to fame as both a lyricist and composer.

Okrent shines new light on Sondheim’s complicated emotional life, wavering self-confidence, and alcoholism, drawing on the artist’s intimate correspondence with such notable figures as Hal Prince, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents; exclusive interviews with his close friends and collaborators, including James Lapine and John Weidman; and Sondheim’s own oral history, which remained closed until his death. He also reveals a previously unknown (and crucial) aspect of the infamous letter from Sondheim’s mother that made him believe she regretted his birth. As Okrent explores the ways Sondheim’s music and lyrics express the inner man, he shows us a life that was defined by two parallel arcs: the movement from alienation to connection, and from ambivalence to resolution.

By Jenna Weissman Joselit
Published March 17, 2026
320 pages

“Wonderful” —Rabbi David Wolpe

An engaging biography that goes behind the myths to reveal the complex life of a transformative figure in modern American Judaism  

Rabbi, writer, teacher, and thinker, Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881–1983) was one of the leading Jewish personalities of twentieth-century America. Founder of the Reconstructionist movement, he was a maverick who reshaped religious faith and practice, generating controversy at every turn. Known for his relentless energy and imagination, Kaplan redefined Jewish identity, emphasizing reason over superstition and intellectual discovery over passive inheritance. He introduced new rituals, reevaluated the role of tradition, and advocated for a Judaism that evolved with the times and fostered an inclusive community. Drawn extensively from Kaplan’s private diaries and correspondence with family and close friends, Jenna Weissman Joselit’s intimate portrait of this influential and iconoclastic thinker sheds new light on the meaning of American Judaism, identity, the limits of belonging, and the role of faith in modern society.

By James McAuley
Published May 19, 2026
320 pages

“Absorbing, innovative” —Derek Penslar

An absorbing portrait of Edmond de Rothschild, who defied his class to help build a nation—and found his identity in the process

Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) was born into one of the wealthiest families in history, but his legacy lies beyond banking, art, and aristocratic privilege. In this compelling biography, award-winning historian and journalist James McAuley tells the story of a man who defied his elite world to support a radical cause: the creation of a Jewish homeland.

Drawing on rare access to archives—including Rothschild’s own long-lost memoir—McAuley reveals how and why this reserved French aesthete became a driving force in the early Zionist settlement of Palestine. Rothschild’s journey from the salons of Paris to the fields of Eretz Israel is a tale of emotional awakening, political conviction, and personal transformation—of a man’s search for a cause and discovery of himself.

By David Rieff
Published October 20, 2026
312 pages

“A lucid, psychologically nuanced portrait” —Kirkus Reviews

An original perspective on the father of the atomic bomb, shedding new light on Oppenheimer’s personality and psychology

Both to his contemporaries and to posterity J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) has gone down in history as the “father” of the atomic bomb. He was a brilliant theoretical physicist, who, as a teacher, was the central figure in the development of theoretical physics in the United States. During World War II Oppenheimer served as the scientific director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were designed and tested. Oppenheimer’s meteoric rise continued after the war, when he became principal scientific advisor to the US Atomic Energy Commission, which in effect made him the US government’s chief scientist. But his fall was equally meteoric, when he became the best known victim of the Red Scare of the early Cold War period and was stripped of his security clearances and excluded from any policymaking role.

The public’s fascination with Oppenheimer, both as the indispensable figure in the creation of the atomic age and as the liberal martyr to the political excesses of that age, remains extremely strong, and is reflected both in the biographies of him that have appeared and in artistic renderings of his life including an opera and, most recently, the acclaimed 2023 biopic Oppenheimer. In this biography, David Rieff offers a fresh perspective, focusing on Oppenheimer’s personality and psychology, above all his closed down nature as a person that so puzzled and fascinated his contemporaries. To do this, Rieff pays particular attention to the traumatic character of Oppenheimer’s childhood, and to his extremely ambivalent relation to his Jewishness, an ambivalence that partly explains Oppenheimer’s affinity for the universalist promise of science.