COMING SOON: Spring 2026

Edmond de Rothschild: Finding Zion
By James McAuley
Publication Date: May 19, 2026

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.

James McAuley is the author of The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Collectors and the Fall of France, winner of the National Jewish Book Award in history. He is a former Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications. He lives in London, UK.

Fall 2026

Robert Oppenheimer: The Sphinx Without a Secret
By David Rieff
Publication Date: October 6, 2026

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.

David Rieff is a journalist and author. His books include Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the 21st Century, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, and Desire and Fate. He lives in New York City.

Sneak Peek: 2027 + Beyond*

Gertrude Stein by Lauren Elkin
Hannah Arendt by M. Gessen
Rebecca by Judith Shulevitz
Bob Dylan by Sasha Frere-Jones
Susan Sontag by Benjamin Taylor
Louis Kahn by Gini Alhadeff
Mahler by Leon Botstein
Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Jeffrey Rosen
Sabbatai Tsevi by Pawel Maciejko
La Guardia by Brenda Wineapple
Jonas Salk by David Margolick
Ba’al Shem Tov by Ariel Mayse
…and many more.

*A sample of titles in production. Publication dates TBD.