COMING SOON: Fall 2025

Carole King: She Made the Earth Move
By Jane Eisner
Publication Date: September 16, 2025

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 postwar 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.

Jane Eisner is a widely published journalist who held leadership positions at the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Forward. She is the author of Taking Back the Vote. Eisner lives in New York City.

Philip Roth: Stung by Life
By Steven J. Zipperstein
Publication Date: October 14, 2025

A revealing biography of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers
 
Philip Roth (1933–2018) is one of the most celebrated American writers of his age. Born in Newark, New Jersey—where his short stories and thirty-one books were often set—he wrote with immense ambition and drive, along with a keen awareness of what must be done to produce great literature. Yet despite rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an “unchaste monk” (his words).
 
In this groundbreaking and vivid biography, Steven J. Zipperstein captures Roth’s complex life and the astonishing range of his self-reflective writings—from “Goodbye, Columbus” and Portnoy’s Complaint to the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Employing extensive archival research and well over one hundred interviews, including conversations with Roth himself, Zipperstein provides an intimate and probing look at one of the twentieth century’s most influential authors, placing his work in the context of Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality in America.

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author and editor of ten books, including Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing and Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. He lives in Berkeley, CA.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes
By Anthony Gottlieb
Publication Date: October 21, 2025

The first biography in more than three decades of the Austrian-born thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century
 
According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), philosophy is a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought and his place in the history of philosophy.
 
Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cultlike following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna.
 
Gottlieb’s meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him.

Anthony Gottlieb is an author, book critic, and former executive editor of The Economist. He is the author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance and The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy.

SPRING 2026

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver
By Peter E. Gordon
Publication Date: February 24, 2026

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 compellingly brings Benjamin to life.

Peter E. Gordon teaches social theory and philosophy at Harvard University. His books include Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization and A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul
By Jenna Weissman Joselit
Publication Date: March 17, 2026

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 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.

Jenna Weissman Joselit is the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and professor of history at the George Washington University. The author, most recently, of Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments, she lives in New York.

Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy
By Daniel Okrent
Pubication Date: March 17, 2026

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 his iconic Broadway shows such 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 acquaintance with Oscar Hammerstein II and subsequent discovery of musical theater, and his rise to fame as both a lyricist and composer.
 
Okrent shines new light on Sondheim’s tormented 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. As Okrent explores the ways Sondheim’s music and lyrics express the inner man, he reveals a life that was defined by two parallel arcs: the movement from alienation to connection, and from ambivalence to resolution.

Daniel Okrent had careers as a book and magazine editor and was the first public editor of the New York Times. He is the prize-winning author of six books, including The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, and Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. He lives in New York City and on Cape Cod.

Sneak Peek: 2026 + Beyond*

Gertrude Stein by Lauren Elkin
Oppenheimer by David Reiff
Hannah Arendt by M. Gessen
Rebecca by Judith Shulevitz
Bob Dylan by Sasha Frere-Jones
Edmond de Rothschild by James McAuley
Susan Sontag by Benjamin Taylor
Louis Kahn by Gini Alhadeff
Mahler by Leon Botstein
Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Jeffrey Rosen
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.