In THE END OF THE END OF THE EARTH, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes --- both human and literary --- that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we’ve come to expect from Franzen. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu.

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual false alarm. The fire was disastrous: It reached 2,000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more. Investigators descended on the scene, but over 30 years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library --- and if so, who? Award-winning journalist Susan Orlean investigates this legendary fire to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives.

The American experiment rests on three ideas --- "these truths," Jefferson called them --- political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Jill Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? THESE TRUTHS tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism and technology.

Olga Tokarczuk’s novel interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. FLIGHTS explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going?

Andrei Kaplan leaves New York to care for his ailing grandmother in Moscow. He learns to navigate Putin’s Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. Over the course of the year, his grandmother’s health declines, and his feelings of dislocation from both Russia and America deepen. Andrei knows he must reckon with his future and make choices that will determine his life and fate. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Andrei’s politics and his allegiances are tested, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation. In this conclusion to her Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering.

Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in THE SOUL OF AMERICA, Jon Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history.

For more than 50 years, Paul Simon has spoken to us in songs about alienation, doubt, resilience and empathy in ways that have established him as one of the most beloved artists in American pop music history. But Simon is a deeply private person who has resisted speaking to us outside of his music. He has said he will not write an autobiography or memoir, and he has refused to talk to previous biographers. Finally, Simon has opened up --- for more than 100 hours of interviews --- to Robert Hilburn. The result is a deeply human account of the challenges and sacrifices of a life in music at the highest level.

Intermingling settings in America and Britain, Lionel Shriver’s first collection explores property in both senses of the word: real estate and stuff. These 10 short stories and two novellas illustrate how our possessions act as proxies for ourselves, and how tussles over ownership articulate the power dynamics of our relationships. In Shriver’s world, we may possess people and objects and places, but in turn they possess us.

One summer in the ’60s, 19-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he is partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who is married with two nearly adult daughters. She is a warm companion, her bond with Paul immediate. And soon, inevitably, they are lovers. Basking in the glow of one another, they set up house together in London. Decades later, Paul looks back at how they fell in love and how everything fell apart. As he turns over his only story in his mind, examining it from different vantage points, he finds himself confronted with the contradictions and slips of his own memory --- and the ways in which our narratives and our lives shape one another.