In November 2021, an obscure email from the California Department of Education landed in New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller’s inbox. The football team at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside was having an undefeated season. After years of covering war, wildfires, the pandemic and mass shootings, Fuller was captivated by the story of this group of high school boys. It was a sports story but not an ordinary one, built on the chemistry between a group of underestimated young men and their superhero advocate coach, Keith Adams, a deaf former athlete himself. Fuller packed his bags and drove seven hours to the Riverside campus. THE BOYS OF RIVERSIDE looks back at the historic 2021 and 2022 seasons in which the California School for the Deaf chased history.

Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in the high desert of central Nevada 50 miles from the nearest town. A grizzled man in his 60s, he survives on canned soup, instant coffee, and memories of his ex-wife, friends and family he’s lost, and his life as a touring musician. Al finds himself teetering on the edge of madness and running out of reasons to go on --- until a horse arrives on his doorstep: nameless, blind and utterly helpless. Is the animal real, or a phantom conjured from imagination? As Al contemplates the horse’s existence --- and what, if anything, he can do --- his thoughts are interspersed with memories, from the moment his mother’s part-time boyfriend gifts him a 1959 butterscotch blonde Telecaster, to the day his travels begin.

Jimmie James spent his entire life defying the odds. He was born invisible. His birth certificate, long since filed away in some clerk’s office in East Texas, recorded facts about him that were deemed most relevant in the late 1950s: “colored” and “illegitimate.” His great-great-grandmother was enslaved, and his early life was confined by the privation and segregation of the late Jim Crow-era South. Four decades later, he embarked on his journey to play the 100 greatest golf courses in the United States. In a single year. From the first tee at Augusta National, the distance between the world he grew up in and the world of extreme privilege to which he’d now managed to gain access was impossible to ignore.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976, and Eilis is now 40 with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades. One day, when Tony is at work, an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that, when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’ doorstep. It is what Eilis does --- and what she refuses to do --- in response to this stunning news that makes LONG ISLAND so riveting and suspenseful.

Mercer Mann, a popular writer from Camino Island, is back on the beach, marrying her boyfriend, Thomas, in a seaside ceremony. Bruce Cable, the infamous owner of Bay Books, performs the wedding. Afterward, Bruce tells Mercer that he has stumbled upon an incredible story. Mercer desperately needs an idea for her next novel, and Bruce now has one. The true story is about Dark Isle, a sliver of a barrier island not far off the North Florida coast. It was settled by freed slaves 300 years ago, and their descendants lived there until 1955, when the last one --- Lovely Jackson --- was forced to leave. But now Tidal Breeze, a huge, ruthless corporate developer, wants to build a resort and casino on the island, which Lovely knows is rightfully hers. She also knows something about the island that could seriously cloud the dollar signs in the developer’s eyes: the island is cursed.

A.J. Jacobs tries to get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers by living as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution. He asserts his right to free speech by writing his opinions on parchment with a quill and handing them out to strangers in Times Square. He consents to quartering a soldier, as is his Third Amendment right. He turns his home into a traditional 1790s household by lighting candles instead of using electricity, boiling mutton, and --- because women were not allowed to sign contracts --- feebly attempting to take over his wife’s day job, which involves a lot of contract negotiations. The book blends unforgettable adventures --- delivering a handwritten petition to Congress, battling redcoats as part of a Revolutionary War reenactment group --- with dozens of interviews from constitutional experts from both sides.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter --- a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, inflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

An autobiography usually requires a justification. The great autobiographies --- those by Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Brooks Adams --- were justified by their authors living in interesting times, harboring radically new ideas or participating in great events. Joseph Epstein qualifies on none of these counts. His life has been quiet, lucky in numerous ways and far from dramatic. But it also has been emblematic of the great changes in our country since World War II. NEVER SAY YOU'VE HAD A LUCKY LIFE is an intimate look at one life steeped in radical change: from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status, from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel on print, and on.

We read to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference, or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the power to keep us safe, to challenge us, and, perhaps most importantly, to make us more fully human. Shannon Reed, a longtime teacher, lifelong reader and New Yorker contributor, gets it. With one simple goal in mind, she makes the case that we should read for pleasure above all else. In WHY WE READ, Reed shares surprising stories from her life as a reader and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students.

August 1943. Newly orphaned and fleeing from Rome after surviving the American bombing raid that killed his parents, 14-year-old Massimo is attacked by thugs and finds himself bloodied at the base of the Montecassino. It is there in the Benedictine abbey’s shadow that a charismatic and cryptic man calling himself Pietro Houdini, the self-proclaimed “Master Artist and confidante of the Vatican,” rescues Massimo and brings him up the mountain to serve as his assistant in preserving the treasures that lay within the monastery walls. But can Massimo believe what Pietro is saying, particularly when Massimo has secrets too? When it becomes evident that Montecassino will soon become the front line in the war, Pietro Houdini and Massimo execute a plan to smuggle three priceless Titian paintings to safety down the mountain.