New Arrivals: The Best Recent Book Releases

A veteran of stage, screen, and television reflects on the craft, discipline, and mindset that sustained a long career, weaving in stories from family life and late-life reinvention as he approaches his hundredth birthday.

Following six women across bohemian Paris, wartime Europe, and the postwar Riviera, this book examines how each shaped different phases of Picasso’s life and work while pursuing her own creative or professional path. Drawing on newly available archival material and overlooked firsthand accounts, it situates these women within the social and political pressures of the twentieth century, from the artistic ferment of Montmartre to the dislocations of occupation and exile.

The former US Poet Laureate turns his signature wit and warmth toward our four-legged companions in twenty-five poems paired with Pamela Sztybel’s graceful watercolors. From the lightness of watching a furry friend bound out the door to the absurd joy of holding a pup on the scale, the man the WSJ dubbed “America’s favorite poet” delivers a charming, heart-lifting gift for the canine lovers in your life.

This edition brings together five decades of work by a writer whose career moved from early poems grounded in the rural life of Northern Ireland to later collections shaped by translation, classical literature, and the political tensions of the late twentieth century.

From a researcher who runs a dream engineering lab and writes widely about the science of sleep, this Tertulia staff pick offers an accessible look at what the mind is doing at night. It explores how dreams sort through emotion, shape memory, and repeat certain images, and it highlights what current research says about gently shifting dream patterns and improving overall rest.

Written by a historian steeped in the study of European and global political change, this book examines uprisings from the English Civil War to the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It shows how these movements unfolded over decades rather than single dramatic moments, and contrasts famous upheavals with the many rebellions that vanished from collective memory.

Isaacson examines the origins and afterlife of a foundational sentence in the Declaration of Independence, tracing how its ideals were drafted, contested, and continually reinterpreted. "A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise," observed Kirkus Reviews.

In eleven new stories, Williams turns her unsparing eye to a world marked by cruelty, confusion, and fleeting moments of grace. Twin sisters seek penance for their family’s industrial fortune, a grown man drifts through memories of boarding-school innocence, and a “pelican child” lives with the irritable Baba Yaga in a hut on chicken legs. Kirkus, in a starred review, called the collection “superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature.”

A seven-volume septology about a single day repeating without end, Balle’s project expands in Book III, recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. By this point in the cycle, Tara is no longer alone: she meets another person who remembers. As the world remains suspended in perpetual fall, a new, tentative sense of companionship begins to shape her understanding of the loop and her place within it.