"Brooke Orr is on a mission to change her life and the world. Assisting an octogenarian billionaire in the quest to give away his vast fortune turns out to be deeply satisfying work, a noble life path. All you need to make the world a better place, it turns out, is the right ideals with the right amount of money. She and her billionaire make an uncommon pair: Brooke, 33, is a Black woman raised by a single mother in New York City; Asher Jaffee, 83,...

"Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts. Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen,...

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline...

Jamie, an uninhibited free spirit lamenting yet another breakup with a girlfriend, decides to tag along on vacation with her shy friend Marian, who desperately needs to loosen up. Things quickly go awry when they accidentally rent the car some incompetent criminals are using for a drop. Pursued across state lines by goons, and aided by Jamie's ex, who is a cop, the two are oblivious to the happenings around them, their own developing feelings, and...