Chris Wickham is professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Oxford. A bold new history of the rise of the medieval Italian commune Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government-the commune-arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally...

Dr. Paul Volkoff is leading a U.S. government experiment to enhance the abilities of soldiers by enabling them to walk through walls. One of the subjects, Captain Ben McCoy, finds himself sleepwalking through a parallel universe without knowing it. Upon learning of Captain McCoy's bizarre condition, Dr. Volkoff sets out to understand and replicate this phenomenon at all costs.

The reader knows by page one of Queen for a Day that Mimi Slavitt's three-year-old son is autistic, but if anyone told her, she wouldn't listen, because she doesn't want to know--until at last Danny's behavior becomes so strange even she can't ignore it. After her son's diagnosis Mimi finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son's. It is a world she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice...

"Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest is an eerie and ensnaring story set in contemporary Reykjavík that's sure to keep you awake at night. Iðunn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause. When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same - have you tried eating better? exercising...

"Across nearly nine eventful decades, Allen's life has been full of surprises. Writing jokes got him a gig as the youngest writer of Sid Caesar's television dream team. As a rising comic, he boxed a kangaroo on TV. He made a blank-check deal with a major studio for terms unmatched in Hollywood apart from early titans like Chaplin and Welles. All before Annie Hall. Yet despite once being one of the most consequen­tial American cultural figures, Allen...