Mindy Aloff‘s writing on dance, literature, film, and other cultural subjects has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other periodicals throughout the U.S. and abroad. She is the author or editor of several books, including Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation and Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World by Agnes de Mille. A past winner of a Whiting Writers Award and a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson and John Simon Guggenheim memorial foundations, she is currently an adjunct professor of dance and a lecturer in the first-year seminar program at Barnard College. 

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“[Why Dance Matters is a] smart, bracing book of reflection, analysis, memoir and history. . . . Even people with some experience of dance and lifetimes of attending performances will be impressed by the author’s range and expertise. Obscure anecdotes and facts are scattered throughout, little gifts to the reader.”
—Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal

David Chaffetz is an independent scholar. He is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books and has written for the South China Morning Post and the Nikkei Asian Review. He is also the author of Three Asian Divas and A Journey Through Afganistan. Chaffetz is a member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asian Society, and the Gremio Literario (Literary Society) of Lisbon.  

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“A fascinating, compelling, and scholarly history . . . that brings the great horse-powered empires of Central Asia to life and places the horse at the center of world history where it belongs.”
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World

Noah Charney is assistant professor of conservation biology at the University of Maine and coauthor of the award-winning Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species. He also leads a conservation nonprofit (Radnor to River) and helped create a jazz club that he co-owns (Rudy’s Jazz Room)—both in Nashville, TN. 

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“[Charney] is an amiable host . . . . The cumulative effect of his book on the reader is the realization that, as much as we talk about ‘managing’ nature, nature has been managing itself for eons just fine without us.”
—Alexandra Horowitz, The Atlantic

William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage; A Wrinkle in History; The Philosopher’s Desire; and The Theater of Truth. The Rigor of Angels was named to several best of 2023 lists, including the New York Times and The New Yorker. 

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“[A] mind-expanding book . . . . Elegantly written . . . . This is a book about the tiniest of things—the position of an electron, an instant of change. It is also about the biggest of things—the cosmos, infinity, the possibility of free will. Egginton works through ideas by grounding them in his characters’ lives . . . . The beauty of this book is that Egginton encourages us to recognize all of these complicated truths as part of our reality, even if the ‘ultimate nature’ of that reality will remain forever elusive. We are finite beings whose perspective will always be limited; but those limits are also what give rise to possibility. When we choose what to observe, we insert our freedom to choose into nature. As Egginton writes, ‘We are, and ever will be, active participants in the universe we discover.’”
—New York Times

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Marina Harss is a dance writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the Nation, the Guardian, Ballet Review, Dance Europe, Tanz, Dance Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Robert and Ina Caro Research and Travel Fellowship and was a fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts in 2019; she is currently a member of Columbia University’s Seminar on Dance. 

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“History itself flows through the life and choreography of Alexei Ratmansky: the histories of Ukraine, Russia, and the West, ballet heritage and ballet modernity, and the evolving presentations of women, of partnering, and of community are Ratmansky terrain. Marina Harss’s The Boy from Kyiv—a page-turner from the first—tells Ratmansky’s story with a fluent lightness that’s like his choreography. Ratmansky’s work and the many possibilities of ballet grow richer and deeper in the mind as you read.”
—Alastair Macaulay, chief dance critic at the New York Times, 2007–2018

Michael Korda is the New York Times bestselling author of many books including Horse People, Country Matters, Ulysses S. Grant, Cat People, Journey to a Revolution, and Ike; as well as Another Life: A Memoir of Other People and Charmed Lives: A Family Romance.

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“Every page of Muse of Fire betrays a profound intimacy with both the ‘sheer horror’ of the war and, even more, of a time when ‘poetry mattered to people in a way it no longer does to us.’ Michael Korda’s unique angle allows him to break through the cliches and restores to us these poets with a fierce immediacy. His book is itself a moving memorial.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, author of An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

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Gillian Linden received her MFA from Columbia University. She is a 2011 winner of the Henfield Prize for fiction. Her previous book, Remember How I Told You I Love You?, is a collection of short stories. She lives in Brooklyn and Norfolk with her husband and children.

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“The prose throughout is lapidary, sharp . . . Negative Space beautifully executes a good amount of what feels imperative; acutely, assuredly, it mirrors a particular world back to us.”
— Lynn Steger Strong, New York Times Book Review

“Subtly written . . . . [I]ts style most resembles the so-called Minimalist writing of Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“It’s the good life. Or is it? Gillian Linden’s eminently engaging heroine—loving mother, wife, and teacher in an elite private school—valiantly aims to do the right thing as she navigates the complexities of ironic absurdities and quiet tragedies reflective of our time. Written with a cool eye and a warm heart, this remarkable novel is both wryly comic and profoundly thought-provoking. It’s a stunning achievement worthy of all the praise it will undoubtedly receive.”
—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits for Food

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law at Yale University, and a notable intellectual historian and political theorist whose writings have appealed in such widely circulated publications as the Altantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonword, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His books are Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics; A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.

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“Skeptical of received wisdom and over-burnished reputations, Liberalism Against Itself is a continuously bracing and necessary exercise in intellectual iconoclasm. It not only rescues a distinguished Western tradition from its skittish cold-war exponents and bellicose neo-conservative exegetes; it also alerts us to the many political and intellectual possibilities still open to us.”
—Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present 

Sarah Maslin Nir is a staff reporter for the New York Times, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the author of the newly published The Star Horse, book #3 in her Once Upon a Horse series of young adult readers.

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“Lyrical, lovely, and thoroughly engaging. Horse Crazy is that rare book that looks inward and outward. . . . Wonderful.”
—Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford and has written for Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian, and National Geographic. His many books include The Professor and the Madman; The Map that Changed the World; Krakatoa; and A Crack in the Edge of the World. Each of these has been a New York Times bestseller and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. Winchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth in 2006.

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“A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world.”

—New York Times

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