Liveright: 269 books

“A bracing and intelligent reminder that, for all its woes, America remains extraordinarily dynamic, innovative, and resilient.”—Fareed Zakaria Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2013, The Myth of America’s Decline is a highly provocative look at how the United...

**Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in History A dramatic work of historical detection illuminating one of the most significant—and long forgotten—Supreme Court cases in American history.** In 1820, a suspicious vessel was spotted lingering off the coast of northern Florida,...

“It’s Downton Abbey meets The Addams Family in [this] delightfully offbeat history.”—Library Journal At the close of the Victorian era, as now, privacy was power. The extraordinarily wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a mania for it, hiding in his carriage and building tunnels between...

An illuminating work of environmental history that chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, which transformed the social and political fabric of Europe. Although hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, the temperature by the end of the sixteenth century plummeted so drastically...

A beguiling exploration of the joys of reading across boundaries, inspired by the author’s year-long journey through a book from every country. Ann Morgan writes in the opening of this delightful book, "I glanced up at my bookshelves, the proud record of more than twenty years of reading,...

"This fable lifts a great freight of ideas effortlessly…The story of an expedition driven on by wishes of possession and power but guided internally by myths of America whose sources lie in the late 20th century." —Guardian Following the energy crisis of the late twentieth century,...

An apocalyptic dystopia like no other, one whose "originality and power [of] vision can be felt" (Times Literary Supplement). Weird and mesmerizingly grotesque, The Drought tells the chilling story of the world on the brink of extinction, where a global drought, brought on by industrial...

"A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire." —New York Times Book Review When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to...

"Compulsively absorbing: the white heat of its images seems to burn off the page, and the surreal landscapes linger on in the mind." —Independent On the arid, war-plagued terrain of central Africa, a manic doctor is consumed with visions of transforming the Sahara into a land of...

A must-read for any J. G. Ballard fan, this “capstone to a magnificent career” is the essential sequel to Empire of the Sun (San Francisco Chronicle). Published in 1991, this semi-autobiographical novel is a daring masterpiece from “one of the most important and intelligent voices in...

"[A] chilling . . . tale about humans who gamely follow their own worst instincts.”—Chicago Tribune Led by a charismatic and slightly unhinged woman, a group of environmentalists wrest control over a small South Pacific island in hopes of cultivating it into their own private Eden....

Yet again J. G. Ballard’s inimitable clairvoyance is on display in this timely, powerful story of a community shattered by a massive act of violence. A massacre rocks a suburban utopia—thirty-two adults murdered, and their children missing—in Running Wild, one of Ballard’s most dazzlingly...

The classic novel of luxury and depravity, now a major motion picture. From the author of the celebrated dystopian classics Kingdom Come, The Drowned World, and The Drought, High Rise is a prescient story of class warfare. The film adaptation by acclaimed director Ben Wheatley (Sightseers,...

A world-renowned classicist presents a groundbreaking biography of the man who sent Jesus of Nazareth to the Cross. The Roman prefect Pontius Pilate has been cloaked in rumor and myth since the first century, but what do we actually know of the man who condemned Jesus of Nazareth to the Cross?...