Liveright Publishing

07/06/2026

For her renditions of "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad", Emily Wilson has emerged as one of the most distinguished translators of her generation. Her resonant language evokes these poems' deep pathos, as she brings an empath's eye to humans and gods alike. Her next book CROSSING THE WINE-DARK SEA - in stores September 1st - is a series of essays on how the act of translation reshapes and enriches our understanding of the ancient world. At a W. W. Norton & Company event last month, Emily spoke to a full house about why people have long sought "to reclaim and reinvent the surviving texts of antiquity", and her pursuit to make the Classics fun and accessible.

06/02/2026

In stores today, Eric Jay Dolin's THE WRECK OF THE MENTOR is "an exciting and at times almost unbelievably dramatic story" that "help[s] readers appreciate how Western visitors affected the delicate balance of power among indigenous cultures." Michael O'Donnell for the The Wall Street Journal:

The crew of the Mentor traveled halfway around the world before pausing to take on supplies. The ship set a course for Guam in the Pacific but never arrived.

05/12/2026

And...get a sneak peak into some of the book's "secrets"

04/07/2026

In stores Sept 15th, available *now* for preorder: From Kristin Kobes DuMez — the New York Times best-selling author of JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE — comes LIVE LAUGH LOVE: THE SECRET HISTORY OF WHITE CHRISTIAN WOMEN AND THE WORLD THEY MADE.

In "Jesus and John Wayne", a book that has changed how countless Americans understand their faith, Du Mez showed how evangelicals made Jesus into an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. Now she unearths the roots of the glittering, Instagram-ready culture of white Christian femininity.

Learn more: https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/announcinglive-laugh-love

03/03/2026

"Expansive . . . the book’s greatest strength lies in Ruden’s wry criticism . . . a biting, revelatory overview of misogyny’s long literary history."
― Publishers Weekly, starred review

In stores now: Sarah Ruden's REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS, a bracing feminist chronicle of the history of the West told through seven texts, exposing where our most virulent ideas about women came from.

The belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to “traditional” values is a dangerous myth that has long prospered in American politics, providing justification for increasing control over women’s bodies and lives. How did such damaging ideas arise?

In "Reproductive Wrongs", acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold. Ruden traces a sweeping history through her trenchant analysis of seven pieces of literature that, she argues, marked key inflection points across two thousand years. From propagandistic poetry written by Ovid in the early Roman Empire to the biography of an evangelical American “abortion survivor,” Ruden lays bare how doctrines of control over women were invented and propagated.

The New Testament’s Pastoral Epistles introduced near-totalitarian measures to force childbearing in the early days of Christianity. In the late fifteenth century, "The Hammer of Witches" outlined a program that demonized women’s fertility, justifying mass torture and killing. And Charles Dickens’s "The Chimes" glorified the virtues of large families among the very poor, playing into their suffering and exploitation in industrialized Victorian Britain. Scathing and vital, Reproductive Wrongs unearths the evolution of a right-wing radicalism that endures to this day, when half of the US population is once again threatened with the loss of basic human rights and totalitarian law.

Available wherever books are sold!

03/03/2026

In stores now: legendary social psychologist Claude M. Steele returns with an ambitious work that examines “churn”—the mental agitation and physical stress we can experience in diverse settings in everyday life—and the surprising role that trust-building can achieve in reducing churn across identity divides.

Opening with a striking vignette of a parent-teacher conference between a well-meaning white teacher and the concerned Black parents of a seventh grader, the book demonstrates how churn threatens the high level of trust that is essential to mentoring and teaching the young. Drawing from decades of psychological research, Churn is rich with examples, such as a young woman entering a boardroom as one of only a few women; a white male feeling conspicuous during an intense diversity training session; a Chinese grandmother shopping in a public market where anti-Asian violence has occurred; and the lessons gleaned from remarkable student improvement and graduation rates at Georgia State University.

Too often, we deal with the commonplace tensions of diversity and difference by pretending they don’t exist, by avoiding talking and relating to one another across what can seem like wide chasms of identity difference. Steele highlights a different path forward, a path rooted in trying to see full humanity and potential in human difference. CHURN doesn’t dwell on age-old tensions that continue to fester. It provides tangible ways to make a better world in the fractured society we inhabit.

“Wise to its core” (Lee C. Bollinger, president emeritus, Columbia University) and filled with a deep well of hope, Steele’s summa work brilliantly succeeds in teaching us how to work through the churn that continues to suffuse our lives.

02/26/2026