W. W. Norton & Company

10/28/2025

Since October 2023, Israel has carried out one of the most brutal military onslaughts in modern history on the Gaza Strip, in response to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7. But Gaza had long been in crisis even prior to the current violence, now widely recognized as genocidal. For seventy-seven years, the Palestinian people have endured displacement, occupation, collective punishment, and ethnic cleansing—with those in Gaza often bearing the brunt of it.

With remarkable clarity and compassion, historian Anne Irfan tells the story of the Gaza Strip through six pivotal moments in its modern history, beginning with Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinian people upon its establishment in 1948, when Gaza absorbed more Palestinian refugees per head than anywhere else—a demographic shift that became central to its identity. As Irfan takes us through Israel’s occupations of Gaza, the Palestinian national struggle and formation of the PLO, the first intifada, the creation of the Palestinian Authority, and the rise of Hamas, she tackles widespread historical ignorance and untangles contradicting narratives. Drawing on a decade of research, Irfan weaves in the voices of everyday Palestinians, from farmers who became refugees in Gaza to poets and activists who grew up in the Strip. Featuring a foreword from Gazan writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE GAZA STRIP is an indispensable read for anyone seeking to understand Palestine and its impact on the world.

Available now.
https://wwnorton.com/books/a-short-history-of-the-gaza-strip

Jacket Design by Jason Heuer

10/24/2025

Congratulations to our authors!🎉 These books have been longlisted for the Medal for Excellence in the following categories.

Nonfiction
• WITHOUT FEAR by Keisha N. Blain ()
• IS A RIVER ALIVE? by Robert Macfarlane ()

Fiction
• TERRESTRIAL HISTORY by Joe Mungo Reed ()

10/23/2025

AI warfare, once the stuff of apocalyptic science fiction, has become a reality. Katrina Manson tells the dramatic story of the secretive decade–long Pentagon campaign to bring AI–powered targeting systems onto the battlefield.

PROJECT MAVEN. Coming soon.
https://wwnorton.com/books/project-maven

10/23/2025

Excited to stream Netflix's "A House of Dynamite" tomorrow on Netflix? Be prepared. Read up on the geopolitics behind the nuclear arms race in this Lithub excerpt from Serhii Plokhy's new book THE NUCLEAR AGE.

As Leo Szilard, Albert Einstein, and other refugees from N**i-controlled Europe lived in fear of a N**i atomic bomb, German physicists worried increasingly about the possibility of an American bomb…

10/23/2025

A brilliant, paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, over the last 500 years.

In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn nature. Amrith’s account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.

The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic—vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images—in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

Available now in paperback.
https://wwnorton.com/books/the-burning-earth

Jacket Design by Sarah Bibel

10/22/2025

FAIRYLAND author, Alyssia Abbott, sits down with Terry Gross to discuss growing up with her gay dad in pre-AIDS San Francisco and the release of the new film Fairyland.

Hear the Fresh Air program for Oct 17, 2025

10/22/2025

In the summer of 1976, Duane Oshun finds himself stranded in a remote Montana town beset by a series of strange and menacing events. He takes a job as a logger and builds a cabin on an isolated road near a reclusive neighbor—a hermit named Ted Kaczynski.

The two men are captivated by the valley’s endangered old-growth forest, but Kaczynski’s violent grievances against modern society soon threaten the lives of all those around him. As Kaczynski’s bombs crescendo to the book’s devastating conclusion, OLD KING wrestles with the birth of the modern environmental movement, the accelerating dominion of technology in American life, and a new kind of violence that lives next door.

Told in four parts sweeping across two decades, OLD KING establishes Maxim Loskutoff as one of the most thrilling and inventive authors of the American west, a writer “endowed with fearless audacity, stunning grace, and gutsy heart” (Nickolas Butler).

Available now in paperback.
https://wwnorton.com/books/old-king

Jacket Design by Sarah Bibel

10/21/2025

The nuclear age came into existence with the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. The inauguration of this new era was epitomized by the bomb’s principal creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Since then, the era of the atom has become the age of the bomb?or two bombs: atomic and hydrogen.

In THE NUCLEAR AGE, Serhii Plokhy, one of our preeminent Cold War historians, explores why governments have acquired and stockpiled nuclear weapons and reveals the global failure to reach meaningful nuclear arms treaties. Plokhy shows how, since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the risk of nuclear war has never been so high: Russia threatens nuclear aggression in its war on Ukraine; China is constructing hundreds of new missile silos; and India and Pakistan are locked in ongoing nuclear competition. Plokhy also examines how more countries than ever have come within perilous reach of acquiring nuclear arms, while new technologies, such as hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence, make the nuclear landscape increasingly unpredictable.

From Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Castle Bravo test of 1954, to the rapidly developing nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, THE NUCLEAR AGE reveals the fear that governs the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Plokhy profiles the global players who have diagnosed, stoked, and influenced this fear, from H. G. Wells to Nikita Khrushchev and Vladimir Putin, and he outlines what we might learn from our past to control today’s arms race. As the danger of nuclear war remains imminent, THE NUCLEAR AGE diagnoses our era of rearmament.

Available now.
https://wwnorton.com/books/the-nuclear-age

Jacket Design by Jason Heuer

10/21/2025

Ahead of the publication of her collection of essays ATTENTION, Anne Enright talks about male chauvinism, monstrous artists and the authors she loves.

ATTENTION is available for pre-order now and arrives in US bookstores in April 2026.

Ahead of the publication of her collection of essays, the Irish writer talks about male chauvinism, monstrous artists and the authors she loves

10/20/2025

“speak home, and watch memory surface in the air/like a hologram.”

Read more in CORD SWELL by . The book is a pilgrimage of poems, stories, voices, and mixed-media collage through the lives of three generations of Black women.

10/20/2025

The Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation is excited to welcome Keisha Blain to the Parkway Central Library on October 27th. Keisha N. Blain will be discussing her new book WITHOUT FEAR with Timothy Welbeck.

Register now.

The Author Events Series presents Keisha N. Blain | Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights In Conversation with Timothy Welbeck Even before they were recognized as citizens of the…

10/18/2025

Jews experienced antisemitism the moment they landed on what would become the United States. When they first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, Peter Stuyvesant tried but failed to deport them. As historian Pamela S. Nadell tells in ANTISEMITISM, AN AMERICAN TRADITION, this was only antisemitism’s beginning on our shores, as negative European stereotypes about Jews rooted into American soil.

Compared with the Old World, with its expulsions, Inquisition, ghettos, and Holocaust, America’s Jews have a different history—but one where antisemitism, even if it has had fewer dramatic eruptions, is deeply embedded. Jews in America faced restrictions on holding office and getting financial credit. Universities set quotas to limit the number of Jews attending and businesses refused to hire them. Jews endured verbal and physical attacks, and their synagogues and cemeteries, continuing to this day, were vandalized and desecrated.

ANTISEMITISM, AN AMERICAN TRADITION investigates the depths of this fraught history and its recent manifestations: white nationalists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a gunman murdering eleven worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue building.

At a time when prejudice, discrimination, and hate against Jews is flaring across the country, ANTISEMITISM, AN AMERICAN TRADITION argues that we must understand the past. This momentous work reveals how antisemitism—and resistance to that hatred—endures, representing not a rupture from America’s history, but a centuries-old legacy.

Available now.
https://wwnorton.com/books/antisemitism-an-american-tradition

Jacket Design by Charles Brock