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Stephen Breyer means well. Why is his new book, “Reading the Constitution,” so exasperating?

In “Death Row Welcomes You,” Steven Hale follows the cases of men in an American prison awaiting execution, examining what they did as well as the people they’ve become.

Crafting the arguments in “You Get What You Pay For,” her first essay collection, “felt like pulling apart a long piece of taffy,” says the author of “Magical Negro.”

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” has been a runaway critical and commercial success. When you’ve been David all your life, everything changes “when you become Goliath.”

A forceful advocate for experimental poetry, she argued that a critic’s task was not to search for meaning, but to explicate the form and texture of a poem.

After his father, who created the character, died, he continued the series of books about a modest elephant and his escapades in Paris for seven decades.

How did gender become a scary word? The theorist who got us talking about the subject has answers.

In “Worry,” Alexandra Tanner puts a humorous spin on the fixations, disappointments, aversions and maladjustments of adulthood.

In “Age of Revolutions,” the CNN host promises to shed light on four centuries of social upheavals and to offer insights on the global fractures of the present.

Taken together, two new books tell the century-long story of the revolutionary ideals that transformed the United States, and the counterrevolutionaries who fought them.