Short histories, built from the documents, meant to be read in an evening. Every one of them takes a story you think you know and sets it beside what the record actually says.
A history of the trial, and a novel told from the prosecutor’s side of the table.
On a January night in 1610 a professor of mathematics in Padua pointed a homemade glass at Jupiter and saw three small stars beside it. Twenty-three years later he was on his knees before the Inquisition, and the charge was not the moons and not the sun. It was a book.
The same trial from the other side of the table. Vincenzo Maculano, the Commissary General who prosecuted him, is handed a charge without a reason — and then reads the book he is meant to convict.
A short piece, free: what the documents in Galileo’s own trial file actually say, including the two pages that decided it. It isn’t sold anywhere, and it’s the fastest way to see how these books are built.
One email when there’s a new book. Nothing else, and you can leave any time.
He didn’t invent ruthless politics. He just took notes.
For fourteen years he stood beside the men who decided things and was never allowed to decide anything. This book sets the dispatches he wrote on the day beside the books he wrote years later, and watches the story change.
Out 1 NovemberRead an advance copy
A week into the job as a customs commissioner, he checked his own wardrobe against the list of prohibited goods and burned what failed it.
The invisible hand appears once in eleven hundred pages. Monopoly appears more than two hundred times. This is the life, the world being remade around him, and the argument he worked out by watching it happen.
Out 1 NovemberRead an advance copy
He had the idea of the century. His plan for publishing it was to die first.
A detective story about evidence: pigeon clubs, barnacles, seeds rotted in brine, and twenty-one years of building a case for something nobody will ever watch happen.
Out 1 NovemberRead an advance copy
He took the word that meant a lord’s son and pointed it at men who owned nothing.
No portrait, nothing in his own hand, one certain date. What survives is a book of sayings put together by his students, and the record of a man who spent forty years failing to get the job he wanted.
Out 1 NovemberRead an advance copy
The forgotten boss behind Boardwalk Empire and Bridgegate: a true story of the New Jersey machine, and the governor who learned it from the inside and then took it apart.
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