by Arthur Lubow.

Recommended by Kathy Battista, Director, Contemporary Art Program

Dianer Arbus brings to life the full story of one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century, a visionary who revolutionized photography and altered the course of contemporary art with her striking, now iconic images. Arbus comes startlingly to life on these pages, a strong-minded child of unnerving originality who grew into a formidable artist and forged an intimacy with her subjects that has inspired generations of artists. Arresting, unsettling, and poignant, her photographs stick in our minds. Why did these people fascinate her? And what was it about her that captivated them?

Call# TR140.A73 L83 2016

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Recommended by Morgan Falconer, Professor of Contemporary Art

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France 1951. Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.

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Recommended by Kathy Battista

Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation.

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Recommended by Bryan Faller, Professor of Contemporary Art

Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and a start a new life.

But just days after his release, Laura and Shadow's best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A trickster and a rogue, Wednesday seems to know more about Shadow than Shadow does himself.

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Now a series on STARZ. Free with subscription.

Recommended by Judith Prowda, Professor of Art Business and Law

Art historian Maxwell Anderson analyzes continuing threats to cultural heritage, and offers a balanced account of treaties and laws governing the circulation of objects; the history of collecting antiquities; how forgeries are made and detected; how authentic works are documented, stored, dispersed, and displayed; the politics of sending antiquities back to their countries of origin; and the outlook of an expanded legal market. Anderson provides a summary of challenges ahead, including the future of underwater archaeology, the use of drones, remote sensing, and how invisible markings on antiquities will allow them to be traced.

Call # CC165.A53 2017

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Recommended by Kathy Battista

A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece; she reluctantly agrees to go look for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart, she's not even sure if she wants to find him. As her search comes to a shocking breaking point, she discovers she understands less than she thought she did about her relationship and the man she used to love.

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Recommended by Judith Prowda

Over the last few decades there has been a disconcerting increase in the number of forged paintings. In retaliation, there has been a rise in the use, efficiency and ability of scientific techniques to detect these forgeries. Written in an approachable and amenable style, this book will make a fascinating read for non-specialists, art historians, curators and scientists alike.

Call # ND1660.R34 2015

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Recommended by Kathy Battista and Claire Hoover, Program Coordinator, Online and Continuing Education

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for American, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion- for each other and for their homeland.

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Recommended by Judith Prowda

This is the definitive handbook on art crime for art-world professionals of all kinds- from museum, auction house or art insurance employees to the contemporary gallerist, dealer, art-market student or collector. An authoritative and readable handbook, Art Crime and Its Prevention will be an essential reference guide for all those involved in the art world internationally, or in the protection and recovery of artworks.

Call # N8795.A78 2016

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Recommended by Kathy Battista

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood outside of Naples, Ferrante's four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, Lila and Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. Book one in the series, My Brilliant Friend, follows Lila and Elena from their first fateful meeting as children through their school years and adolescence.

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Recommended by Judith Prowda

As much as any other topic arising out of World War II, stolen art has proven to be an issue that simply will not go away. newly found works of art pit survivors and their heirs against museums, foreign nations, and even their own family members. This is the first book to seriously address the legal and ethical rules that have dictated the results of restitution claims between competing claimants to the same works of art. It provides a history of art and culture in German-occupied Europe, an introduction to the most significant collections in Europe to be targeted by the Nazis, and a narrative of the efforts to reclaim looted artwork in the decades following the Holocaust through profiles of some of the art world's most famous and influential restitution cases.

Coming soon to the Library!

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Can't wait for this title to come in? Be sure to check out the film, Woman in Gold.

Recommended by Paul Melton, Professor of Art Business

The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? Historian Thomas Lacqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogene's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in today's supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters- for individuals, communitites, and nations.

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Recommended by Judith Prowda

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.

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Recommended by Bryan Faller

Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life. This life, however, changes forever when he stops to help a girl on a London sidewalk. His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them. And he must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels, if he is ever to return to the London that he knew.

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Recommended by Judith Prowda

In Whitehead's ingeniousconception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor- engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface makes an insidious scheme designed designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

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by Annie Sinclair

Drawing on Rosenberg's intimate correspondence with Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and others, My Grandfather's Gallery takes the reader through the life of a legendary member of the Parisian art scene. Rosenberg's story is emblematic of millions of Jews, rich and poor, whose lives were indelibly altered by World War II, and Sinclair's journey to reclaim it as it paints a picture that reframes the history of twentieth-century art.

Call # PN5183.S54 A313 2014

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Recommended by Judith Prowda

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happen with adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of though that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

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Recommended by Paul Melton

With the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of 'friending', 'liking' and 'commenting', at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? Networks Without a Cause examines our collecting obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture.

Coming soon to the Library!

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Recommended by Paul Melton

Social networking has grown into a staple of modern society, but its continued evolution is becoming increasingly detrimental to our lives. Shifts in communication and privacy are affecting us more than we realize or understand. Terms of Service solidifies this current moment in technology and contemplates its implications: the identity-validating pleasures and perils of online invisibility; our newly adopted view of daily life through the lens of what is share-worth; and the surveillance state operated by social media platforms- Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others- to mine our personal data for advertising revenue, an invasion of our lives that is a pervasive as government spying.

Coming soon to the Library!

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Recommended by Bryan Faller

While the Civil War raged on in America, another revolution was taking place in the studios of Paris. The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amidst scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. The drama of its birth, played out on canvas and against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, would at times resemble a battlefield. As King revels, it would reorder both history and culture, and resonate around the world.

Call # ND547.K47 2007

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Recommended by Paul Melton

In this short and provocative book, Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls 'hypermodulation,' as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. His account challenges the various narratives that portray social media as a sinister space of synchronized attention in which we are 'busily clicking ourselves to death.' This critical reflection on the unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distraction that our latest technologies now allow.

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Recommended by Bryan Faller

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now he's sure that he'll be the first person to die there. Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills- and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit- he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

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Recommended by Bryan Faller

This historical masterpiece by Ken Follett tells the tale of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known...of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect- a man divided in his soul...of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame...and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state and brother against brother.

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A STARZ mini-series. Available to watch with subscription or to purchase on Amazon.

Recommended by Paul Melton

Laurence Scott shows how a fourth-dimensional life- one where there is ceaseless communication, instant information, and global connection- is dramatically changing us by redefining our social lives and extending the limits of our presence in the world. Blending tech-philosophy with insights on everything from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, Scott stands with a rising generation of social critics hoping to understand our new reality. His virtuosic debut is a revelatory and original exploration of life in the digital age.

Coming soon to the Library!

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Recommended by Paul Melton

Crackling with insights into our most perplexing contemporary dilemmas, from climate change to the global financial meltdown, this book challenges our most sacredly held beliefs about science, technology, and progress. At the same time, it shows how the secret to be better science can be found where we least expect it- in the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the inevitably unpredictable. William Byers explains why the subjective element in scientific inquiry is in fact what makes it so dynamic, and deftly balances the need for certainty and rigor in science with the equally important need for creativity, freedom, and downright wonder. Drawing on an array of fascinating examples, Byers demonstrates how we can and must learn from the existence of blind spots in our sceintific and mathematical understanding.

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Recommended by Paul Melton

Through a series of colorful stories about great thinkers and the problems they choose to solve, the author traces the historical evolution of probability and explains how statistical methods have helped to propel scientific research. The past successes of statistics has depended on vast, deliberate simplifications amounting to willful ignorance, and this very success now threatens future advances in medicine, the social sciences, and other fields. Limitations of existing methods result in frequent reversals of scientific findings and recommendations, to the consternation of both scientists and the lay public. This book explains how statistical methodology , though enormously productive and influential over the past century, is approaching a crisis. The deep and troubling divide between qualitative and quantitative modes of research, and between research and practice, are reflections of this underlying problem. The author outlines a path toward the re-engineering of data analysis to help close these gaps and accelerate scientific discovery.

Coming soon to the Library!

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Recommended by Paul Melton

In the modern world, science is king: weekly headlines proclaim the latest scientific breakthroughs and numerous mathematical problems, once indecipherable, have now been solved. But are there limits to what we can discover about our physical universe? In this very personal journey to the edges of knowledge, Marcus du Sautoy investigates how leading experts in fields from quantum physics and cosmology, to sensory perception and neuroscience, have articulated the current lie of the land. In doing so, he travels to the very boundaries of understanding, questioning contradictory stories and consulting cutting edge data.

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Recommended by Paul Melton

Renowned philosopher Jean-Luc Marion challenges some the most fundamental assumptions we have developed about knowledge: that it is categorical, predicative, and positive. Following Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, he looks toward our finitude and the limits of our reason. He asks an astonishingly simple- but profoundly provocative- question in order to open up an entirely new way of thinking about knowledge: Isn't our uncertainty, our finitude and rational limitations, one of the few things that we can be certain of?

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Recommended by Paul Melton

For most of us, the better we perform the more attention we receive. Yet for many "Invisibles"- skilled professionals whose role is critical to whatever enterprise they're a part of- it is the opposite: the better they do their jobs the more they disappear. In fact, it is only when something goes wrong that they are noticed at all. David Zweig takes us into the behind-the-scenes worlds that Invisibles inhabit. He interviews top experts in unusual fields to reveal the quiet workers behind public successes. Combining in-depth profiles with insights from psychology, sociology, and business, Zweig uncovers how these hidden professionals reap deep fulfillment by relishing the challenges their work presents.

Coming soon to the Library!

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Recommended by Paul Melton

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It is a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep- spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. Author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite.

Coming soon to the Library!

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Recommended by Paul Melton

Neoliberalism is not working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.

Coming soon to the Library!

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Recommended by Katherine Burgess, Student Services Coordinator

Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandal, and the little lies that can be deadly.

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Recommended by Claire Hoover

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious-even liberating book, lies not in ourselves, but in the product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization.

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Recommended by Jamie Goldenberg, Admissions Advisor

Sixteenth-century Europe saw an explosion of female rule- whether they were on the throne or behind the scenes, women held unprecedented power for more than a hundred years. From Isabella of Castile, to her daughter Katherine of Aragon, and her granddaughter Mary Tudor, to Catherine de Medici, Anne Boleyn, and Elizabeth Tudor, these women wielded enormous power over their territories, shaping the course of European history for over a year.

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Recommended by Clarissa Santiago, Program Manager, Contemporary Art, Fine/ Decorative Art and Design, Summer Study

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held just inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.

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Recommended by Katherine Burgess

This memoir chronicle's Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

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Recommended by Jamie Goldenberg

Ginny Carter was once a rising star in TV news, married to a top anchorman, with a three year-old son and a full and happy life in Beverly Hills- until her whole world dissolved in a single instant on the freeway two days before Christmas. In the aftermath, she pieces her life back together and tries to find meaning in her existence as a human rights worker in the worst areas around the globe.

Then on the anniversary of the fateful accident- and wrestling with the lure of death herself- she meets a boy who will cause her life to change forever yet again.

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Recommended by Katherine Burgess

Too many of us believe that the search for meaning is an esoteric pursuit- that you have to travel to a distant monastery or page through dusty volumes to cover life's secrets. The truth is, there untapped sources of meaning all around us- right here, right now.

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Recommended by Claire Hoover

Buildings have often been studies whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time.

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Recommended by Katherine Burgess

The Mitford had style and presence and were mercilessly gifted. Above all, they were funny- hilariously and mercilessly so. In this wise, evenhanded, and generous book, Lovell captures the vitality and drama of a family that took the twentieth century by storm and became, in some respects, its victims.

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Recommended by Kaitlyn Curtis

This is the story of Chimen Abramsky, an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. For more than fifty years Chimen and his wife hosted epic gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age's greatest thinkers.

Call # Z330.6.L6 A27 2015

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Recommended by Claire Hoover

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Toru encounters a bizarre group of allies: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen year-old girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

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Recommended by Kaitlyn Curtis

Of all the glamorous stars of New York high society, none blazes brighter than Babe Paley. Her flawless face regularly graces the pages of Vogue, and she is celebrated and adored for ineffable style and exquisite taste, especially among her friends- the alluring socialite Swans Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, and Pamela Churchill. By all appearances, Babe has it all: money, beauty, glamour, jewels, influential friends, a prestigious husband, and beautiful homes. But beneath the elegantly composed exterior lies a passionate woman- one who is desperately longing for true love and connection.

Enter Truman Capote. The diminutive golden-haired genius with a larger than life personality explodes onto the scene, setting Babe and her circle of Swans aflutter. Through Babe, Truman gains an unlikely entrée into the enviable lives of Manhattan's elite, along with unparalleled access to the scandal and gossip of Babe's powerful circle. Babe never imagines the destruction Truman will leave in his wake. But once a storyteller, always a storyteller- even when the stories are not his to tell.

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Recommended by Clarissa Santiago

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, native New Yorker Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in a world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart.

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Recommended by Jamie Goldenberg

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. Solving the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of da Vinci...clues visible for all to see...and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter. Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved with the Priory of Sion- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and da Vinci, among others. The Louvre curator has sacrificed his life to protect the Priory's most sacred trust: the location of a vastly important religious relic, hidden for centuries.

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Like the book? Watch the movie, starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon. Available to rent on Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu.

Recommended by Clarissa Santiago

The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.

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Recommended by Anupama Chakravartti, Associate Director of Admissions

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Kahneman and Tversky's work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much Michael Lewis's own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

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Recommended by Kaitlyn Curtis

In this breathtaking work of the imagination, Georgia tells the story of a passionate young woman, her search for love and artistic freedom, the sacrifices she faces, and the bold vision that will make her a legend.

Call # PS3620.R57 G46 2017

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If you like this book, be sure to check out the movie, Georgia O'Keefe (Call #ND237.O5 G46 2009), starring Joan Allen as Georgia O'Keefe and Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz.

Recommended by Jamie Goldenberg

Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the tale of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music, wearing kimono, elaborate make-up, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it.

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Like the book? Watch the movie! Available to rent on Amazon Video, YouTube, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.

Recommended by Clarissa Santiago

A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically talented Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink.

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Recommended by Kaitlyn Curtis

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. Offred must lies on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in the age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable.

Now a series on Hulu, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and a literary tour de force.

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