A deeply researched account of the rightward turn in Appalachia, this study focusses on Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city once flush with coal-mining jobs that sits in what is now America's "whitest and second-poorest congressional district." Hochschild, a sociologist, posits that Pikeville's politics are shaped by grief about "stolen pride" and feelings of shame prompted by the region's decline. She interviews a range of residents--including a mayor, prisoners, and recovering drug addicts--to understand each person's relationship to these feelings. Some of her subjects experience "bootstrap pride"; others, like Matthew Heimbach, a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party, fashion themselves as moral outlaws. This polemic, by a cognitive scientist and startup founder, calls for stricter regulation of A.I.

The result of eight years of reporting, this deft chronicle delves into the story of Bobby Johnson, a sixteen-year-old from New Haven, who, in 2006, was coerced into confessing to a brutal murder he didn't commit. Dawidoff presents portraits of the individuals involved, juxtaposed with research on segregation, the Great Migration, and mass incarceration. Bobby, though widely considered innocent, was convicted because he "fit a false stereotype about how things worked in poor neighborhoods." This musical study charts the rise of Romanticism, in the nineteenth century, as composers came to see individual voice as the key to emotional expression, and began to assert their "existential being through a recognizable, even idiosyncratic musical language." Walsh provides biographical sketches of composers and assessments of their work, and weaves in subplots across decades and geography--the impact of nationalism, the development of program music, the ubiquitous spectre of Beethoven.

This incisive, warm-blooded collection of stories is populated by outsiders: expatriates and repatriates, Vikings, travelling ventriloquists. Nearly half the stories are linked, tracing a romance between Jack and Sadie, whom we first meet in Ireland, attending Jack's sister's wedding to a Dutchman. Whether it's over the course of a honeymoon in Amsterdam or a day at a Texas water park, McCracken illuminates qualities of human nature through fragments of her characters' lives, much like the boy in the title story, examining ancient shards of pottery at a museum: "Looking at a piece of a thing, he might think, deduce, discover something nobody ever had, which was all he wanted in the world." An eccentric Italian bibliophile, Giordano Vietri, is the driving force of this assured début novel. The narrator, Gabriele, working in a Berkeley bookstore, receives hundreds of Vietri's requests for obscure titles, and, as she ships them off to him, at an address in Rome, she wonders if he is an academic or someone on a more personal quest for knowledge.

Philosophers have long debated the nature of consciousness. This probing study takes an evolutionary approach, examining "experience in general" not only in humans but in much of the animal kingdom. Animals, it argues, developed consciousness gradually, through such biological innovations as centralized nervous systems and the ability to distinguish one's actions from external forces, which have given rise to "varieties of subjectivity." The author is crisp on a subject notorious for abstraction, dissecting fuzzy philosophical metaphors and weaving in lively descriptions of the octopuses, whale sharks, and banded shrimp he observes on scuba dives off the coasts of Australia. Born in 1797 in Düsseldorf, then under Napoleonic occupation, Heine remained a committed liberal even as Germany turned inward after the Congress of Vienna.