One morning in 1943, close to eighty men descended into the Smith coal mine in Bearcreek, Montana. Only three came out alive. “Goodbye wifes and daughters . . .” wrote two of the miners as they died. The story of that tragic day and its aftermath unfolds in this book through the eyes of those wives and daughters—women who lost their husbands, fathers, and sons, livelihoods, neighbors, and homes, yet managed to fight back and persevere.

Reflecting on Montaigne, Virginia Woolf remarked, “The most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind.” In Quotidiana, Patrick Madden illuminates these common actions and seemingly commonplace moments, making connections that revise and reconfigure the overlooked and underappreciated.

All our lives are made of moments, both simple and sublime, all of which in some way partake of the cultural moment. Fleda Brown is that rare writer who, in narrating the incidents and observations of her life, turns her story, by wit and insight and a poet’s gift, into something more.

Memoirs are as varied as human emotion and experience, and those published in the distinguished American Lives Series run the gamut. Excerpted from this series (called “splendid” by Newsweek) and collected here for the first time, these dispatches from American lives take us from China during the Cultural Revolution to the streets of New York in the sixties to a cabin in the backwoods of Idaho.

In this “journal” Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where “things seen” reflect a private life meeting the larger world.

“Robert Vivian’s prose is lyrical and harrowing—harrowing in the Biblical sense,” Sven Birkerts said of The Mover of Bones, the first book in Vivian’s Tall Grass Trilogy. That same lyrical power carries this new volume to a place of hard-won hope and redemption at once both spiritual and earthly.

For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen’s stories, the past is very much the present. Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual boundaries set for American Indian characters: migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility.

According to W. Scott Olsen, there are two reasons for flying. The first is just to get somewhere. The second has nothing to do with destination. It is this second reason, expressing our deepest curiosity and our longings for infinity, grace, and clarity, that Never Land explores. At once frankly philosophical and engagingly practical, the book combines accounts of touring in the air, the history of flight, the sensations of flying, and the technical acts and facts of navigating, piloting, lifting off, and landing.

Journeys West traces journeys made during seven months of fieldwork in 1935 and 1936 by Julian Steward, a young anthropologist, and his wife, Jane. Virginia Kerns identifies the scores of Native elders whom they met throughout the Western desert, men and women previously known in print only by initials and thus largely invisible as primary sources of Steward’s classic ethnography.

This volume uses the prism of political cultures to interpret Kansas politics and disclose the intimate connections between the state’s past and its current politics. The framework of political cultures evolves from underlying political preferences for liberty, order, and equality, and these preferences form the basis for the active political cultures of individualism, hierarchy, and egalitarianism. This comprehensive examination of Kansas political institutions argues that Kansas politics, historically and presently, may best be understood as a clash of political cultures.

The Recipe Reader brings new perspectives, contexts, and arguments into the existing debate about cookery writing and will interest scholars of literature, popular culture, social history, and women’s studies, as well as food historians and professional food writers.

“Insouciant” and “irreverent” are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore’s books—and, invariably, “hilarious.” Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, “A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,” this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own.

The Forbidden Fuel is the definitive history of alcohol fuel, describing in colorful detail the emergence of alcohol fuel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the political and economic forces behind its popularity, opposition, and eventual growth.

Pete Newell is considered one of the finest basketball minds in the sport’s history. His death in 2008 spawned tributes from around the country, including legendary UCLA coach John Wooden and Bob Knight, who considered Newell his mentor. Based on hundreds of interviews of veterans of the game, A Good Man is Bruce Jenkins’s complete biography of Pete Newell.

Despite enormous differences in pay among professional athletes, most aspects of their daily lives remain surprisingly constant across sports and income levels. Living Out of Bounds provides answers to persistent questions about what it’s really like to be an athlete and discusses the filtered image of the athlete that emerges through books and other media.

The story of the making of the great Yankees dynasty reveals Barrow’s genius for organizing, for recognizing baseball talent, and for exploiting the existing economic environment. Because Barrow was a player in so many of baseball’s key events, his biography gives a clear and eye-opening picture of how America’s sport was played in the twentieth century, on the field and off. A complex portrait of a larger-than-life character in the annals of baseball, this book is also an inside history of how the sport’s competitive environment evolved and how the Yankees came to dominate it.