Mike Jay, Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain — Jay, a historian of medicine and culture whose previous work includes Mescaline and High Society, traces the long entanglement between technology and the human brain. Much of this story is told through the lens of accompanying science fiction and non-neurological trends elsewhere in science. It is an excellent book, substantive on every page, and will leave readers wanting to seek out some of the works cited within.

Vasily Grossman, From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin 1941–1945 — Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent who spent years embedded with the Red Army, and these dispatches feed directly into the themes of his later masterpiece Life and Fate. Self-recommending. The best third of this volume is simply stunning. Readers need not commit to the entire work, as there is some repetition.

Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season — Farrokhzad died in a car crash in 1967 at the age of thirty-three, but she was an extraordinary poet whose bold, confessional voice challenged conventions in mid-twentieth-century Iran and continues to influence modern Persian literature. While translated poetry is not always easy to enjoy, this collection is so fiery and passionate that it earns a confident recommendation. In the original Farsi it is presumably even better — and perhaps quite different.

André Breton, Nadja — Breton, the chief theorist and principal founder of the Surrealist movement, published this quasi-novel in 1928 as one of its foundational literary texts. Short and entertaining enough. One takeaway: most books from the past are not masterpieces, and surrealism as a movement — above all in painting — was more important than its literary outputs. Nadja itself reads like a drag, which is fine. But what does Breton think he is immortalizing here? At the end he writes, "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all." Breton deserves appreciation for his understanding of Mexico and for his cultivation of Haitian art.

Emma Southon, Servus: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire — A very good and aggressively readable account of how terrible slavery was under Rome. Southon pushes back against a persistent tendency in popular history to treat Roman slavery as comparatively benign relative to later Atlantic systems. It serves as a useful corrective to other sources. While interpretive disputes over antiquity are generally difficult to resolve, her interpretations feel more intuitive and more convincing than the opposing side of the debate.