The short story “San Manuel Bueno, Martir” by the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno can help us to sort out the feelings of the unbelieving minister.

From features on contemporary writers to looks back at some of our greatest literary figures, along with poetry, biography, social criticism and more, our Spring Books 2020 issue has something for everyone (well, almost everyone).

He is most well known for inventing the light bulb and the phonograph, but Thomas Edison patented 1,093 "machines, systems, processes, and phenomena.” In 1881, Edmund Morris writes, Edison was “executing, on average, one new patent every four days.”

The church needs Madeleine Delbrêl’s words and example to transform our vision of one another, whether across ecclesial lines or simply across the subway aisle.

Barry Lopez's new book describes his experiences at six remote sites around the globe: a rugged cape on the Oregon coast; centuries-old human settlements in the Canadian high Arctic; the complex biome of the Galápagos Islands; early-hominid fossil grounds in northern Kenya; a British imperial penal colony in southeastern Australia; and fields of meteorites on the vast ice of Antarctica.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a fierce critic of identity politics, urges readers to move beyond a black-white binary in discussing or thinking about race in the United States.