Featured Topics: Spring 2026 Nonfiction

Narcissism is everywhere at the moment – as a pop-culture buzzword, a moral reproach, a description of contemporary society, or as a clinical diagnosis. But what is behind this omnipresence? And why are narcissistic people impossible to satisfy – why are they insatiable? In this groundbreaking new book, Thomas Arnold and Thomas Fuchs articulate a new, phenomenological existentialist view of...

 Alexander the Great imitated Achilles, and Caesar imitated Alexander – but who did the powerful men of today take as their role models? Caligula, Napoleon III, Mao? »Be careful what you wish for«, as the old proverb goes. Perhaps today's leaders should have been more cautious when they wished for more charismatic heads of state and government in the era of post-politics.

»I am...

The largely peaceful or at least predictable world order of the long decade of the 1990s is now a thing of the past: neither international organisations nor the USA as erstwhile sole superpower are able to suppress military conflicts like the one in Ukraine. The West seems divided. New powers are entering the arena, and trade wars are posing major problems for export-oriented countries like...

The big black line running through digitalisation – the spanner in the works – is society. But what does this line mean? It is visible, but not legible. It is a reference to the reality that runs parallel to every digitalisation process, and it is as continuous as it is resistant. It refers to the reality that runs parallel to every digitization process and is as continuous as it is resistant....

Are you able to draw a clitoris? If not, you’re not alone. We know far too little about the female pleasure organ. Back in the 19th century, though, things were different. Scientists knew that the...

The current world order has grown fragile: future economic development is uncertain, peace in Europe is under threat, and social cohesion is under immense strain. Many people are worried and looking for guidance. But it is precisely in times of crisis that it is worth looking back – for example, at women who found ways out of hardship, war, and poverty 100 years ago, or who found ways of living...

Waking up means becoming part of the world again. Day after day. Sometimes, these early moments are magical and quiet, almost like a dream. But often we wake with a start, stressed and harried. And while today's influencers like to recommend morning rituals for self-optimization, as this book shows, this isn’t a recent development. Even among medieval nuns and monks, waking up was observed,...

In her book based on the Frankfurt Adorno Lectures, renowned philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff examines the genealogy of racism in modernity and its manifestations in the present day. She centres her...

Hans Ulricht Gumbrecht claims to have no great passion for reading or writing. And yet, he ranks among the most high-profile and productive social scientists living and working today. From an ironic distance, the emeritus Stanford University professor looks back on more than half a century of life. It all begins in the bombed-out ruins of the German city of Würzburg. But soon enough, his ambition...

Wars are mostly fought by men. But without the support of women, it would be impossible to carry them out. And indeed, women have been serving in Europe’s militaries for centuries. But they are rarely commemorated in an appropriate fashion. At most, isolated heroines – depicted as Amazonas in uniform – find a place in our collective memory, while the history of the many women who were actively...