A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Wilkinson has accomplished something more moving and original, braiding his stumbling attempts to get better at math with his deepening awareness that there's an entire universe of understanding that will, in some fundamental sense, forever lie outside his reach. --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

There is almost no writer I admire as much as I do Alec Wilkinson. His work has enduring brilliance and humanity. --Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

A spirited, metaphysical exploration into math's deepest mysteries and conundrums at the crux of middle age.

Decades after struggling to understand math as a boy, Alec Wilkinson decides to embark on a journey to learn it as a middle-aged man. What begins as a personal challenge--and it is challenging--soon transforms into something greater than a belabored effort to learn math. Despite his incompetence, Wilkinson encounters a universe of unexpected questions in his pursuit of mathematical knowledge and quickly becomes fascinated; soon, his exercise in personal growth (and torture) morphs into an intellectually expansive exploration.

In A Divine Language, Wilkinson, a contributor to The New Yorker for more than forty years, journeys into the heart of the divine aspects of mathematics--its mysteries, difficulties, and revelations--from antiquity to the present. As he submits himself to the lure of deep mathematics, he takes the reader through his investigations into the subject's big questions: number theory and the creation of numbers, the debate over math's human or otherworldly origins, problems and equations that remain unsolved after centuries, the conundrum of prime numbers. Writing with warm humor and sharp observation as he traverses practical math's endless frustrations and rewards, Wilkinson provides an awe-inspiring account of an adventure in a land of strange sights. Part memoir, part metaphysical travel book, and part journey in self-improvement, A Divine Language is one man's second attempt at understanding the numbers in front of him and the world beyond.

A spirited and intimate look at American icon and activist Pete Seeger.

Throughout his life, Pete Seeger transformed a classic American musical style into a form of peaceful protest against war, segregation, and nuclear weapons. Drawing on his extensive talks with Seeger, Alec Wilkinson delivers a first hand look at Seeger's unique blend of independence and commitment, charm, courage, energy, and belief in human equality and American democracy. We see Seeger as a child, instilled with a love of music by his parents; as a teenager, hearing real folk music for the first time; as a young adult, singing with Woody Guthrie. And finally, Seeger the man marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King in Selma, standing up to McCarthyism, and fighting for his beloved Hudson River. The gigantic life captured in this slender volume is truly an American anthem.

A vivid portrait of legendary liquor agent Garland Bunting, an American original who patrolled rural North Carolina when moonshiners worked their stills in the backcountry.

For thirty-five years, Garland Bunting slid his sweet potato shape--small at both ends and big in the middle onto the front seat of his beat-up pickup with the coon dogs in the back to ride around in pursuit of moonshine stills in Halifax County, North Carolina. Bunting was true a one-of-a-kind, a man who would do nearly anything to get his culprit. To best the bootleggers, Bunting passed himself off as an outrageous array of characters, including a door-to-door fish peddler, a preacher, a farmer, a fox hunter, a sawmill worker, and a woman.

Articulate, canny, imaginative, and aware--aware even that he's an unusual character--Bunting fills the foreground of Alec Wilkinson's deeply reported and elegantly told story. This is experiential, immersive, journalism at its best.

Moonshine is a wonderfully alive portrait of both Bunting and rural North Carolina's coastal plain, with its landscape of small farms, woods, and swamps. We meet the people Bunting grew up with, his fellow liquor agents, his cronies, and his shy wife, Colleen. Along the way, we learn the history of moonshine and how it is made, and accompany Bunting on the stake-out of a small, backwoods still.

For viewers who made Moonshiners a hit for 12 seasons on the Discovery Channel, this is the book they've been waiting for. All readers will find a story where the flavors of the past and present are richly intermingled.

This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed author Padgett Powell.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Wilkinson has accomplished something more moving and original, braiding his stumbling attempts to get better at math with his deepening awareness that there's an entire universe of understanding that will, in some fundamental sense, forever lie outside his reach. --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

There is almost no writer I admire as much as I do Alec Wilkinson. His work has enduring brilliance and humanity. --Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

A spirited, metaphysical exploration into math's deepest mysteries and conundrums at the crux of middle age.

Decades after struggling to understand math as a boy, Alec Wilkinson decides to embark on a journey to learn it as a middle-aged man. What begins as a personal challenge--and it's challenging--soon transforms into something greater than a belabored effort to learn math. Despite his incompetence, Wilkinson encounters a universe of unexpected mysteries in his pursuit of mathematical knowledge and quickly becomes fascinated; soon, his exercise in personal growth (and torture) morphs into an intellectually expansive exploration.

In A Divine Language, Wilkinson, a contributor to The New Yorker for over forty years, journeys into the heart of the divine aspect of mathematics--its mysteries, challenges, and revelations--since antiquity. As he submits himself to the lure of deep mathematics, he takes the reader through his investigations into the subject's big questions--number theory and the creation of numbers, the debate over math's human or otherworldly origins, problems and equations that remain unsolved after centuries, the conundrum of prime numbers. Writing with warm humor and sharp observation as he traverses practical math's endless frustrations and rewards, Wilkinson provides an awe-inspiring account of an adventure from a land of strange sights. Part memoir, part metaphysical travel book, and part journey in self-improvement, A Divine Language is one man's second attempt at understanding the numbers in front of him, and the world beyond.

A compelling reflection on wisdom, friendship, and the craft of writing, My Mentor is also the touching story of a young man's education at the hands of a master, William Maxwell. At age twenty-four, Alec Wilkinson approached Maxwell in hopes of being taught to write. A quarter century of friendship followed.
As a fiction editor of The New Yorker, Maxwell was unquestionably one of the past century's most respected editors; as the author of the masterpieces They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow, he was one of its greatest American writers. His unparalleled ear for language and eye for detail, his depth of understanding and experience, make his instructions on writing an essential guide to the craft. In honoring this great man of letters, Wilkinson creates a deft and sympathetic portrait (New York Times Book Review).

Midnights is both a comedy of errors and an affectionate portrait of small-town police, those beleaguered souls charged with the task of keeping their neighbors in line....A reminder that those assigned to protect are often vulnerable and quietly heroic.--Time

Funny, touching, revealing, here is the view from a rookie cop's patrol car, during midnight shifts, in a (mostly) peaceful town. With a rich cast of characters, this is a classic memoir of the fear, surprises, excitement, embarrassment that comes with a protecting and serving a small community.

When I was twenty-three years old, five months out of college, with a degree in music, and without any idea of what to do with myself, I took a job as a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, so writes Alec Wilkinson. Music, huh? the police chief said during the job interview. That'll be a big help. Wilkinson's main qualification was familiarity with the town of 2,000 people from summers there growing up. Committing himself to a year wearing a uniform and carrying a gun, and with no training, Wilkinson was sent out to keep the peace, hoping nothing would happen.

There are high-speed chases and stopping drunk drivers, one of whom tries to set Wilkinson's hair on fire. There are domestic squabbles. The first six months were murder for me, Wilkinson's partner confides on his first night. After that, when I found out the people I thought were my friends weren't really my friends, I felt better off. There is an attempted bank robbery. The teller convinces the robber that his haul ($300) is too much to carry around in cash. The robber is still listening to investment options when the police arrive.

Throughout there are conversations with his eight fellow officers who Wilkinson comes to respect and admire. Nobody ever calls you when they're behaving themselves, one admits. As a rule, you always get called when people are at their worst. It's sad. It depresses me. The job is often thankless. Right now I work on the police force, another officer says, my wife stamps cans in the supermarket, and she makes more money than I do.

This is experiential journalism at its most poignant and entertaining--and it launched the career of Alec Wilkinson: writer, interviewer, essayist, and author. This is for any reader looking for insight into the real lives of police officers, outside of large cities, across America. It is also for anyone looking for a marvelously engaging read.

Midnights is part of Godine's Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

In 1897, at the height of the heroic age of Arctic exploration, the visionary Swedish explorer S. A. Andr e made a revolutionary attempt to discover the North Pole by flying over it in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty-three years later, his expedition diaries and papers would be discovered on the ice.

Alec Wilkinson uses the explorer's papers and contemporary sources to tell the full story of this ambitious voyage, while also showing how the late 19th century's spirit of exploration and scientific discovery drove over 1,000 explorers to the unforgiving Arctic landscape. Suspenseful and haunting, Wilkinson captures Andr e's remarkable adventure and illuminates the detail, beauty, and devastating conditions of traveling and dwelling on the ice.

Poppa Neutrino is a philosopher of movement, a vernacular Buddhist, a San Francisco bohemian, a polymath, a pauper, a football strategist for the Red Mesa Redskins of the Navajo Nation, and a mariner who built a raft from materials he found on the streets of New York and sailed across the North Atlantic. And he is possibly the happiest man in the world.

This is a rare and compelling book in which nearly every page contains an implausible, outrageous and exhilarating adventure.