Peter S. Canellos provides us with a fascinating biography of a Supreme Court judge who was the sole dissenter in both the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the court held that the Constitution established the separate-but-equal doctrine.

For more than three decades, Mike Davis has offered clear and often stinging counterpoints to the prevailing vision of the “California Dream.”

In “The Agitators,” Dorothy Wickenden explores 19th-century intersections of class, racism and patriarchy through the lives of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman and the activists Martha Wright and Frances Seward.

This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley talk about Catholic wisdom from Jane Austen, how a cardinal was arrested in Hong Kong, and what it’s like altar serving as an adult.

No list of brilliant Catholic novelists would be complete without Dame Muriel Spark.

John L'Heureux was rightly praised for his novels, short stories, poetry and memoir. But how many other writers do you know also once wrote an experimental eucharistic prayer?