The Berggruen Press creates unusual books about significant ideas. A new in-house publishing effort by the Berggruen Institute, the Berggruen Press joins Noema Magazine as a platform for showcasing the work of the Institute’s programmatic areas, developing new ideas, and broadening our readership.

What defines Berggruen Press books is their identity as art objects whose uncategorizable ideas cross political, philosophical, scientific, academic, and cultural boundaries. But each project is also more than a mere text: alongside literary and philosophical storytelling informed by rigorous research, there will be art and interesting design elements plus activities, guides, blueprints, and other ways to interact with the author(s), with the Press, and with fellow readers.

To rise to the challenge of confronting the polycrisis confronting our species and the planet requires new ideas and speculative thinking. Our books do not necessarily contain readymade solutions to these crises, but rather aim to open new possibilities. We proceed from the experience that ideas which, at their moment of creation, may seem wild or esoteric but often evolve into what is practical and necessary tomorrow.

Fundamentally, we aim to deepen intellectual engagement with ideas that can generate progress on the world’s most important, neglected, and intractable problems. At a time when information is becoming increasingly hard to validate, where it’s difficult to determine if a story is true or false or somewhere in between, where interlocutors may not be who they seem or even human at all, the Berggruen Press seeks, through books, to build a scaffold to support a future that is dynamic and habitable for all.