I love reading debut books. They often show authors at their most raw, exploring their fundamental obsessions, and tapping into deeply held beliefs. For most writers, the road to publishing takes year…
What to Read Now
As someone who writes nonfiction, poetry, and songs based on my own realities, I am amazed by the fiction writer’s capacity to create worlds. In the books that follow, the authors seamlessly weave res…
I’m worried for us. Humanity is on a collision course with annihilation, and most people don’t seem terribly bothered. Granted, we’re a species hardwired to survive and don’t like to look at our demis…
It is not easy to open one’s heart to the crises of the world, and to observe, gauge, and feel the impact. In The Defense of Poesy (1580), the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney pointed out that the a…
No sense can be made of the unspeakable horrors and injustices Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to over the course of the last few months—to say nothing of the last century.…
As a tween, I was solely allowed to read whatever was “true”; stories found in nonfiction historical narratives, biographies, zoography, and travelogues. While the emotional truths one finds in fictio…
While working on a new verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I discovered that skepticism toward my project tended to follow a specific trajectory. People who began with perhaps too much faith in…
Herewith a list of recent books about illness and disability and the transformative changes that happen to us during these journeys with the body. Some of these works are fictional, and others are mem…
What the world thinks it knows about Indigenous peoples of North America could be likened to a Polaroid snapshot taken off the deck of a cruise ship in a foreign land, over which Euro…
If ecological literature (“eco-lit”) of the early twenty-first century can stand as any evidence, we readers are being asked to consider new and more complex relationships about what it means to live…
When I first read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, I’d been working on a novel about Tudor-era martyr and writer Anne Askew for over a decade. My head buried in research, I’d been struggling toward…
What I like about essays is their sheer unpredictability and exuberance, their limitless range of subject matter, the way in which, within short compass, they give access to all kinds of perspectives.…
Borders have always been a big bone of contention for Italy as a geopolitical entity. For centuries, its territory was fragmented, subdivided into city-states, duchies, seigneuries, run by local and f…
THE NOVELISTS Pat Barker and Douglas Stuart were both born into poverty, victims of the de-industrialization that swept like a wrecking ball through the British Isles during the secon…
I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about how much of my own writing resembles “correspondences,” as my friend calls it, whether being conversations with visual artists such as Agnes Martin or E…
I THINK I WILL FOREVER be just a little bit in love with young adult (YA) literature, no matter how old I get. While I’m not terribly discriminatory about genres, I do have steadfast…
IN 2009, OUT OF THE BLUE or perhaps apropos of my essays, one of my relatives living in Cuba sent me an email scolding me for not keeping in touch while also telling me that I had no…
WHEN LYDIA DAVIS WON the Man Booker International prize in 2013, flash fiction made it into the sitting room of the house of fiction. Not just flash fiction collections appeared, but…
Illustration by Chloe Cushman / All Saints’ Mountain by Olga Tokarsczuk POLISH SPECULATIVE FICTION in English is easy to find, if you know where to look: Twisted Spoon Press…
AS WITH ANY CITY, there is no one text that conveys the singularity of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s, eighteen distinct barrios. But there are books that capture the spirit of it—the metro…
We asked several writers and our readers to tell us about a book that’s too heavy for beach reading, but they’re taking it anyway—if they’re able to get to a beach. Whether you (or they) are able…
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN drawn to narratives of cities, both as a reader and as a writer. In the early stages of my writing life, I loved reading depictions of Paris by writers such as Stein,…
ALTHOUGH I'VE SPENT most of my life in large cities, I’ve long been attracted to mystery novels set in more remote areas. Something about the isolated atmospheres of small towns—somet…
BORDERS, OFTEN CONFUSED for boundaries, are first imagined by groups who insist power over geographies that surpass such insistence. So limits are invented into rivers and fo…
HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE of a warming planet when the causes of the warming are so big, so systemic, they’re difficult to even think about, let alone fully understand? Where scientific…
