Jane Wong’s memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is a “story of lost enterprises”—for example, her family’s restaurant—but it’s also a story of a tender sibling relationship, a strong and comfort…
In Every Issue
Perpetually Demolished, Perpetually Renewed by Dana Gioia Los Angeles is an impossible city to describe, even for natives. Make any assertion about the place, and the opposite will of…
So many books, so little time—even in the summer. Of the many new choices, here are six that caught our eye, a handful of fiction and nonfiction that promises reflection, adventure, and, yes, even fun…
In her new, ongoing column, Veronica Esposito highlights an untranslatable word—its history, its contemporary usage, and why it’s so hard to translate. To begin this new project, Esposito delves into…
In this remembrance with a recipe, a writer in California traces her inclination for growing back through her father and his father, a retired baker and confectioner from Syria. The San Francisco Bay…
“The French critic Albert Thibaudet proposed in one of his books on the novel a distinction between two kinds of reader: the liseur and the lecteur. I do not know whether a similar differentiating nua…
Since the invention of the printing press, it’s not been uncommon for publishers—whether large international operations like Italy’s Rizzoli or small, scrappy independents like Deep Vellum in Dallas,…
I like this little area of my library a lot because it’s where I keep some of my horror books: H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Mariana Enríquez, Amparo Dávila, Shirley Jackson. I also like that these b…
Beacon Press published Aaron Caycedo-Kimura’s collection Common Grace in 2022. A poet and visual artist, his paintings have appeared in galleries across Connecticut. Q Who are the poets we should be…
Photo by Jesse Ditmar In Take What You Need, Idra Novey’s third novel, a woman who fled her childhood in the Allegheny Mountains endures an uneasy return when her stepmother, Jean, dies. There in her…
THE ERASURE of spomeniks began little more than a decade after Marshal Tito’s death in 1980. The president of Yugoslavia had commissioned the construction of these Space Age monument…
An ancient Babylonian recipe for cooking turnips survived in one of the three cuneiform tablets dating from around 1700 BC. THIS IS A SUBSTANTIAL DISH of a creamy vegetable s…
Photo by Leiada Krozjhen / Unsplash“People who love books find it difficult to get along without them, but millions in the war-devastated areas today are forced to live, work, and study with practical…
Marfa Book Company, Photo: Jessica Powers IT ISN'T EASY to get to Redford, Texas. There’s only one road in or out, a two-lane highway that runs along the US–Mexico b…
Photo by Wasaaf Jeelani IN A BUSY MARKET lane in the Mahraj Gung area of downtown Srinagar city in Indian-administered Kashmir, there is a small bookstore named Ghulam Mohd Noor Mohd…
We’re intrigued by these short, often speculative fictions arriving early this year. No Edges: Swahili Stories Trans. Various Two Lines Press In April, Two Lines Press wil…
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…
We asked writers in Turkey two questions: What is the book, available in English, that best evokes Istanbul? What is a favorite Istanbul bookstore? Here are their answers. A City of…
Li Zi Shu is the author of the Taiwanese best-seller The Age of Goodbyes, now available in English translation by YZ Chin (Feminist Press, 2022). Q YZ Chin’s translation of The…
Photo by Lucy Tomasino Beacon Press published Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s second collection, Relinquenda, winner of the National Poetry Series, in 2022; it was a Featured Fall Book at Po…
A Sufi in Ecstasy in a Landscape, Iran, Isfahan, circa 1650–1660. The Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collection, gift of Joan Palevsky, LA County Museum of Art “Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980) has presente…
IN 1972 the Irish poet Seamus Heaney drew a line under Northern Ireland, moved south to the Republic, and settled in a cottage in County Wicklow. From his experience…
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…
Ana Ojeda’s new novel, Furor fulgor—set in a dystopian future where the government dictates that only one, hegemonic, form of language is legally acceptable—was already nearing publicati…
It’s a new year, and we’re looking forward to new books. Here are eight scheduled for publication in January and February—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction—to get a strong start on a new year of rea…