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…
What to Read Now
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…
WHEN WE SAY “Russian literature” we think about the classics, but contemporary Russian-language writing is as vibrant as it is geographically and politically diverse. Within the Russi…
HORROR COMES IN many forms and from all over the world. Whether it’s psychological horror that invites us to confront our deepest fears or biohorror that anticipates humanity’s genet…
WHAT DO TWO LATE masterpieces by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), have in common, apart from the technical fact that the action of b…
ONE OF THE FIRST BOOKS I read as a teen was C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was transported into a fantastical world that could occur by simply walking…
I f you’re not one of those people who has a stack of cookbooks on your nightstand already, you might not know that there’s a lot more to read in a cookbook than just the recipes. Cookbooks can be a s…
December 12, 2023
October 24, 2023
