This week marked twenty-five years since the Rwandan genocide took place, and author Philip Gourevitch joined NPR's Morning Edition to discuss where things stand in Rwanda today and what the healing process has looked like. Gourevitch's book, We Wish to Inform You...
Stanley had known it was a mistake to accept his uncle Lech’s offer to apartment-sit in Prague—he’d known it was one of Lech’s proposals, a thinly veiled setup for some invasive, potentially dangerous performance art project. But after Stanley's failed attempt to propose to his...
Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger’s essays are beautiful and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Wasteland architecture, mountaintop astronomy, Bach in the wilderness, the mind of the wood rat, the...
In the middle of the Nevada desert stands a solitary poplar tree covered in hundreds of pairs of shoes. Farther along Route 50, a lonely prostitute falls in love with a collector of found photographs. In Las Vegas, an Argentine man builds a peculiar...
In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the story of the United States outside the United States. He reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light and offers an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today....
The Peacock Feast opens on a June day in 1916 when Louis C. Tiffany, the eccentric glass genius, dynamites the breakwater at Laurelton Hall—his fantastical Oyster Bay mansion—so as to foil the town from reclaiming the beach for public use. The explosion shakes...
On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a returning, decorated African-American veteran, was removed from a Greyhound bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, after he challenged the bus driver’s disrespectful treatment of him. Woodard, in uniform, was arrested by the local police chief, Lynwood Shull,...
“The Catholic School is one of the foundational works of the literature of the twenty-first century. It is a great book by a great writer. It is also a major sociological and theological meditation, which raises questions that we hope won’t be forgotten.” —Natale...
I went to Paris to meet a girl called Monica. I’ve never forgotten it. She was a dancer from Spain. I met her at a wedding in Barcelona where the groom was the only person I knew. We really got on, Monica and me...
In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. For two weeks, they join an...
Evening in Paradise is a collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation, Lucia Berlin. After reading them, Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote, "Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize." The stories take us from Texas...
“I’ve lived so many places it’s ridiculous . . . and because I moved so much, place is very, very important to me. I’m always looking . . . looking for home.” —Lucia Berlin, interview (2003) The first writer I ever watched at work was my...
Gretchen and Steve have been married for a long time. Living in San Francisco, recently separated, with two children and demanding jobs, they’ve started going to a marriage counselor. Unfolding over the course of ten months and taking place entirely in the marriage counselor’s...
It is rare for a literary critic to remain alive for readers decades after his death—even rarer than for a novelist or a poet. Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) belonged to what Randall Jarrell called “the age of criticism,” a time when the analysis and judgment...
In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the...
The ravens at the Tower of London are of mighty importance: rumor has it that if a raven from the Tower should ever leave, the city will fall. The title of Ravenmaster, therefore, is a serious title indeed, and after decades of serving the...
Spanning eras, continents, and genres, CoDex 1962—twenty years in the making—is Icelandic author Sjón's epic three-part masterpiece. Josef Löwe, the narrator, was born in 1962—the same year, the same moment even, as Sjón. Josef's story, however, stretches back decades in the form of...
