Long before he became one of the most renowned literary critics of our time, Dwight Garner started the practice of keeping a 'commonplace book' of literary quotations that spoke to him. His new book, Garner's Quotations, is a reflection of that lifelong attention—and celebration—of...
Jonas Hassan Khemiri is a 2020 finalist for the National Book Award in Translated Literature for his book, The Family Clause, a singular novel hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as a "complex portrait of a family that is both identifiable and distinctive,...
Lawrence Joseph’s A Certain Clarity brings together poems selected from throughout his career, spanning his first book—1983’s Shouting at No One—to his most recent, So Where Are We? (2017). Joseph’s poetry has always grappled with the defining moments of our age, from...
Sharks in the Time of Saviors is a groundbreaking debut novel that folds the legends of Hawaiian gods into an engrossing family saga; a story of exile and the pursuit of salvation from debut author Kawai Strong Washburn. In this interview, transcribed from a...
Bound galleys of Dalia Sofer’s Man of My Time happened to go out just as political tensions started to escalate between the US and Iran over the killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani. Some weeks later, as we publish this novel, the entire...
If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold’s second poetry collection, charts a radical spiritual journey through catastrophe. Alternately searing and hopeful, funny and fraught, the poems explore the world’s fracturing through the collapse of the ego, embodied in a character named “I”—a soul attempting to...
Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and...
I sometimes think I was born reading...I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. In Vivian Gornick's new book, Unfinished Business, she brings us a celebration of passionate reading, of...
Jason Goodyear is the star outfielder for the Los Angeles Lions, stationed with the rest of his team in the punishingly hot Arizona desert for their annual spring training. Handsome, famous, and talented, Goodyear is nonetheless coming apart at the seams. And the coaches,...
In Cleanness, the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire. Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. In this atmosphere of...
For John Freeman—literary critic, essayist, editor, poet—it is the rare moment when words are not enough. But in the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent. Action was the only reasonable response. He took to the streets in protest, and...
If a rolling stone gathers no moss, the poems in Devin Johnston’s Mosses and Lichens attend to what accretes over time, as well as to what erodes. They often take place in the middle of life’s journey, at the edge of the woods,...
No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. First published in 2007, the book recently became an Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young...
At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety...
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just a block or two up from the East River on Division Avenue, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her ten children range in age from thirteen to thirty-nine. Her in-laws, postwar immigrants from Romania, live on the first...
"This is a powerful, timely, and troubling book. Boyer's unflinching account of the market-driven brutality of American cancer care sits beside some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read." —Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears A...
From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner's new book The Topeka School is a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression,...
Costanza Ansaldo, a half-Italian and half-American translator, is convinced that she has made peace with her childlessness. A year after the death of her husband, an eminent writer, she returns to the pensione in Florence where she spent many happy times in her youth....
In We, the Survivors, award-winning and critically acclaimed author Tash Aw presents a compelling depiction of a man’s act of violence, set against the backdrop of Asia in flux. Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means—so what brings him to kill...
Two writers grapple with climate change in fiction, nonfiction—and real life. Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning author of the Ibis Trilogy returns with his new novel, Gun Island. When a Bengali legend from childhood comes to haunt the lonely life of a rare books...