What happens when you let your strong female characters step outside their boxes? Writers Katrina Carrasco (The Best Bad Things), Madeline ffitch (Stay and Fight), Tessa Fontaine (The Electric Woman), Chia-Chia Lin (The Unpassing), Ling Ma (Severance), and Lydia...
Native Country of the Heart is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant,...
In those days I began to see light under every bushel basket, light nearly splitting the sides of the bushel basket. Light came through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles congregated like well-taxed citizens untransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the one underneath the basket. I was...
"David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose...Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight." —Joyce Carol Oates Following the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means now...
When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby U.S. border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one...
When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life...
It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is...
Hiking with Nietzsche is a tale of John Kaag's two philosophical journeys—one as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later as a husband and father. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his...
Angie Kim's debut novel Miracle Creek will publish April 2019, and is about an experimental medical treatment device known as the "Miracle Submarine" that mysteriously explodes, killing two people. What follows is a thoroughly contemporary take on the courtroom drama, drawing on the...
In The Circuit, award-winning poet and Paris Review sports columnist Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates...
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...
Aden Grace Sawyer, the heroine—somehow, the word “protagonist” doesn’t do her justice—of John Wray’s fifth novel, Godsend, has a great deal in common with John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” who was, for a time, the most reviled American traitor since Lee Harvey...
I first came to know Jeff Jackson’s work when I encountered his powerfully original and moving debut novel, Mira Corpora, which Two Dollar Radio published in 2013. You have never read anything like this before, I would tell friends as I pressed the...
Certain American States is a collection of stories about ordinary people seeking—and failing to find—the extraordinary in their lives. The characters are continually coming to terms with their place in the world, and how to adapt to that place. A woman leaves her...
Laura van den Berg’s beautiful and haunting The Third Hotel brings us to Havana, Cuba, where recent widow Clare has arrived for the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema. She was supposed to be there with her film scholar husband, Richard, but...
In Kudos, a woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface. Rachel Cusk's unique approach to storytelling builds action through vivid, precise encounters and monologues that explore the nature of family and...
Named an NPR Best Book of the Year, Anne Fadiman’s poignant memoir The Wine Lover's Daughter examines her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman. Though he was a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host, his greatest love was wine. The book explores...
With her newest essay collection Look Alive Out There, Sloane Crosley brings us her trademark humor, wit, and charm. Yet there is also a new maturity to these essays: they are full of punch-packing observations and emotional insight, whether ruminating on fertility or...
Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica...
Thom Gunn has been described as “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Times Literary Supplement). Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there’s nothing archaic or quaint about his poetry. His method was dispassionate...