In Champaign, Illinois, in the summer of 2011, in a closet in a bookstore consecrated to science fiction (the closet, that is, not the bookstore), I came upon a shelf of pocket paperbacks all attributed to one Barry N. Malzberg. I’m not sure what...
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In Amity and Prosperity, prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold draws on seven years of reporting to tell the story of the energy industry’s impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia, and one woman’s transformation from a struggling single parent...
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Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us...
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A startlingly beautiful debut, Akil Kumarasamy's Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destinies of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of...
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In Mark Sarvas's Memento Park, Matt Santos becomes aware of a painting that he believes was looted from his family in Hungary during the Second World War. To recover the painting, he must repair his strained relationship with his harshly judgmental father,...
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New York Times bestselling author David Duchovny reimagines the Irish mythological figure of Emer with Miss Subways, a darkly comic fantasy love story set in New York City. Emer is just a woman living in the city, taking the subway, dreaming of...
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Graffiti Palace, A. G. Lombardo’s debut novel, is a contemporary reimagining of The Odyssey set during the 1965 Watts Riots. Los Angeles is scorching and Americo Monk, a street-haunting graffiti aficionado, is frantically trying to return home. Yet his trek is constantly...
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Sloane Crosley is back, returning to the form that made her a household name in really quite a lot of households. With her newest essay collection Look Alive Out There, she brings us her trademark humor, wit, and charm. Yet there is...
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Whiskey author Bruce Holbert met author Elizabeth McCracken in their Iowa MFA program, where they became close friends. Though their careers have taken vastly different tracks, they have supported each other's work for decades, and each appreciates the subtleties of the other's characterization,...
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On March 11, 2011, an earthquake sent a twelve-foot-high tsunami crashing into the coast of northeast Japan, setting off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear plant. Award-winning foreign correspondent Richard Lloyd Parry was there to feel the destabilizing first shakes and...
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In 2015, John Leland wrote a revelatory series of articles for The New York Times about the city’s oldest residents—those eighty-five and up. The profiles upended conventional notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably...
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Katherine Faw's dark new novel Ultraluminous takes us into the life of K, a high-end, girlfriend-experience prostitute whose routine includes everything from Duane Reade sushi to gallery shows to heroin. The New Yorker called the book "a damning, often hilarious account of...
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides, whose short story collection Fresh Complaint was published this fall, discusses volunteering with Mother Teresa, the time he played golf with Philip Roth in a dream, and his writing vices. What was your first experience of writing as a...
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The visual artist Joyce Kozloff and I were surprised to discover that we have both completed projects inspired by the material leavings of our childhood worlds—in Joyce’s case found, in my case (mostly) lost. Girlhood was Joyce’s recent exhibition at the D.C. Moore...
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Anne Fadiman, author of The Wine Lover’s Daughter, and Cullen Murphy, author of Cartoon County, embarked on an epistolary exchange to probe their shared experience of bringing their fathers back to life through writing. Fadiman’s father—literary critic, editor, and radio host Clifton...
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Liska Jacobs’s provocative debut novel, Catalina, sets a young woman on the edge and follows her downward spiral following the end of an affair with her married boss at MoMA. Elsa is lost, lonely, and full of rage, and after agreeing to a journey...
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Alice McDermott’s newest masterpiece, The Ninth Hour, examines how one man’s suicide ripples through various lives and generations, illuminating the worlds of the man's widow and daughter, as well as the nuns of Catholic Brooklyn who take them in. The book was...
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David Lebovitz worked as a baker and pastry chef in the San Francisco Bay Area, including a thirteen year stint in the pastry department at the renowned Chez Panisse. He currently lives in Paris and is the author of eight books, and also runs...
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Robin Sloan took the literary world by storm with his debut novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Now, with his second novel, Sourdough, he brings us back to the Bay Area—this time to look at the intersection of the tech and food worlds....