Write about what captivates. This principle didn’t occur to me until Mysterium was finished, but now I believe in the words wholeheartedly. It was fascination and reverence for the mountains that bore the novel forward. You could say I was taken captive by...

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...

Philip Roth, one of the most renowned writers of our time, passed away last week at the age of 85 in Manhattan. We are extremely honored to have published some of his work. The following is an excerpt from Roth Unbound, Claudia Roth...

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,...

What I’m going to tell you has a very simple plot line. It’s like this: someone decides to write a letter. Someone writes the letter. Someone does not send the letter. Someone writes a novel instead, where someone writes a letter they do not...

With more than 500 interviews and over twenty years of research, Sam Stephenson presents his newest masterpiece Gene Smith’s Sink—an extraordinary look into the life of W. Eugene Smith, a revolutionary photojournalist who both captured some of history’s most powerful images and chronicled...

The questions of where a story should go can be paralyzing, especially in the beginning, when anything is possible, and especially if you’re not the type of writer to make a plan, which I’m not. To get through this hairy time, I’m likely to...

Fiction almost always gets Artificial Intelligence wrong. The AI narratives are generally Frankenstein (“It’s gone rogue!” e.g. Skynet) or Pinocchio (“I just want to be a real boy!” e.g. Commander Data), both of which are a little banal, and neither of which have much...

Colin Harrison and I are an unusual team: he has edited me, and I have the joy of editing him. He went first. In 2003, he edited a book I co-wrote with Mariane Pearl called A Mighty Heart, an account of the murder...

Jeff VanderMeer's Borne is an unusual kind of coming-of-age story—it isn't a human that grows up, but rather a sentient, shape-shifting bit of biotech, raised by a young woman in a city ravaged by corporate greed. The book was met with rave...

A few months ago I traveled to India for work. I went north and south, seeing auto rickshaws and UNESCO architecture. One of the best things I saw was a logo. The logo stands for the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat....

Who’s a good dog? We humans seem to think highly of dogs who understand and care about what we want from them, says author Kirsten Bakis—but why don’t we measure ourselves by how well we can understand what they want from us? The mysterious...

Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach Trilogy, explores northern Florida to discuss the encroaching threats to local wildlife, writing about the environment as a political act, and the inspiration for his latest novel, Borne.

My first experience with Robert Lowell’s poetry was a failure in reading comprehension. Breezing through a stack of poems I’d been assigned for a college class, I came to his “Man and Wife” and gave it my cursory attention. Its setup is not hard...

Though it charts historical and intellectual trends that have taken place over centuries, Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger could hardly be more timely. Earlier this spring, Mishra and the author and artist Molly Crabapple corresponded over e-mail about the book and considered...

So Where Are We? So where were we? The fiery avalanche headed right at us—falling, flailing bodies in midair— the neighborhood under thick gray powder— on every screen. I don’t know where you are, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I heard a man say; the man who had spoken...

ENGLISH 206 Why would anyone even want to do it anymore? Fifty-two years ago I didn’t know what it was, And yet I knew I wanted to do it too, like the idea of a mind The self aspires to, the self a mind endeavors to become. I...

Daphne Merkin’s daring memoir about her lifelong struggle with depression received a fantastic review from Andrew Solomon on the front page of the February 5th, 2017 issue of The New York Times Book Review, which was especially gratifying since This Close to...

A locked-room mystery taking place at a rest home for burned-out futurists, Warren Ellis's Normal explores what happens when you spend all your time staring at the end of the world. A darkly funny book, Normal was initially published during the lead-up to...

Shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, as Boris Nemtsov and his girlfriend were crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin, a man stepped out of the darkness and shot the prominent opposition politician four times, killing him instantly. Nemtsov...