What to Read Now

July 2018

Literary Cookbooks

By Carrie Helms Tippen

I f you’re not one of those people who has a stack of cookbooks on your nightstand already, you might not know that there’s a lot more to read in a cookbook than just the recipes. Cookbooks can be a s...
May 2018

Unrequited Love

By Lori Feathers

T hree brief, powerful novels in recent translation enriched my reading during the last few months. Stories of unrequited love, their protagonists suffer an unsatisfied, persistent longing for affirma...
March 2018

Palestinian Literature

By Hala Alyan

Naomi Shihab Nye Sitti’s Secrets Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers I remember coming across this beautifully written (and illustrated) children’s book when I was...
January 2018

Gothic Novels for Midwinter

By Eleanor Wasserberg

One of my favorite book events ever was a celebration of gothic literature in Stoke Newington, London: it was held in a candlelit old church, and we read from Frankenstein before discussing...
November 2017

From Aden to Kampala to Washington, DC

By Stanley Gazemba

I bought Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy on a visit to her Somaliland hometown, Hargeisa. When I visited, Hargeisa was a dreary city—at least that was my first impression—until I got to kno...
September 2017

Selected Works from the African Diaspora

By Mahtem Shiferraw

This is not the Africa you knew. These books, some rooted in Africa but mostly embedded in multiple lands, explore issues of race, equality, immigration, cultural shifts, and more. At their core, they...
May 2017

What to Read Now: Summer Reading List 2017

By WLT

Photo: Bequest/Pixabay By a lake, on a train, deep in a canyon, or at home on your back porch: it’s time to catch up on the outstanding global writing publishers have been bringing out since January....
March 2017

What to Read Now: Activism Literature

By Timothy Bradford

Illustration: Verso Books Despite the popular culture trope that the golden age of activism (the 1950s and ’60s) is over, despite the endless distractions offered by digital entertainment, and despit...
January 2017

What to Read Now: When Civilization Fails

By Anastasia Edel

With two world wars, revolutions, famines, colonial violence, and state-sponsored genocides, the twentieth century was the most murderous in history, claiming the lives of some two hundred million peo...
November 2016

What to Read Now: Imagination and the Environment

By Pireeni Sundaralingam

In an era in which we spend an increasing number of our waking hours immersed in virtual and augmented realities, gliding across the two-dimensional surfaces of a placeless digital world, it is perhap...
September 2016

Four Books from Malaysia

By Dipika Mukherjee

The appetite for Malaysian fiction in the English-speaking world seems fixated on family sagas set in the Japanese Occupation of Malaya—stories largely irrelevant to the current sociopolitical challen...
March 2016

Three Quintessential Books to Add to Your “Russian Masters” List

By Anastasia Edel

It is not unusual for those on a quest to understand Russia to plough through Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy; the more adventurous add Bulgakov and Pasternak to their lists. Yet Russia of the twent...