What to Read Now
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IN 2009, OUT OF THE BLUE or perhaps apropos of my essays, one of my relatives living in Cuba sent me an email scolding me for not keeping in touch while also telling me that I had no... -
WHEN LYDIA DAVIS WON the Man Booker International prize in 2013, flash fiction made it into the sitting room of the house of fiction. Not just flash fiction collections appeared, but... -
Illustration by Chloe Cushman / All Saints’ Mountain by Olga Tokarsczuk POLISH SPECULATIVE FICTION in English is easy to find, if you know where to look: Twisted Spoo... -
AS WITH ANY CITY, there is no one text that conveys the singularity of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s, eighteen distinct barrios. But there are books that capture the spirit of it—the metro... -
We asked several writers and our readers to tell us about a book that’s too heavy for beach reading, but they’re taking it anyway—if they’re able to get to a beach. Whether you (or they) are able... -
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN drawn to narratives of cities, both as a reader and as a writer. In the early stages of my writing life, I loved reading depictions of Paris by writers such as Stein,... -
ALTHOUGH I'VE SPENT most of my life in large cities, I’ve long been attracted to mystery novels set in more remote areas. Something about the isolated atmospheres of small towns—somet... -
BORDERS, OFTEN CONFUSED for boundaries, are first imagined by groups who insist power over geographies that surpass such insistence. So limits are invented into rivers and fo... -
HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE of a warming planet when the causes of the warming are so big, so systemic, they’re difficult to even think about, let alone fully understand? Where scientific... -
WHEN WE SAY “Russian literature” we think about the classics, but contemporary Russian-language writing is as vibrant as it is geographically and politically diverse. Within the Russi... -
HORROR COMES IN many forms and from all over the world. Whether it’s psychological horror that invites us to confront our deepest fears or biohorror that anticipates humanity’s genet... -
WHAT DO TWO LATE masterpieces by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), have in common, apart from the technical fact that the action of b... -
ONE OF THE FIRST BOOKS I read as a teen was C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was transported into a fantastical world that could occur by simply walking... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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.... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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...
