Prince Shakur
When They Tell You to Be Good
Tin House
This debut memoir made many best-of-fall lists and won the Hurston/Wright Crossover Award. Shakur’s memoir charts his political coming of age, com…
In Every Issue
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1817), oil on canvas, 119.5 x 99.5 x 9 cm bpk Bildagentur / Hamburger Kunsthalle, SHK / Elke Walford / Art Resource, NY What is sehnsucht…
Photos courtesy of the authorIt’s a long way from Manhattan Island to King George Island—actually, it’s an epic trip from anywhere to Antarctica—and the wise traveler needs to make a stop, preferably…
Photos courtesy of the authorDuring a recent trip to the Netherlands, my family and I visited Amsterdam—an obvious stop—and found it stunning, the elaborate architecture contrasting w…
Whitman Road, Nebraska Sandhills | Photo © Michael Forsberg | www.michaelforsberg.comSometimes referred to as “flyover states,” the states of the middle US are home to much worth seeing, including des…
Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s first collection of short stories, Happy Stories, Mostly, was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and published, in Tiffany Tsao’s English translation, in the…
Herewith a list of recent books about illness and disability and the transformative changes that happen to us during these journeys with the body. Some of these works are fictional, and others are mem…
Jane Wong’s memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is a “story of lost enterprises”—for example, her family’s restaurant—but it’s also a story of a tender sibling relationship, a strong and comfort…
Perpetually Demolished, Perpetually Renewed by Dana Gioia Los Angeles is an impossible city to describe, even for natives. Make any assertion about the place, and the opposite will of…
So many books, so little time—even in the summer. Of the many new choices, here are six that caught our eye, a handful of fiction and nonfiction that promises reflection, adventure, and, yes, even fun…
In her new, ongoing column, Veronica Esposito highlights an untranslatable word—its history, its contemporary usage, and why it’s so hard to translate. To begin this new project, Esposito delves into…
In this remembrance with a recipe, a writer in California traces her inclination for growing back through her father and his father, a retired baker and confectioner from Syria. The San Francisco Bay…
“The French critic Albert Thibaudet proposed in one of his books on the novel a distinction between two kinds of reader: the liseur and the lecteur. I do not know whether a similar differentiating nua…
Since the invention of the printing press, it’s not been uncommon for publishers—whether large international operations like Italy’s Rizzoli or small, scrappy independents like Deep Vellum in Dallas,…
I like this little area of my library a lot because it’s where I keep some of my horror books: H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Mariana Enríquez, Amparo Dávila, Shirley Jackson. I also like that these b…
Beacon Press published Aaron Caycedo-Kimura’s collection Common Grace in 2022. A poet and visual artist, his paintings have appeared in galleries across Connecticut. Q Who are the poets we should be…
Photo by Jesse Ditmar In Take What You Need, Idra Novey’s third novel, a woman who fled her childhood in the Allegheny Mountains endures an uneasy return when her stepmother, Jean, dies. There in her…
THE ERASURE of spomeniks began little more than a decade after Marshal Tito’s death in 1980. The president of Yugoslavia had commissioned the construction of these Space Age monument…
An ancient Babylonian recipe for cooking turnips survived in one of the three cuneiform tablets dating from around 1700 BC. THIS IS A SUBSTANTIAL DISH of a creamy vegetable s…
Photo by Leiada Krozjhen / Unsplash“People who love books find it difficult to get along without them, but millions in the war-devastated areas today are forced to live, work, and study with practical…
Marfa Book Company, Photo: Jessica Powers IT ISN'T EASY to get to Redford, Texas. There’s only one road in or out, a two-lane highway that runs along the US–Mexico b…
Photo by Wasaaf Jeelani IN A BUSY MARKET lane in the Mahraj Gung area of downtown Srinagar city in Indian-administered Kashmir, there is a small bookstore named Ghulam Mohd Noor Mohd…
We’re intrigued by these short, often speculative fictions arriving early this year. No Edges: Swahili Stories Trans. Various Two Lines Press In April, Two Lines Press wil…
What the world thinks it knows about Indigenous peoples of North America could be likened to a Polaroid snapshot taken off the deck of a cruise ship in a foreign land, over which Euro…
We asked writers in Turkey two questions: What is the book, available in English, that best evokes Istanbul? What is a favorite Istanbul bookstore? Here are their answers. A City of…