The enigmatic Susan Taubes wrote the coming-of-age novel “Lament for Julia” in the 1960s; 54 years after her death, its gothic splendors shine. Read more
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46 Books that Changed the World
Here, in no particular order, are just a few of history’s most influential tomes—and how they made humanity look at things in a new light. Read more
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U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s Verses are Soaring Into Space — Literally
The Mexican American’s new poem will be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission spacecraft and travel 1.8 billion miles — and the public can send their names along. Read more
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What’s Weird? These Novels — Brilliant Forays Into the Otherworldly
Having no belief whatsoever in the supernatural, I nonetheless love stories of the weird and inexplicable. Give me a plot involving magic, deals with the devil, three wishes, an impossible-seeming murder, time travel, alchemy, the Tarot, accursed books, revenants, demons or Elder Gods, and I’m a happy reader. In what follows, I race — with necessary but unseemly speed — through 10 recent volumes of the “weird,” nearly all from small independent presses. Read more
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The ‘Brazilian Ulysses’ Finally Gets a First-Rate Translation
Perhaps through Dodson’s masterful work, Andrade will finally be widely read alongside Joyce, Woolf, and Kafka, and Brazilian modernism will be cemented in a canon that has largely excluded authors from Latin America. Read more
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Where to Start With Kazuo Ishiguro
The Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most critically acclaimed authors writing in English today: the now 68-year-old was twice selected in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists issue, in 1983 and 1993, before going on to bag the Booker prize, the Nobel prize in literature and a knighthood. Earlier this year, he picked up Bafta and Oscar nominations too, for his adapted screenplay of Living, starring Bill Nighy. David Sexton suggests some good places to start for those who haven’t yet dipped in to his work. Read more
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A Map of 1,001 Novels to Show Us Where to Find the Real America
Over the last five years, I’ve read or reread 1,001 books of fiction in my project to create a literary map of this country. The idea for this “library of America” was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not. For me, those arguments ignored the vast geography of our stories and novels, the ways people search for belonging, leave home or stay, and how every state is really many places. Read more
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Man Returns Library Book 96 Years After Due Date
A Northern California man returned a book to his local library this month — an astounding 96 years after the book was originally due. The book, “A History of the United States” by Benson Lossing, was checked out in 1927 and is not in perfect shape, but the St. Helena Public Library was happy to receive it and spared the man what otherwise could have been about $1,700 in late fees. Read more
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The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
In this dazzling memoir, essayist Rosen chronicles his thorny relationship with his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a lawyer and disability rights advocate who made headlines in 1998 for murdering his fiancée during a paranoid episode. Read more
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The Dank Underground
In the late Sixties, countercultural media was distributed by the Underground Press Syndicate and bankrolled by marijuana. Read more
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