Harry Smith: American Magus – ed. Paola Igliori
Maybe he was just in a lot of pain. Maybe he just wanted to fly away—one interpretation of his paper airplane collection.
Independent journalism is as essential as the public utilities that many of us take for granted. Local news is the first draft of a people’s history.
States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic – Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris
The isolation, the fear, the breaking of actual communication, and the lack of touch draws together Camus’s worlds and our reality.
The Bad Angel Brothers – Paul Theroux
In short, no fun, the having of a brother.
Bright Unbearable Reality – Anna Badkhen
Without awe, how can we dream up a different reality? Without wonder, the dark matter of possibility, how do we find the courage to zoom in on our unbearable humanity?
Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below – ed. Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi
Many of the people we encounter in the pages of this book do not identify as smugglers but as workers of various kinds.
Divination with a Human Heart Attached – Emily Stoddard
These poems leave us with a gentle litany of things left behind—things more suitable, perhaps, for the more subtle shades of grief.
Lost in the Long March – Michael X. Wang
[The novel’s] layering surpasses anything like theme or plot and suffuses into a kind of aesthetic ethos which justifies the old saying: The novelist picks up where the historian has to stop.
Health Communism – Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
Health Communism thrives with the inbound hope of any manifesto—the naming of violence as a source of potential political revolution.
Though Kivland resolved not to speak about herself, the pages are dotted with first-person asides in brackets: dreams, flashes of memory, brooding.