Sentences that might represent a life-altering pain, the ongoing experience of that pain, are not the tragedy itself.

Every funeral is a hole.

Before bedtime, in their two-room apartment on the outskirts of postwar Tokyo, my great-grandfather would tell my obāchan and her siblings ghost stories, like those retold in Aoko Matsuda’s short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are.

Nicky Beer begins her newest poetry collection Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes with an epigraph from Bjork: Don’t let poets lie to you.

The debate over nationalism, multiculturalism, and how diversity affects national identity isn’t new.

Ella Baxter has emerged with New Animal, her debut novel about Amelia, a woman lost amid fraying personal relationships and newfound grief.

Contemporary poetry is haunted by what Keats called, in reference to Wordsworth, the “egotistical sublime.”

It would be easy to say Claire-Louise Bennett’s second novel, Checkout 19, is a love letter to books.

Solmaz Sharif’s spectacular sophomore collection, Customs, is filled with crushing poems that carry weariness, rebuilt and disrupted again and again.

It should be surprising that Fight Night, Miriam Toews’ eighth novel, is touted as a “feel good” book—the L.A. Times calls it the “Ted Lasso of novels, for better or worse.”

“Breathe normally,” the nurse says to me.

A poem is not a song.

The title of Ari Banias’ second collection of poetry is pliable, suggesting opposing meanings if you squint: “a symmetry,” or “asymmetry.”

Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour begins with a nameless narrator explaining that God, after creating all of existence, stepped back from the canvas of creation to contemplate his work, and that this moment of contemplation is the one in which we are all living.

I first read “Love & Solidarity” as a blurry EPUB on my phone, in spare moments snatched from my shifts at one of America’s largest retail chains.

The premise of Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust—a teacher’s life-changing affair with his former student—might suggest to the wary reader a familiar story of predator and prey.

For anyone with a tendency to procrastinate, “tomorrow” is a familiar word.

This collection, a 2021 National Book Award finalist for poetry, spirals in and out of the imaginary, like Andrei Tarkovky’s chignons on the backs of faceless heads.

The first thing to say about Percival Everett’s latest effort, The Trees: A Novel, is that it’s funny.

A common critique of experimental short fiction is that it may fail to balance its brainier, genre-bending tricks with true intuition and care for its characters and the reader.