It’s 2 a.m. in a small enclave of American refugees living abroad.

I’m writing this in a plane flying south over California, from San Francisco, where I grew up, to Santa Barbara, where I attend grad school.

Paradais, Fernanda Melchor’s second book translated into English, opens with two teenage boys drinking rum outside a luxury housing development.

Brooke Sahni’s debut poetry collection, Before I Had the Word, chosen by Maggie Smith as the Winner of the 2020 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, explores generational ties to grief, sex, family, and religion.

The first time I saw an image of William Sommer’s “Winter Landscape” painting, I was doing something unmemorable online; but I remembered the moment I saw it perhaps even more than I remembered the painting itself because it so strongly evoked the view from my childhood bedroom window.

When readers need to know a century’s worth of history to comprehend a novel’s dynamics, a fiction writer confronts a task that may appear simple but is actually excruciatingly difficult.

Irene Solà’s novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance starts with a storm personified and a person disembodied.

Where are the great climate novels?

Matvei Yankelevich’s new collection Dead Winter draws its poems from a longer sequence, still in progress, whose overall title is “From A Winter Notebook.”

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.