Robert Aquinas McNally’s "Cast Out of Eden" is a detailed biography of American naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir. Born in Scotland, Muir arrived in the United States as a boy. He was brought by his father, who began a farm... Read More

In Jess Taylor’s unfiltered novel "Play", guilt and memories overshadow a woman’s strength and resilience. As a child, Paul had an unbreakable bond with her cousin Adrian. Together, they imagined into existence The Lighted City, a... Read More

Norman H. Finkelstein reviews the past and present fight against American antisemitism in "Saying No to Hate". Finkelstein notes that the first Jews settled in North America in the mid-1600s. Since then, he writes, the United States has... Read More

Zoë Bossiere’s "Cactus Country" is a sensitive, searching memoir about gender fluidity. Cactus Country is the Tucson trailer park where Bossiere lived as a child, all year round, in a harsh desert environment that taught them... Read More

Sejal Shah’s intrepid short story collection "How to Make Your Mother Cry" is a polysemous encounter connecting auditory and visual modes. Interspersed with ephemera—memory-photographs, childlike drawings, Indian dance notations, a... Read More

Written during COVID-19 lockdowns, "Off the Tracks" is an enchanting, lyrical reflection on memory, travel, and passenger trains. In her engaging travel book, Pamela Mulloy describes COVID-19 as a time when we “all had to learn what... Read More

Set in the Netherlands, Jaap Robben’s novel "Afterlight" is about an elderly woman’s work to discover what happened to her child. In the book’s present, Frieda is in her eighties. After her husband, Louis, dies, she is deemed too... Read More

In the funny and harrowing short stories of Joan Leegant’s excellent collection Displaced Persons, characters navigate myriad forms of displacement, from putting a new life together after divorce to finding their place in an adopted... Read More