California—land of golden dreams, proud melting pot, home to both the poor and the unimaginably rich—is an amalgam. Her complexities are captured in the essays of... Read More

Wars may begin on the battlefield, but they end on a map. "The Bird King" is an exquisite fantasy about the end of Muslim sovereignty in the West, the power of desire to disrupt... Read More

John Freeman, the former editor of Granta, edited this collection on power. Its stories and poems are astonishing in their global breadth, featuring chilling and vivid... Read More

Melanie Hobson’s "Summer Cannibals" is a vibrant, vicious family portrait in which three adult daughters come home. The family matriarch, Margaret, has summoned everyone to... Read More

In Hunter’s poetic post-apocalyptic novel, meditations on what has been lost are heartrending in their clarity. Poetic and succinct, Megan Hunter’s "The End We Start From"... Read More

Since umbrellas normally are not difficult to operate, they seldom come with instruction booklets. This "Umbrella", however, could well use a warning: Notice—what follows is... Read More

Tracing gin’s history back to ancient times, Richard Barnett launches this intoxicating, astringent tale with an exploration of the age-old culinary and religious associations... Read More

Readers familiar with Jeanette Winterson’s semi-autobiographical first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, know a scumbled version of her history: Adopted by a religious... Read More

The quote is well-worn: “It’s the journey that matters.” Dagoberto Gilb’s appropriately titled new collection—*Before the End, After the Beginning—*gives us ten such... Read More

Alexander is obsessed with air—how to move it, heat it, cool it and clean it. In late twentieth-century South Africa, where millions crumble under weighty issues such as race,... Read More