Some people just seem to have a certain magic that highlights their credibility, draws people to them, and puts them on a fast track to success, while others struggle—even though their knowledge and skill levels may equal or even... Read More

"Paperback Crush" by Gabrielle Moss is an immersive examination and commentary on teen and tween fiction from the 1980s and ‘90s. It’s sprinkled with personal opinions and memoir elements as well as interviews with authors like... 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 perspectives on brutal and sublime assertions of power in life around... Read More

Part memoir, part biography, "Look Both Ways" traces the long path that sent Katharine Coles’s grandparents across the world, searching for oil and a resolution to their untenable marriage. Both trained geologists, Walter Link and... Read More

In an early piece in this book of short, connected stories, Caroline Bock establishes a daughter’s reverence for her father: “let me recall the days when I picked tomatoes beside my Pop, and ate one or two directly from the vine at... Read More

Maureen Aitken’s "The Patron Saint of Lost Girls" pretends to be a collection of short stories but is not. Instead, advantages of both short-story and novel formats are fused into a mutation which is neither. By the time this... Read More

Drawing inspiration from the most existentially bored quarters of the sweater-set crowd, the short stories of Virginia Pye’s "Shelf Life of Happiness" are unsettling, sighing laments. They organize church fundraisers and clean their... Read More

Words can hurt, and they can heal. We need only look around us these days to see how the words we use, and the ways we use them, can create or destroy individuals, families, communities, even nations. In these chaotic times, Oren Jay... Read More