In 1902, at twenty-six, Rainer Maria Rilke visited Paris for the first time, drawn by his perception—he was not alone—of France as the consummate home of the artist. He sought out Auguste Rodin and, over the course of many years, the... Read More

Across the whole of the twentieth century, one glittering and palatial estate looms over the Catskills: the Hotel Neversink, host to presidents and movie stars and the exclusive domain of the immigrant Sikorsky family. Adam O’Fallon... Read More

Containing summer friendships, whispered secrets, and a dark, hidden truth, Felicity McLean’s "The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone" is poignant and jarring. Cordelia, Hannah, and Ruth Van Apfel’s disappearances sear through the palpable... Read More

Rebecca Solnit wants you to act. She wants you to abandon naive cynicism and reject resting in anger. She wants you to engage the issues and go about the hard work of effecting change. And she believes that you can do it. Given the fiery... Read More

His life was magical and euphoric. He was invincible, brilliant, and super positive. Everything he wanted could be his. “You think you’re just happy, that everything is going your way and you don’t have a problem. But you do,”... Read More

It’s the 1990s, and June is making her way through high school in Marshalltown, Iowa. Life moves at a laconic pace, spiked with the adrenaline of teenage discovery. But in Brandi Homan’s "Burn Fortune", what June discovers about the... Read More

Imagine becoming an adult under the imposing shadow of the Soviet Union. That’s what Sonya faces when she’s pulled down from her quiet life in Siberia to rejoin her mother, a Jewish dissident, in the USSR’s waning days. In Katia... Read More

The questions of love, marriage, and mortality come to life in Margriet de Moor’s poignant novel Sleepless Night. Suffering from insomnia, a woman wakes in the middle of the night. With her loyal dog as her only witness, she settles... Read More