In western Kentucky, towns along the Cumberland River were replaced by Lake Barkley during a dam project. Residents were told “their sacrifice was for the public good.” Jayne Moore Waldrop’s novel "Drowned Town" is about what they... Read More

A psycholinguist and a Czech immigrant to Canada, Julie Sedivy lost her first language, so much so that her “Czech heritage began to feel more and more like a vestigial organ.” She is not alone in this experience: Generation 1.5... Read More

Based on Elizabeth Engelman’s family history and experiences growing up as the daughter of a Santeria priestess, the short story collection "The Way of the Saints" charts Puerto Rico’s history of colonization, revolution, migration,... Read More

Great for any person who perennially insists that they’re a “fun-gi” at family functions, Frank Hyman’s "How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying" is a fascinating guidebook that’ll earn its place on any bookshelf, even if the... Read More

“Health is a capacious category, inextricable from the entire social world,” says Anne Pollock in "Sickening", about how societies’ intricacies and ills are reflected back in the ways health is conceptualized, stratified, and... Read More

Beautiful and tragic, RE Katz’s novel "And Then the Gray Heaven" embodies “the whole blessed void: a vast field of care” as it recounts the gradual process of laying the dead to rest. Jules, a queer kid who “no one was watching... Read More

A thought experiment wrapped in a science fiction novel, Chris Beckett’s "Two Tribes" audits Brexit and Britain’s current political and class gulf from a dystopian future, as a historian tries to find the origins of her world in the... Read More

Alex Lubertozzi’s science fiction novel "Any Other World Will Do" presents an alien vision of Earth’s possible future. It’s a send-up of the genre that wraps its earnest warning in plausible deniability. In 1986, Barcelona teems... Read More