Ernesto Mestre-Reed’s historical novel is set in Cuba in the late 1990s, where a displaced young man learns the limits of family, trust, and community. Rafa is an orphan. He moves to Havana, where Cecilia, a restaurant owner, becomes... Read More

“We are all apocalyptic now”: such is the solemn, realistic conclusion that Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen reach in "An Inconvenient Apocalypse", a hard-hitting philosophical reckoning with climate breakdowns, and with the social... Read More

Jessa Crispin’s voluble memoir "My Three Dads" entwines intense personal experiences with compelling social observations. Crispin, after renting a house in a blighted neighborhood of Kansas City, began to feel haunted. After meeting... Read More

In Vigdis Hjorth’s novel "Is Mother Dead", a woman takes drastic action to figure out where her relationship with her family went wrong. After thirty years, Johanna is finally back in Oslo, the city where she grew up. In all that time,... Read More

"The Backstreets" is an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness novel by now disappeared Uyghur writer Perhat Tursun. It is an ominous meditation on isolation, oppression, and dehumanization. One night, an anonymous Uyghur government office... Read More

In Andrew Miller’s historical novel The Slowworm’s Song, a British family reckons with their patriarch’s military involvement in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. Though raised as a Quaker, Stephen joined the British army when he was... Read More

“Each and every extinction has its own story,” writes Thom van Dooren in his attentive, elegiac book "A World in a Shell", which regards Hawai’i’s lost and endangered snail species as instructive microcosms of biodiversity loss.... Read More

“You will be the storyteller,” navigating through this exquisite wordless picture book whose images suggest deep tales, but do not over pronounce their parameters. Each feathery illustration plays with proportions and subverts... Read More