The global slave trade backgrounds Solange Burrell’s fantastical coming-of-age novel "Yeseni and the Daughter of Peace", about what it truly means to act in favor of the greater good. In eighteenth-century West Africa, sixteen-year-old... Read More

Eavesdrop on the quiet chaos of a Viennese apartment building through Dominik Barta’s provocative novel Overheard, wherein the lives of its tenants converge to reveal tender truths. Kurt, a gay German and English teacher, settles into... Read More

In Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting novel "Sour Cherry", women are entrapped by the gluttonous monstrosities of their sons and husbands. To elucidate her husband’s abuse, a mother tells her child a story about a cursed lord. She begins... Read More

The skillful poems of Songs from Fern’s Pond explore loss, family, and the power of human will. Sheryl Pothier Harmer’s Songs from Fern’s Pond is a stirring poetic tribute to her mother, who staked out a solitary, hardscrabble... Read More

A fascinating, multifaceted collection of armchair treks, Linda Cracknell’s travel memoir "Doubling Back" is about revisiting significant places on foot. Cracknell’s walks, undertaken sometimes solo and at other times with... Read More

A kindred relationship is severed by a winter storm in Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novel "Heaven and Hell", about grave losses and lucent beginnings. In a place “built of cod bones,” Bárður and an orphaned boy are outliers among... Read More

In her outstanding book-length essay "Immemorial", Lauren Markham compares language, memorials, and rituals as strategies for coping with climate anxiety and grief. Monuments to famous men are passé, the work insists; instead, it is... Read More

In Sergei Lebedev’s harrowing novel "The Lady of the Mine", murdered souls buried in an abandoned Ukrainian coal mine haunt the country’s emerging conflict with Russia. In 2014, Zhanna leaves college to care for her ailing mother,... Read More