Poetry helps us express feelings that don't fit neatly into sentences; confusion and fear but also hope and joy. Here's the second installment of our look ahead at the most exciting poetry of 2021.
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Nnedi Okorafor's multi-faceted new novella follows a young girl in a near-future version of Ghana who becomes the Adopted Daughter of Death — but she can't quite figure out how that happened.
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Tyler Stovall writes white freedom is "the belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free" — noting nations were built on it.
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This is Gurganus's first book since 2013, and it's worth the wait. These stories are funny, compassionate, and marked by the author's amazing ability to reflect both light and dark in his characters.
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When Nadia Owusu was 4 years old, her Armenian American mother disappeared from her life. When she was 13, her Ghanaian father died. Owusu reflects the losses and her biracial identity in her memoir.
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Sadeqa Johnson's novel — inspired by a real historical figure — pulls no punches in its tale of an enslaved woman trying to survive and make a life for herself and her family.
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Randi Pink's new novel follows a young couple, Angel and Isaiah, whose budding love is set against the backdrop of historical tragedy: the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.
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Dr. Carl Hart's positions on drug use and availability may seem quite extreme to some — but are thoughtful and data-driven. He asserts that racism is a major factor in the negative image drugs carry.
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Sarah Moss's new novel takes place over a single, unrelentingly rainy day at a vacation site in Scotland, where families complain about each other and mounting dread builds to catastrophe at the end.
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Writer Nadia Owusu has lived many lives. Her nonlinear memoir, centered on the idea of physical and metaphorical earthquakes, is about all of the parts of what is her single, complex life.
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In his new story collection, Kevin Barry proves to be a master at evoking the landscapes of both western Ireland and the human heart; he seems to have an innate sense of why people do what they do.
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Eley Williams tells the story of two word-mad characters who work for the same dictionary publisher 120 years apart. This novel is perfect for anyone who loves puns, crosswords and witty writing.
This year, critic Craig Morgan Teicher says American poetry has become too big for just one person to cover, so he's invited five colleagues to bring their own perspectives to our 2021 poetry preview.
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A new graphic novel adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor's story "After the Rain" sets straightforward art against scattered, skewed panels to produce a sense of primal struggle between order and chaos.
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Former FBI Director James Comey sees his obligation, his client, not as the person or party who appointed him or even as the Department of Justice. He sees his obligation as being to justice itself.
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Stina Leicht's new sci-fi novel has a lot of moving parts: Space opera, rough-and-tumble mercenaries, corporate intrigue, alien first contact — and to her credit, she almost pulls it all off.
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Critic Maureen Corrigan has been describing Anna North's new novel to friends as "The Handmaid's Tale meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." It's a glib tagline, but not without justification.
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Eley Williamsdid her doctoral dissertation on "mountweazels," fake words inserted into dictionaries as copyright traps — and she builds on that in her charming debut novel, about an epic dictionary.
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Harvard University's Daniel Lieberman looks at exercise from an evolutionary point of view, concluding that we evolved to limit our physical activity where possible, saving it for survival activities.
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For December, our columnist Maya Rodale has rounded up three must-reads where romance is for everyone who's willing to take a risk, from regular girls to royals.
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