Literary Essays

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center.

Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture...

From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. “Anyone wanting to learn how to remodel, restore, or build a poem from the...

Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry Finalist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection Postcolonial Love Poem, the brilliant second collection from Natalie Diaz, holds...

Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realise their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted. Nick and Susy agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition.

Following on the Giller Prize-nominated and Governor General's Literary Award-winning success of Ru, Kim Thúy's latest novel is a triumph of poetic beauty and a moving meditation on how love and food are inextricably entwined. Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth...

Three people – Indigenous, immigrant, and settler – journey over dangerous terrain in a race against time, and each other, to gain control of a vast parcel of land. YOU decide how events unfold, ultimately determining how the land is stewarded, and by whom. An urban couple are on a...

From the Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes an engaging intellectual thriller and high romance set in Turkey about a young student whose life and identity is uprooted through the single act of reading a book. The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly...

Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love? As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella, and Carson formed the kind of rare...

A tribute to a great man, an important and interesting writer, an inspiring teacher, and a friend some will not likely find again. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper wrote a memorable biography about their pal, C.S. Lewis. "...We have sought to tell his story as best we could, to lay before...

For fans of Yellowface and American Fiction, A Hero of Our Time is a vicious takedown of superficial diversity initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity that the Toronto Star calls "a powerful, unexpected reading experience." Osman Shah is a pitstop on his white...

Dionne Brand’s hypnotic, urgent long poem is about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a...

After a harrowing voyage from Italy, during which his mother died, seven-year-old Vittorio arrives in Canada with his newborn half-sister, and is reunited with his estranged father, a dark, isolated, and angry figure he hardly knows. The story that follows spans two decades of Vittorio’s life...

Hanuman is an outstanding scholar, a fearless warrior, and the ideal lieutenant: intelligent, totally committed to his master, selfless and humble. Born into the Vanar tribe, a clan of the upa-devatas (demi-deities), he represents the four best-known divine attributes akhand brahmacharya...

Few authors in America write with such sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T.C. Boyle, and nowhere is that passion more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and widely praised short stories. In After the Plague, Boyle speaks of contemporary social issues in a range of...

Published in 1980 by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Pnball, 1973 is the second book in the "Trilogy of the Rat" series. It is preceded by Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and followed by A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), and is the second novel written by Murakami...

Melissa Bank's runaway bestseller, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, charmed readers and critics alike with its wickedly insightful, tender look at a young woman's forays into love, work, and friendship. Now, with The Wonder Spot, Bank is back with her signature combination of devilishly...

Vir Sanghvi's has been an interesting life - one that took him to Oxford, movie and political journalism, television and magazines - and he depicts it with the silky polish his readers expect of him. In A Rude Life, he turns his dispassionate observer's gaze on himself, and in taut prose tells...

A deliciously compulsive first novel from New York Times Editor's Choice author of Lights On, Rats Out, Cree LeFavour's Private Means captures the very essence of summer in a sharply observed, moving meditation on marriage, money, and loss. It's Memorial Day weekend and Alice's beloved dog...

Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows readers an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the Moving Picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister...