In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh argued that contemporary fiction—at least the literary, realist kind—has failed to imagine and represent our “deranged” relationship with the natural world. Science fiction, he maintains, has done a better job of critiquing our world and imagining it differently. The realist novel’s preoccupation with individual morality and everyday normalcy has left it ill-equipped for a world in which the improbable is the norm.

In 2006, Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin—the alter egos of Jonathan Lethem and Christopher Sorrentino—collaborated on Believeniks!, their ode to the Mets. After more than a decade of silence, they recently resurfaced to weigh in on I’m Keith Hernandez (Little, Brown, $28), and to reminisce about highlights in the history of the beleaguered Queens franchise. —eds.

The one activity that was perhaps the most stable part of my identity that first semester was the seminar I was taking with Ehsaan Ali. His class Colonial Encounters was held on Friday afternoons. The seminar participants required his special permission to join. I had heard that he brought red wine each week to his classes and you sat around discussing the day’s readings while sipping wine from small plastic cups. When the semester began, I went to Ehsaan’s office in Philosophy Hall to get his signature. Third floor, after the set of dual radiators, next to the notice board

Below is an excerpt from Leslie Kaplan’s 1982 fiction of the French factory revolts. For more on the book, recently released in an English edition (translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap), see Jason E. Smith’s review in our special summer issue, 1968 Now.

Origin stories are woven with many threads: Some we spin ourselves, while others we inherit. The great German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) accounted for herself—for who she was, and why she was, and where she came from—not by wondering what of herself was fact and what was fiction. Rather, the real and present question was Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?). In other words, how to distinguish genuine presence and raw experience from the spectacle and folly of human making.

More than a century before Antifa or Occupy Wall Street, thousands showed up to hear lectures on wealth inequality and its discontents from Lucy Parsons, the subject of Jacqueline Jones engrossing new biography, Goddess of Anarchy. A former slave, Parsons transformed herself from a rural seamstress with only the “bare bones of a formal education” into a revolutionary essayist, orator, and celebrity. Railing against the Dickensian horrors of capitalism from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression, Parsons was one of the few female activists of color to capture a mass audience. But despite Parsons’s fantastic life story, Goddess of

Last month, the Feminist Press at CUNY and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop published Go Home!, an anthology of Asian diasporic writers exploring belonging, identity, family, place, and the myriad other topics that come into play when considering the notion of “home.” We invited the AAWW’s Ken Chen and the Feminist Press’s Jisu Kim to discuss the book with its editor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, and contributors Amitava Kumar, Alexander Chee, and Wo Chan. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

When I was in a suicidal phase in my life and hiding my alcoholism from my partner, I was also working on a book about love and deception. My editor at the time, with whom I had no doubt too intimate a friendship—he once sternly but correctly told me, “Clancy, I can’t be both your editor and your psychiatrist”—recommended two books to me: William Styron’s Darkness Visible, one of the best-known studies of alcoholism and the depression that often follows on the heels of new sobriety, and Al Alvarez’s The Savage God, the classic work on suicide among and as

One side effect of the Trump presidency so far—among the mildest and yet, for book reviewers, still very noticeable—has been its distortion of a popular nonfiction genre that wasn’t hurting anyone. Since late 2016, a whole slew of sunny, triumphalist works about the social, political, and cultural progress being made in one corner or another have been forced to add awkward, doomy turns to their introductions and conclusions, the beginnings and ends of their chapters. Thus Joy Press’s Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, whose prevailing mood matches its effervescent title, must now frame its reported profiles of

In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s novel Empty Set, the book’s narrator, an authorial stand-in also named Verónica, is haunted by her mother’s disappearance back when she was fifteen. In the book’s slightly fantastical world, this disappearance is gradual, ghostly: One day, Verónica and her brother noticed that it was increasingly difficult to understand what their mother was saying. She began to literally fade away and “in the end, we couldn’t see her anymore.” Years after the disappearance, Veronica and her brother still glimpse (or think they glimpse) phantom-like images of their mom around the apartment.

Despite its obdurate title—which cribs the catchphrase made famous by Damon Wayans’s outrageous character Homey D. Clown from In Living Color—David Peisner’s Homey Don’t Play That! plays practically everything. It dodges and weaves through the biographies of many people, laying down a cultural history of late-twentieth-century black humor, television, and civil rights, even as its bite-size chapters maintain the brisk, gossipy tone of a celebrity tell-all.

A woman with a set of fake names—Kata, Katya, Kasia, Katushka—has returned to New York after eighteen years in Dubai. Glass towers now crowd the Williamsburg waterfront and women yell at her to get out of the bike lane. Bodega cigarettes cost fourteen dollars and smoking in bars is against the law. It’s unclear why she’s come back, and even more unclear why, at eighteen, she left in the first place. “New York wants to trick me, make me think it’s gone soft,” she thinks. But bricks of heroin still come stamped: VERSACE and HERMÈS, then DRONE, RIHANNA, ISIS. She

“I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” writes Annie Ernaux’s narrator near the end of her 1998 autofiction, Shame. Ernaux takes the sentiment further in the opening lines of her 2008 book, The Possession: “I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published. To write as if I were about to die—no more judges.”