Elissa Washuta. Photo: K. R. Forbes In her new collection of linked essays, Elissa Washuta explores heartbreak, the occult, and the legacy of settler colonialism in the US. Weaving Native folklore with the history of exploitation of tribes such as the Duwamish people—alongside analysis of Twin Peaks, Fleetwood Mac videos, and the Oregon Trail II computer game—Washuta considers broader notions of inheritance, magic, and value. For Bookforum, Washuta and I chatted over Zoom about narrative, literary Twitter, and learning to cede control. ELIZABETH LOTHIAN: You play with narrative a lot in White Magic. Can you talk a bit about

Bett Williams. Photo: Beth Hill If mushrooms are having a moment, psilocybin mushrooms are having their own red-carpeted star turn. Multiple double-blind studies conducted at Johns Hopkins University, which has its own Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, have shown how psilocybin mushrooms, administered in hours-long, therapist-guided sessions (with a playlist), have helped those with depression, various types addiction, fear of death. Microdosing is widespread, and psilocybin mushrooms have been decriminalized in Oregon and various cities around the country. Bett Williams recounts her own “psilocybin odyssey” in her new memoir, The Wild Kindness. The field of psychedelics is dominated

Women from Boston and Charleston, West Virginia, holding signs, demonstrating against busing and textbooks, Washington, D.C. In his podcasts Slow Burn and Fiasco, Leon Neyfakh and his team have covered Watergate, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Iran-Contra affair, and more, making seemingly familiar stories feel both fresh and suspenseful. In the third season of Fiasco, Neyfakh turns his attention to the battle over school desegregation in Boston in the 1970s, during which white Northerners took pains to distance themselves from racist Southerners while fighting against school integration in their own city. An activist and two-time mayoral hopeful named Louise

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON: In the face of this title, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, $45), you’re intentionally widening the geographic and aesthetic scope. It’s much more diasporic than “African American” might seem to suggest. And you have prose, songs, epics, formally constrained poems, poems that make us question what poetry can be, and look like, and do. What was your approach to the scale and scope of this anthology?

Helen Macdonald. Photo: Bill Johnston Jr. In the introduction to Helen Macdonald’s new collection of nature essays, Vesper Flights, she describes a trend in sixteenth-century European palaces and halls—Wunderkammer. These were ornamental display cabinets, similar to Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, filled with “natural and artificial things together on shelves in close conjunction,” like coral, fossils, miniature paintings, tiny instruments. Macdonald’s aim was to replicate the experience of Wunderkammer in her book. She so successfully achieves her goal, we wander around Vesper Flights amazed by flocks of songbirds migrating over the Empire State Building or a swift whose mouth is

Stephanie LaCava Stephanie LaCava’s new novel The Superrationals is a destabilizing read—like coming across a sudden anagram in a sentence. The book’s strikingly true-to-life characters are similarly jarring: constantly misunderstood and misunderstanding and fiercely protective of fortresses of self-delusion (though LaCava resists moralization at every turn). The story is told from the point-of-view of three main characters: Mathilde, a young art-world initiate who is haunted by trauma and the death of her mother, a legendary editor; Gretchen, Mathilde’s best friend, who travels alongside the protagonist in New York, Paris, and London; and Robert, an aging writer. LaCava also introduces

DAVID O’NEILL: In Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (Crown, $27) you write about your student days at Princeton, when you first encountered Baldwin. Can you talk about the initial resistance you felt to his work?

Moyra Davey. Photo: New Directions Moyra Davey began her career in photography and filmmaking. Her experimental, cross-media artworks incorporate elements of fiction, documentary, and journals. Writing has long been an important aspect of Davey’s visual work. In her recent collection, Index Cards, she lingers on the page, creating an associative personal canon through close readings of literature, theory, film, her own journals, and more. Throughout, Davey returns to the same themes and vignettes: Walter Benjamin’s epistolary account of a clock seen from his study, for example, or the unconventional lives of eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters. With