Genevieve Hudson. Photo: Thomas Teal Genevieve Hudson’s debut novel, Boys of Alabama, tells the story of Max, a shy German teenager with a rare magical power, who emigrates with his parents to Alabama (Hudson’s own native state). There, Max finds a place rife with wonders and terrors beyond anything he’s ever known. It’s a slow-burning exploration of queerness and magic and toxic masculinity—of otherness and the yearning to belong—set against the landscape of the Deep South. During the early days of the lockdown, Hudson and I talked about obsession, sentences that are more than mere load-bearing devices, and the

Algiers, Third World Capital by Elaine Mokhtefi Born in New York, journalist and artist Elaine Mokhtefi became active in the youth movement for peace and justice in the early ’50s. In 1951, she went to Paris, where she first became aware of France’s colonial involvement in Algeria, and in 1962 she moved to Algiers to work in the newly independent Algerian government. Algiers, Third World Capital captures the author’s experiences in Algeria after its liberation from French colonial rule; her interactions with figures there such as Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Ahmed Ben Bella, Jomo Kenyatta, and Eldridge

Laura van den Berg. Photo: © Paul Yoon Laura van den Berg writes ghost stories: In her new book, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, absences assume a life of their own, demanding to be acknowledged. The dead, the forgotten, and the lost have a shimmering vibrancy, becoming more present than the real. Like her ghostly figures, van den Berg comes home in this collection. Short stories were her first literary love, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is her return to the form after two successful novels. The book also represents a more literal homecoming.

Interior view in lantern of lighthouse of Fresnel lens – Split Rock Lighthouse, Off Highway 61, 38 miles northeast of Duluth, Two Harbors, Lake County, MN. Photo: Lowe, Jet/Library of Congress A longtime translator, Christina MacSweeney is responsible for bringing the writing of authors like Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, and Eduardo Rabasa to English-language readers. She is drawn to works that exists outside the confines of a single genre, especially those that merge the visual and literary. The latest addition to this impressive ensemble is Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses, a delightful, pocket-sized book chronicling Barrera’s

Alexandra Chang. Photo: Alana Davis In Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, Days of Distraction, the twenty-five-year-old narrator escapes her unfulfilling job as a tech reporter by moving from her native San Francisco to upstate New York with her longtime boyfriend. On their road trip across the country, she begins to question her relationship with J., who is white. Once they settle in Ithaca, the narrator finds herself feeling increasingly distant from her boyfriend, and spends her time collecting forgotten pieces of Asian American history and working in the archives of a historical museum. Dissatisfied with Ithaca, she heads to China,

Jean-Patrick Manchette, Self-portrait from 1964, © Estate of Jean-Patrick Manchette After the protests of May 1968, Jean-Patrick Manchette began writing a cycle of hard-boiled romans noirs. Involved with the French ultra-left since his adolescence, Manchette aimed to rehabilitate the genre. Steeped in American crime fiction, Manchette’s work imported the Situationist critique and other ultra-left discourse into what was then considered perhaps the lowest of all mass-produced literature. Translator Donald Nicholson-Smith has done more than anyone else to bring Manchette to English-language readers. Last summer, New York Review Books Classics published Nicholson-Smith’s translation of Nada, a story about kidnapping, anarchist

Celia Laskey. Photo: Leonora Anzaldua Celia Laskey’s new novel, Under the Rainbow, takes place in the fictional town of Big Burr, Kansas, which could easily stand in for any small town in America. Like the town Laskey herself grew up in, Big Burr is full of people who love each other, while also being insular. After LGBTQ+ rights group Acceptance Across America determines that Big Burr is “the most homophobic town in America,” the group sends a cohort of queer people from the coasts to change hearts and minds. Under the Rainbow follows several characters over the AAA’s two-year

Malcolm Harris. Photo: Julia Burke One of the most striking, important, and unique features of Malcolm Harris’s work is the way in which he integrates a profound understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy into his analyses of our contemporary life without heavy-handed jargon. Harris’s first book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (2017), addressed how we should understand millennials and explains why we shouldn’t understand their generation in terms of the moralizing analyses that are often proffered but instead in terms of its mode of production. His new book, Shit is Fucked Up Bullshit:

Eve Babitz. JULIA PAGNAMENTA: In the preface to your first book, Eve’s Hollywood (1974), you write, “I believe that places should be capitalized . . . West, especially, is a serious place that should ALWAYS be capitalized. It also sounds more adventurous to go West than to go west.” The spirit and sense of a place—genius loci—are such prominent parts of your writing. How does sense of place influence your writing? EVE BABITZ: I was a visual artist first, my collages and drawings, and I really like the way certain words look, like West rather than west. I love

Emily Nemens. Photo: James Emmerman Emily Nemens, the editor in chief of the Paris Review, is also an accomplished illustrator: Her cartoons have appeared in publications like the New Yorker, and in 2011 she started a multiyear series of watercolor portraits of every woman in the 112th, 113th, and 114th Congresses. Nemens also happens to know a lot about baseball, thanks to a childhood spent watching Mariners games with her father in her native Seattle. Each of these skills comes into play in Nemens’s new novel, The Cactus League, a propulsive debut set in the highly competitive world of

Fanny Howe. Photo: Lynn Christoffers Born in 1940 during a lunar eclipse, the poet and novelist Fanny Howe is the black sheep of her blue-blooded Boston family. Daughter of Mark DeWolfe Howe, a Harvard law professor and civil rights activist, and Mary Manning, an Irish-born actress and playwright, Howe grew up as part of a powerful and gifted artistic pantheon. Breaking with tradition, she moved West, became a communist and later a Catholic, and dropped out of college three times. (Howe attended but never graduated from Stanford.) She eloped with a conservative microbiologist but left him in the febrile